Campaign Corner

June 14, 2005

Last week, a pledge by a Democratic mayoral candidate, Rep. Anthony Weiner, to get an Olympic stadium built in Queens sounded like an empty election-year promise.

But with Mr. Bloomberg's announcement Sunday that the city would help the Mets build a new stadium at Willets Point and would incorporate it in the city's bid for the 2012 Olympics, Mr. Weiner had managed to fulfill a campaign pledge without having been elected.

For more than a year, the congressman, who represents parts of Queens and Brooklyn, had been the most vocal of the mayoral candidates in calling for an Olympic stadium in Queens.

And until the leaders of the state Legislature, Sheldon Silver and Joseph Bruno, quashed the mayor's plans for a football-cum-Olympics stadium on the Far West Side, the Queens option had been dismissed by the Bloomberg administration.

"There's a very strong instinct in me to say I told you so," Mr. Weiner said to reporters yesterday.

Speaking of Mr. Bloomberg and his deputy mayor for economic development, Daniel Doctoroff, who has spent more than a decade working to bring the Olympics to the city, Mr. Weiner said: "All they could do is deride the idea of Willets Point. Now they consider it a masterstroke. I just wish they would have reached that point sooner."

A political consultant, Scott Levenson, president of the Advance Group, said the failure of the West Side stadium has solidified the impression among the public that Mr. Bloomberg is a "Manhattan-centric mayor," a label he can ill afford given his slim 40,000-vote margin of victory in 2001. Meanwhile, outer-borough candidates such as Mr. Ferrer and Mr. Weiner could benefit.