NEW YORK – The city’s mayoral candidates hit the church circuit Sunday, marking Michael Bloomberg’s first speaking stint in a pulpit since announcing his candidacy.
At the church’s invitation, GOP candidate and media owner Bloomberg spoke
at the predominantly black Memorial Baptist Church in Harlem.
“I would not have been invited here if I wasn’t looking for a new job, but
that doesn’t mean I’m here to campaign,” Bloomberg told the predominantly
black congregants and the tourists who also were present for the service.
“You’re here to learn. And if you get some publicity out of it, sure,
that’s fine.”
He spoke of anti-Semitic experiences, including the time when his parents
had to use an intermediary to purchase their family home.
“There’s a genuineness that comes across,” Bloomberg told the New York
Post of his visit to the church. “Hopefully, they were interested in what
I had to say. I said what I thought.”
Meanwhile, Democratic candidates Public Advocate Mark Green, Peter Vallone
and Fernando Ferrer, visited black churches in other boroughs.
Green visited two churches in Brooklyn, including the Christian Life
Center, where more than 3,000 people attended.
He spoke of his likeness to former Mayor David Dinkins and of Mayor Rudy
Giuliani’s relations with minority groups.
“You can run and win with half the city,” Green said in Monday’s Daily
News, “but the era when the mayor won’t meet half the city ends in six
months.”
Vallone spoke at four churches in the Fort Greene, East New York,
Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick sections of Brooklyn. He also spoke of
Dinkins and then discussed the Police Department’s treatment of black men,
saying that “police officers should be ambassadors of goodwill,” according
to The New York Times in Monday’s editions.
Ferrer visited three churches in Queens. His spokesman, John Del Cecato
said the church visits are important.
“The church is the social fabric of communities all across New York,” Del
Cecato told The News. “It’s a way to reach out and communicate.”
