Report: David Stern's Friends Want Him To Run For Mayor

What does a 72-year-old, bored, retired, and obscenely wealthy man in New York City do? Run for mayor, apparently, if his friends can talk him into it.

According to a report from the New York Post, former NBA commissioner David Stern’s friends are pushing him to challenge current mayor Bill de Blasio in the Democratic primary in 2017. One of the reasons to think he’ll do it is that he seemingly has nothing better to do:

“He’s pretty bored,” said one source. “He’s always been interested in politics, and he’s always been interested in running for office.”

For his part, Stern denied the report, telling the Post: “I remain a happy Westchester resident and am very busy as a senior adviser to a number of enterprises.”

To some it might come as a surprise that David Stern—old, white, wealthy, union-busting David Stern—wouldn’t run as a Republican, but as the Post notes, Stern is a lifelong Democrat. A quick perusal of Open Secrets’s donor search shows that Stern has donated 279 times over the past 26 years, from $1,000 given to senator (and former Knick) Bill Bradley in 1989 to the $2,600 he gave to losing U.S. House candidate Aaron Woolf in October. Stern has donated almost $1.4 million, and just $2,000 of it went to Republicans or Republican causes: $1,000 each to Chuck Haytaian and Sherwood Boehlert.

It is natural to wonder whether Stern would make for a good mayor, but who really knows? It’d make for good tabloid copy though, and that’s as good of a reason as any to encourage it.

[ New York Post]

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