John Messer’s Bloomberg-esque Campaign Spending

Queens Democratic State Senate candidate John Messer, a businessman and attorney, has promised to drop $500,000 of his own money into his primary campaign – and so far he’s not disappointing.

Messer’s 11-page July campaign finance filing shows that he’s already spent more than $120,000 on his race, with the vast majority of that coming just since June. Much of the money has gone to Cottage Consulting (a firm run by Queens operative Jay Golub, a dentist who has close ties to the Queens Republican Party) and Multi-Media, the firm run by Michael Nussbaum, who doubles as the associate publisher of the Queens Tribune.

Messer so far has put $251,000 into his own race and has received no outside campaign contributions, records show.

By contrast, his opponent State Sen. Toby Stavisky has spent only $37,000 since February.

As Colin Campbell pointed out earlier this week over Twitter, the Tribune (which is run out of the same office as Multi-Media, a Messer consultant) just happened to recently write an absolutely scathing editorial recently knocking Stavisky.

In particular, the paper’s publisher Michael Schenkler (who also has an ownership stake in Multi-Media) hit Stavisky’s consultant, the Parkside Group, for bringing up the checkered history of some members of Messer’s campaign team, including that of former Councilman Dennis Gallagher, who is business partners with Golub.

“He is working for the Messer campaign and is not a candidate. In a place where Bill Clinton is still number one – or damned close — and Anthony Weiner may just be the comeback kid, casting false aspersions at campaign staff, workers or consultants is just plain ugly and stupid,” Schenkler wrote.

Golub and Multi-Media have a fair amount of history of working together (including for other big self-funders such as lotto millionaire Isaac Sasson) and were suspected of doing so unofficially in the the NY-6 Democratic primary in Queens.

Recall that Golub was the campaign consultant for erstwhile NY-6 Democratic congressional candidate Jeff Gottlieb (and later, fellow fringe candidate Robert Mittman). Meng’s campaign was accused bu Assemblyman Rory Lancman “planting” Gottlieb in the race to split the Jewish vote – and Multi-Media ran Meng’s campaign.

Gottlieb is now, oddly, getting to run unopposed for a spot on the state committee for the Queens Democratic Party, which also backed Meng.