Ed Cox

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.

Ed Cox, the son-in-law of Richard Nixon who abandoned a bid for the 2006 Republican nomination for Senate against Hillary Clinton, is now the chairman of John McCain’s New York campaign. [The official announcement should be going out shortly.]

He and the New York national campaign’s executive director, Chris Cox (Ed's son), will be in Albany today filing with the state Board of Elections to show they have a slate of 174 delegates.

The list includes Ed Mullins, President of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, Teddy Roosevelt IV, former Chairman of the League of Conservation Voters, David Rosado, former New York State Senator, Chris Callaghan, former Saratoga County Treasurer and former candidate for New York State Comptroller and John Whitehead, former Chairman of Goldman Sachs and former United States Deputy Secretary of State.
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