For The Record

While his rivals used the final Democratic mayoral debate to burnish their standing among voters tuning in to the WNBC-TV showdown, City Comptroller John C. Liu used the opening question—dealing with when was the last time they faced the kind of financial crunch they have said so many New Yorkers are confronting regularly—to continue his recriminations against the Campaign Finance Board.

The board effectively crippled Mr. Liu’s already-battered campaign when it chose last month to deny him millions of dollars he would have qualified for in public matching funds because of the fund-raising chicanery that led to the criminal conviction of his campaign treasurer and a “bundler” for his campaign this past spring. It was still a bit jarring to have him segue from talking about his mother having “toiled for many years in a sweatshop” (something she actually denied after he first made that claim while running for Comptroller in 2009) into a declaration that the CFB “has really gone out of control in recent years.... [It] arbitrarily decided they would take the campaign funds away from me.”