(Photo: Jemal Countess/Wireimage)

Eliot Spitzer’s supporters should be on guard at the Dem fund-raiser his wife, Silda, is headlining on June 12: Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno and fellow Republicans are planning an ambush of sorts. After learning about Spitzer’s fête, thrown by real-estate maven Dale Hemmerdinger and his wife, Elizabeth, the GOP decided to hold its own, rival cocktail fund-raiser that same night downstairs in the same Central Park South building as Spitzer’s. “That’s amusing,” muses state Democratic Party executive director Edna Ishayik. “I think it’s the closest the Dems and Republicans will ever come to holding a joint fund-raiser.” Bruno’s $100 event is much cheaper than Spitzer’s (the minimum is $250, but donors are encouraged to give far more). “It’s gonna be the fat cats in the penthouse, and the skinny cats downstairs,” says one Republican activist, who adds that Bruno is planning to “bleed” Spitzer on campaign-finance reform. Spitzer wants to limit how much donors can give a candidate; Bruno is against the bill and has called him “a fraud” for holding fund-raisers like his June 7 birthday party where guests who bundle $1 million earn a lunch with Spitzer.

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• Archive: “Intelligencer”
• Articles by Geoffrey Gray
• Table of Contents: June 4, 2007 issue of New York | Subscribe!