Apparently, here's what $100 million in campaign spending buys you these days in New York: a state-of-the-art computerized database that catalogues every attitude and every desire of nearly any New Yorker eligible to vote. Or something like that, at least. The New York Times goes behind the scenes of the Bloomberg campaign to learn more about Mayor Mike's high-tech secret weapon:

"Rather than trying to read the tea leaves of public records to figure out voters' tastes and leanings, they [the Bloomberg campaign staffers] had the money to simply call and ask about them directly. They called hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers in what top strategists in both the Republican and Democratic Parties said was one of the most ambitious pollings of an electorate ever undertaken.

They stored the answers in a vast computerized database to develop sophisticated psychological portraits of city voters - identifying eight never-before-identified voting blocs based on people's shared everyday interests and concerns, not on their broader racial, cultural or ideological differences... The extensive polling gave Mr. Bloomberg's campaign a deep understanding of the city's voters, and allowed it to tailor mailings, electronic messages and prerecorded telephone calls to voters' specific interests as never before."

Among the groups identified: FANS (Fearful and Anxious New Yorkers), MIDDLE AGES (middle class moderates) and CULTURAL LIBERALS. Surely, it didn't take millions of dollars to identify FANS and CULTURAL LIBERALS, did it? Nevertheless, we'd be interested to know what the other five groupings were... Maybe the JET SETTERS (really wealthy Manhattan folk who love the Jets)?