Out on the campaign trail, town hall-style meetings are often held in barns, or factories or high school gyms. John McCain's "Town Hall Meeting in New York" on Thursday night took place under the vaunted marble dome and pillars of Federal Hall, where the audience mostly looked like they had wandered in directly from their Wall Street offices. Men wearing dark suits and long power ties and women, most of them blond, surrounded a wooden podium, next to a thigh-high speaker. In the quiet, show's-about-to-begin minutes before McCain arrived, Tony Carbonetti, the former chief political adviser to Rudy Giuliani and a good friend of McCain, twisted in his second row seat to chat with Senators Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman behind him.  read more »

Michael Bloomberg made a hefty contribution towards Arnold Schwarzenegger's effort to get legislative redistricting in California.

But some other notable New Yorkers have opened up their wallets and given to another Schwarzenegger venture: his campaign committee. That's according to a financial report posted yesterday for Governor Schwarzenegger’s California Dream Team:  read more »

According to the polls, John McCain is either ahead of Giuliani in New York or pretty close to it.

But the McCain campaign's New York chairman, Ed Cox says there's no need to wait for February 5.

“The nomination is over. He’s got the nomination,” Cox told me when I saw him last night at a Martin Luther King celebration event in Manhattan, hosted by the Congress for Racial Equality. “He fits New York to a tee.”

What about Michael Bloomberg?

“If John McCain gets the nomination, I would predict that Bloomberg would not run because McCain occupies so much of the space that Bloomberg would want to take up,” Cox told me.