Fields Plays Down Concerns That Campaign Is in Turmoil
by Randal C. Archibold
New York Times
July 13, 2005

With questions still swirling about a doctored photograph in a mayoral campaign flier, C. Virginia Fields sought to move past the problem yesterday by proposing ways to improve subway safety.

Ms. Fields, at her first formal news conference since the problem arose last week, repeated a statement that her campaign manager put out about subway safety after the London subway and bus bombings last Thursday. But she still found herself addressing the fliers, if only to play down suggestions that the fuss has damaged her campaign.

"I don't have that same concern and neither does my campaign have that same concern," said Ms. Fields, the Manhattan borough president and a Democrat, when asked if her campaign was adrift. "We are continuing to do what we have been doing, outreach to voters, talking to voters, continuing to raise money, continuing to implement plans that we have to implement. So that is not my view or the view of my campaign."

She declined to provide details on the flier, which included a picture edited to include a more diverse backdrop of supporters than had appeared in the original. Since then, Ms. Fields, who has based her campaign largely on her appeal to ethnic and racial groups, and the campaign consultant she dismissed on Friday over the matter, Joseph C. Mercurio, have sparred through the news media over the candidate's role and knowledge of the photo manipulation.

"My credibility is not under question," Ms. Fields said, declining to release any information supporting her version, adding that Mr. Mercurio's dismissal ended the matter.

Yesterday's event, at the entrance to the subway station at 169th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem, followed the postponement of a news conference Sunday on the same topic, when the problem over the fliers was at a fever pitch.

Ms. Fields, running second in polls among the four major candidates seeking the Democratic nomination, appeared before the cameras yesterday for more than nine minutes, with an assistant cutting off questioning when it focused on the fliers.

She suggested that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg press the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for a range of steps to improve safety and security, including increasing the number of workers at stations, equipping tunnels and stations with cellphone service and expanding the use of security cameras. Ms. Fields did not release an estimate of the cost of the additional measures.

She criticized Mr. Bloomberg for what she said was inattention to subway safety. The governor appoints the majority of the transportation authority's 17-member board, and the mayor can recommend four appointees.

"I for one was very astonished to hear Mayor Bloomberg calling the London attacks a wake-up call, because our wake-up call was 9/11," Ms. Fields told reporters, referring to a statement that Mr. Bloomberg made on Sunday.

A transcript of his remarks to reporters on Sunday suggested that the mayor meant the transportation authority had received a wake-up call, though he literally got one when an aide woke him up to tell him about the London bombings as he returned to New York from his Olympics-hunting trip to Singapore.

"I'm sure that they got a wake-up call the other day, just as I did," Mr. Bloomberg said. "When mine was a physical one, theirs should have been a mental one."

Spokesmen for Mr. Bloomberg pointed out that the Police Department had intensified patrols and taken other steps to improve security.

Ms. Fields also found herself issuing an apology on Monday after she used the words "paddy wagon" in a television interview on NY1 over the weekend to describe vans used by the police in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, when she and others participated in civil rights demonstrations. The term is offensive to some people of Irish descent.