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Alex Balk: Oh, is that tomorrow?

Choire Sicha: Yes, the world's quietest New York City election.

Alex Balk: It's weird, I haven't even been robo-called. What the fuck is Mike Bloomberg spending $35,000 an hour on?

Choire Sicha: I think I saw a TV ad this one time as I was fast-forwarding on my DVR?

Choire Sicha: Please tell me our official opinion on Ballot Proposal Number 2:

Amendment to article 3 of the Constitution, in relation to authorizing the Legislature to allow prisoners to voluntarily perform work for nonprofit organizations. The proposed amendment would authorize the Legislature to pass legislation to permit inmates in state and local correctional facilities to perform work for nonprofit organizations. Shall the proposed amendment be approved?

Alex Balk: I say Yes! If Bernie Kerik wants to affix a penny to charitable solicitations out of the goodness of his heart who I am to stop him?

Choire Sicha: Agreed. Then I will also vote yes.

Alex Balk: Great! That's it, right? Nothing else on there?

Choire Sicha: Well... Let us discuss the thorny issue of our vote for mayor.

Alex Balk: I thought the mayor was running unopposed.

Choire Sicha: You would be excused for assuming that. But there is some young upstart named "William C. Thompson Jr." on my ballot.

Alex Balk: Ah, yes, the fellow from the comptroller's office. He does not seemed to have waged much of a campaign.

Choire Sicha: (The C. stands for "Colridge"!)

Alex Balk: I'm not sure what his strategy has been. I've seen suggestions that he doesn't want to get too nasty because he plans to run for state comptroller next year and he doesn't want to ruffle any feathers? But, I mean, it's a goddamned race. Ruth Messinger knew she was gonna get walloped but she was still out there every day.

Choire Sicha: She sure was. That annoying woman!

Alex Balk: Of course, she was running against pure evil, which provides more motivation.

Choire Sicha: Right. So, here is what my weekend thinking was. It runs on two tracks. One is like, about actual governance. (As in: would this person be a good mayor.) The second track was procedural, in a sense. Like: "Is this person too much of a douchebag to vote for?"

Alex Balk: I am having very similar issues. How do you feel about the current mayor's performance?

Choire Sicha: I am mixed on the matter. On the one hand? The streets are clean, the city is still standing and I live fairly undisturbed by the workings of the government. Also he is fairly entertaining. On the other hand? He invented the corporate welfare bailout through real estate deals, screwed the city out of millions and millions of dollars, and stood idly by-at best!-while a huge swath of the city became unemployed. And procedurally speaking? AKA, the Douchebag Problem? He is a huge douchebag.

Alex Balk: Of course he's a douchebag. Get over it, as a famous municipal douchebag is wont to say. You know who was a caring and temperate person? David Dinkins. I'm not sure you can do the job without being a douchebag.

Choire Sicha: Right. BUT. What if Bill Thompson is also a huge douchebag? Which I suspect he is!

Alex Balk: I don't think he's the RIGHT kind of douchebag. Ed Koch was also a douchebag, but he was a douchebag in the right way. Giuliani transcends douchebaggery and shoots up to a level of dickslappery for which a word has not yet been invented, but he also had something that made for effective governance (not that I'm endorsing what he did, but he was able to push it through). I don't get any sense from Thompson that he'd be able to utilize his own internal doucebagness to make things happen.

Choire Sicha: I see.

Alex Balk: I mean, say what you will about Anthony Weiner, you at least can sort of see him whining and yapping and cursing his way through. You'd laugh at his empty threats, but in the end he'd be so GODDAMN ANNOYING that he would wear you down.

Choire Sicha: He wears me down just thinking about him.

Alex Balk: Whereas Thompson? You really gonna worry about something someone named Billy wants you to do? Maybe he should go by Colridge.

Choire Sicha: So... is a vote for Thompson actually an acceptable protest vote?

Alex Balk: Me ten years ago would have been all, FUCK NO, let the Democrats know that they can't run these kind of candidates anymore. A vote for some other party will stiffen their spines next time and they'll go for someone who will at least make a race of it. But now? What difference is it going to make? Everyone knew Bloomberg was gonna spend a gajillion dollars to win, that's why anyone who wanted a future as a potential mayoral candidate stepped out. So, sure, vote for Thompson. I'm actually of the opinion that if there are enough people who pull the lever in protest, it's at least something you can irritate Bloomberg with for the next four years: "You spent the annual GDP of Brazil to run against BILL THOMPSON and you only got 54% of the vote?"

Choire Sicha: That seems to me to be worth it. Okay. I am voting for Bill Thompson, though not particularly in the interest of having Bill Thompson as mayor, though I wouldn't hate that, I don't think. It's basically a vote for Bernie Goetz, minus some of the crazy. And the veganism.

Alex Balk: There is nothing that gives one more faith in democracy than voting for a guy because you know there's no danger of him winning.

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Democrat Bill Thompson-whose friends really have to stop calling him "Billy" in the press; no one is going to vote for a grown man named Billy-came out hard against the mayor on the term limits issue, but seemed to fade down the stretch, getting bogged down in details and not making as clear a case as he could have as to why he should get the job. Still, there were plenty of sparks there. My favorite part was when the Univision reporter asked both men why Latinos were underrepresented in their respective offices and the mayor responded to the question with his freshman year Spanish, saying that there were plenty of people of color in his office, at which point you could totally see Thompson thinking, "Well, wait, if we're scoring by the 'people of color' metric I can ACE this." Another highlight: Getting to see what local radio fave Brian Lehrer looks like in real life (a left testicle). I am not kidding when I say that this was actually a rather enjoyable hour. I'm looking forward to the next one, unless it happens on a night when I've got any other plans.

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I have never met you. As far as I know, no one I know has ever met you. I couldn't pick you out of a lineup-and I can say that because I just now went Googling for a picture of you and I didn't even know you were black, so I didn't even know that saying that would have icky weird racist overtones! Seriously. WTF? And I say this as the kind of primary-voting nerd who briefly got into it with Leslie Crocker Snyder campaigners last night on the street. (So maybe I called her a killer, and maybe a bunch of Aborn campaigners laughed their heads off.) And yet here you are, the Democratic contender for mayor of New York. Right now, you are not going to be the mayor, to put it politely, which is to say, you are barely a blip on the map in a political landscape where the tiny Red Sox-loving mayor is a strangely dominant, compelling and, most importantly, famous entity. So what are you going to do? Who are you going to appeal to?

The pissed-off. As your people probably keep bringing up over and over, and one hopes you aren't baffled as to why, yesterday's election reflected a real dissatisfaction, what with at least four, and maybe six, incumbent City Councilmembers getting punted out. Good riddance! Bloomberg's attacks on you are that you have both no experience and bad experience, and your attack on him is "he overstayed his welcome," which is, eh, so-so. But what he's saying about you is just like what everyone said about Barack Obama. Who won fans through oratory and inspiration. Which leads us to...

The debates in October. Oh, look, free TV time. A lot of people don't like Bloomberg but we're not dissatisfied with him because, at the end of the day, we all think he's our daddy and we know he's a little mouthy. Like, we feel that he would go down to D.C. and go toe-to-toe with Rahm if it came to that. We know he's a dick, and we respect that! But what's not as obvious is to us, as emotional voters, is that 1. we'd be "safe" with someone else as mayor and 2. that someone else could stand up for us. Make it clear exactly how Bloomberg has undermined the middle and working classes. (And he has, no two ways about it.) Your voters are Stuy Town residents, and black people, and young people. Oh, wait, look at that-a complete overlap with the Obama vote! Which leads us to....

The Obama strategy. Once upon a time there was an Obama campaign that was not yet a money-printing machine! I remember standing in a parking lot somewhere in Pennsylvania and he got out of this cheap rental car, all gray and tired, going to make some speech. There was no machine there yet. Sure, they had more money than you have now, because you have no money. But what the Obama campaign garnered through showing up anywhere, anytime was enthusiasm, instilling the kind of fervor that it is easy to tap in the young people. You know who is excited about door-knocking and phone-banking for you? OH RIGHT, PRETTY MUCH NO ONE. So go excite a constituency, and put them to work as autonomous field captains. People will work for free if they believe in a cause, and they are set loose to work, which leads us to...

You don't need the money. Bloomberg's insane coffers, well, whatever! Bloomberg pays for thousands of ads because he can. Do you know what is free, however? Editorial space on blogs, TV and newspapers. But you have to give them something to write about. Sit down with your three smartest people and brainstorm twenty ways to get attention. Guess what? This is New York! Your stunts don't have to be too cautious. This is seriously a day and age when nearly all attention is good attention. (Just don't fuck with Taylor Swift, I guess!) You should have a little fun. You should...

Tear some shit up. YOU HEAR ME? Don't be cautious. Enter a pie-eating contest. Start making fun of Eric Gioia on Twitter. Or Perez. Get photographed at lunch with Tina Fey. It is not 1985! You have to be a character in our imagination. We have to know who you are, and conceive of you in our minds. We have a cartoon idea of Bloomberg in our heads; he's the little annoying dude who can't shake that horrible accent who gets driven around in a black Suburban. Who the hell are you?

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