Michael Fragin: How do you feel with regard to education reform? And I guess I will be more specific with regard to the question, particularly with regard to the Jewish and Catholic school communities. They are really in need of more government assistance, with things like security guards and nurses and all the things that the city could provide in many cases but doesn’t necessarily provide. And I know there was a bill a while ago with regard to allowing or mandate that school safety officers should also patrol non-public schools as well, which I think to me is a no-brainer. Joe Lhota:I agree with you. Senator Martin Golden from Bay Ridge actually had a bill put forward to make sure that the NYPD and the school safety officers would be available in parochial schools and yeshivas. The security of our children shouldn’t be distinguished between where they go to school. We should as a city make sure that everybody is properly safe and properly secure. In answer to the broader part of your question, yes, this has been going on in my life. I went to parochial schools in the Bronx when I was a young kid and I can remember there were issues about the fact that some textbooks that were not religious based would be paid by the state, bus services, nursing services, all of which have been cut back significantly. Making sure that there is proper health treatment, that’s not an issue that should make a distinction between a private school and a public school. It’s the responsibility of the state to make sure that children are inoculated, they have proper health regimens, that they have the proper textbooks. There has got to be a better way of understanding that it’s the responsibility of the state to make sure that our children are properly educated. I will fight to make sure that we get the ability to work not only with the public schools but also the private schools, the parochial schools, the religious schools because I think it’s very, very important. They are an important component to the education process, and always have been in the City of New York. Michael Fragin: Joe Lhota, Republican candidate for mayor, thank you for joining us on Spin Class as part of our Meet the Future Mayor Series,
and we wish you best of luck in the campaign. And I want to go to our next guest. Isaac Dovere is the White House editor at Politico. So Isaac, thanks for coming on Spin Class. Isaac Dovere: It’s great to be here. Michael Fragin: Okay. So let’s talk about the White House for a second, okay. Is the White House in panic mode at this point with regard to scandals and all kinds of issues going on? Isaac Dovere: I don’t think panic mode is the right word to describe what’s going on at this point. The scandals are obviously not good. The last two weeks are not the two weeks that the president or anyone in his administration would have chosen to have. But so far, there has not been any evidence or proof that the scandal can be rooted back to the White House on the IRS front or on the justice department, and the Benghazi situation which does have a connection much more clearly to the White House is one where the White House and the administration feels that they remain in a position of strength and justification.
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Michael Fragin: I accept the fact that panic might not be the right word for it. But I think we have to say that they are not dominating the news cycle as they may have thought. There is definitely a defensive posture going on. Let’s talk for a second about Eric Holder, and some are out there talking about the fact that Holder has become a little bit of an albatross. So give us some idea about where things are and how that can really happen. Isaac Dovere:Well, what we learned about the situation with the AP phone records is that in the search for the leaker about the situation in Yemen that the AP reporters were able to expose, the Justice Department pulled the phone records of the AP. Now the argument coming from the Justice Department essentially is that if they were looking for the leakers, then they needed to look to the people who were leaking were talking to, and they did that not only with the AP but also with the James Rosen, who is the reporter for Fox News, with some information that he had reported about North Korea. This has made journalists very uncomfortable, there is no doubt about it, and journalists have a say in what ends up in the news and that’s helped drive some of the coverage about this. But the situation with Holder is that the day after the story came out about the Justice Department actually looking into the AP phone records, Eric Holder came out and he said that he had been interviewed by the FBI in connection with that investigation into that national security leak and therefore had recused himself for the investigation into it, and the decision to look into the AP phone records had been made by the Deputy Attorney General. What we learned today,
though, is there is a report that is out that says that the order to investigate James Rosen, the Fox News reporter, actually was signed by Holder himself, according to this report that’s out now. So though Holder may not have had anything to do with the AP investigation per se, he’s certainly involved with the way the Justice Department has been pursuing this. Michael Fragin: What’s the perception of the mayoral race down in DC, particularly since a former Congressman is now jumping in? Isaac Dovere:The perception in DC is pretty similar to what the perception is in New York, which is that it hasn’t been that exciting of a race so far. And that means that people in DC are paying even less attention to it than they might otherwise since it is not a national race for all the attention that it gets and for all the attention that Mike Bloomberg gets and previous mayors have gotten nationally. So Anthony Weiner has helped get more people paying attention to the mayoral race both because it’s certainly an interesting story to see him in this race, and he also is someone who obviously has a lot of Washington connections. People in Washington were paying a lot of attention to Weiner in the midst of the scandal that took him down two years ago but also, before that, he was a very known character around Washington for all of the speeches that he would make on the House floor and always being in the media and giving interviews about all the things that he wanted to talk about. So that has helped focus a little bit more attention at least for the moment on the mayoral race down here. But there was a feeling in the positions of power about Weiner that they did not like him and that he hadn’t made friends, and in a situation like the one that he found himself in two years ago, you need friends, you need people to stand by you. And instead, what happened was that the Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Steve Israel who is high ranking in the House leadership but also has a New York connection, helped push Weiner towards resigning. They weren’t standing there in support of him and they sort of urged him towards the door. Michael Fragin: I saw is that Weiner’s ad man, Jim Margolis, who was an Obama ad man as well, he made this really passionately nice video for Weiner’s roll-out but apparently he did it as a volunteer; he did it for free. He doesn’t want to be on the campaign payroll. What do we make of that? Isaac Dovere: The fact that Margolis didn’t want to speaks perhaps to the fact that a lot of people have been avoiding Weiner’s campaign. A lot of people that he worked with in the past have not signed on professionally. He has not attracted a lot of staffers and you can see in the way the campaign has been going that there is perhaps a need for more people and more people with more experience. Michael Fragin: Huma, Weiner’s wife, a very important and vital and integral part of the Clinton universe, is she pushing him to run or she is begrudgingly going along? Isaac Dovere:Well, if you watch the launch video, at the end of it, when we hear his wife speaking, they are sitting together, and she speaks out and says that she really wants him to be the next mayor of New York, that New York needs him to be the mayor. It seems that she at least for the purposes of this video, the purposes of the campaign, is supportive of it. What
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to hide behind the First Amendment, saying it was a separation of church and state issue. I mean that’s the most misguided understanding of the United States Constitution I have ever heard in my life. Religious organizations, any organizations, for profit, not-forprofit who want to rent any part of our public schools after hours or on the weekends so long as it doesn’t interfere with the academic requirements of that school, they should be allowed to rent that facility. This idea that you can’t have religious services in public schools is the most absurd thing I have ever seen in my life. As you know, I am not Jewish but I have in fact attended religious services in public schools, both in New York as a young kid when my church was being built, we actually had services on Sunday in a public school; when I lived outside of New York, we actually went to services at a public school. I don’t understand the logic and the thinking behind it, especially when the fact that the religious organizations or any organizations are willing to pay rent to have that facility rented, which will help the schools in paying for better education for our children. It’s a win-win all way around. When I am the next mayor, I will revert what Mike Bloomberg has done. We won’t have to go to the state legislature to have a law.
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