n old friend of mine is an elected county Democratic committeeman in one of those distant upstate counties that people from the South Shore should not try to pronounce.
He told me a cautionary tale a few years ago about his candidate’s race for county clerk or district attorney or some similar office. This being a small county whose population grows more Democratic every campaign cycle, the candidate planned a low-key race and imagined a budget in the very low five figures.
Turns out she was way off. As soon as she had the nomination, my friend said, the campaign was told that the state party would withhold all support unless the campaign hired a certain Albany-based polling firm that was favored by certain Albany-based people.
The cost to the campaign was several thousand dollars, and in return they got information that my friend said included nothing they didn’t already know. They spent the rest of the campaign scrambling to make up the money by using up resources and favors that would have been better expended elsewhere.
This is not to pick on Democrats — I’m quite sure the GOP is just as ruthless — but to point out that, while money continues to ruin politics, it is doing it in new and increasingly useless ways.
I was trolling for information on campaign financing the other night, and a Google ad pointed me to a remarkable Web site called Politically-e.com, which touts itself as “The Single-Source Campaign and Incumbency Manager.” It aspires to be for grass-roots politics what Web-MD, which the writer Michael Lewis once dubbed “The New, New Thing,” is for health care: a way to use the Internet to break the experts’ grip on an industry.
According to the site, “The Politically-e Campaign Planner is an interactive process that will help you understand all of the fine points of successful campaigning while guiding you through the process of planning and preparing every facet including the detailed budget and timeline. All you have to do is answer a series of questions and the Politically-e Campaign Planner does the rest.”
I checked out some of the sample material. Sign-up costs vary based on the size of your hoped-for constituency, but start at $700. The site promises to help candidates write position papers and plan neighborhood canvassing, and will even sell them palm cards, lawn signs (which require something else they sell called QuickStakesTM), opposition research, speech training, voter lists and image consulting. Politically-e also offers pre-recorded, customizable radio and television ads. I almost spent the $700 just to hear them.
It all felt like a peek behind the Wizard’s curtain. We think we’re sending Josiah Bartlett to sit on our sanitation commissions and library boards; who knew there was a tool kit that could teach anyone with $700 how to make eye contact, use Binaca and remember the name of the VFW commander’s wife?
But wait, there’s more. Like most campaign workers, the site wants a job after Election Day, so it also offers an incumbency management program in the form of “a 33-step training and planning process that helps an office holder make multiple decisions regarding how he or she will manage their public affairs as an elected official.”
Presumably, the site isn’t going to teach an elected official how to balance a budget, twist an arm or cut a municipality’s work force — although it might. (You can find out for $700.) More likely, it will teach an elected official things like the importance of standing in the middle of group pictures to avoid being cropped out by photo editors, or, I hope, the importance of confiding all of one’s ambitions and strategies to a community newspaper reporter, you know, for safe keeping.
The only thing the site is missing is a testimonials page, to give us an idea of how many, or at least what percentage, of its customers actually got themselves elected (“Hi, I’m Hillary Clinton, and I owe it all to Politically-e …”).
It’s impossible to say whether this stuff works. In fact, it’s probably accurate to say that for the average Joe it doesn’t work, since it’s next to impossible for the average Joe to get himself elected.
It requires an unhealthily large ego to believe that you have a chance to win a popularity contest among thousands of people you could never possibly meet. To then dedicate a year of your life to work toward winning that popularity contest is just as unnatural. And once that contest is won, it is very difficult for most people to maintain a normal relationship with the world around them: Officeholders, like ballplayers and rock stars, tend to believe what’s written about them, and their behavior changes accordingly.
This is why pollsters and political consultants were created to begin with, to speak truth to power, as they say. Consultants are also the people whose job it is to keep the Joe Bidens and Trent Lotts of the world from strangling themselves with their own tongues.
It’s when consultants become part of the bargain, as in my friend’s campaign upstate, that they become unhealthy, and a tool like this Politically-e site could be helpful.
In the state Senate campaign between Maureen O’Connell and Craig Johnson, whose winner was decided after this column’s deadline, I heard radio attack ads from both sides accusing the other of “voting to raise taxes,” because, like almost everyone else who’s ever served in a legislative body long enough to vote on a budget, both had voted to raise taxes. Consultants are paid to say these ads are effective, and whichever candidate can afford the most of them will win.
It’s probably a safe bet that if these candidates told their party bosses at the outset that they were going to do it their own way, ditch the consultants and subscribe to a site like Politically-e, they would immediately have been laughed right off the tickets.
But, once safely returned to civilian life after losing, if Johnson or O’Connell decided that his or her talents could serve the children of a local school district, and they had $700 left over, perhaps he or she would find Internet campaign management to be the new, new thing.
Friday, February 9, 2007
Monday, January 29, 2007
It’s the self-inflicted headaches that are the worst
My Charles Osgood viewing on Sunday morning was interrupted by a commercial starring Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who was stumping for Nassau Legislator Craig Johnson, who is hoping to fill the state Senate seat vacated by our new Homeland Security czar, Republican Mike Balboni.
I read an interesting twist on the story in the Albany Times-Union, which reported that Spitzer told Balboni he wasn’t allowed to get involved in the race to succeed him. Not that Balboni listened. His wife, Stephanie, appears in an ad for the Republican candidate, Maureen O’Connell, so all’s fair.
With a win, Johnson, a Democrat, would take a seat in the mostly impotent Democratic minority in the Senate, but more important, he would leave a vacancy in the county Legislature. The Democrats and Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi will appoint a successor, but that Democrat will have all of six months of incumbency — which Long Island voters seem to view as the sole measure of a candidate’s worth — when he runs for a full term in November.
Assuming the rest of the Legislature is re-elected — again — the winner of this seat will give control of the Legislature to his or her party.
Suozzi can thank Spitzer for his latest headache. Several of his other headaches, alas, are self-inflicted.
On Sunday afternoon, some friends and I attended the golf expo at Queens College. Hidden in the back, next to the Koreans offering massages (no kidding), was the booth sponsored by Commerce Bank, title sponsor of the Commerce Bank Championship, played on Eisenhower Park’s Red Course.
Not that the people manning the booth knew anything about the golf tournament. For starters, they couldn’t tell me when it would be played. “June, I think. It’s too soon to tell,” said one guy, sounding like a sixth-grader who hadn’t done his homework.
The Commerce Bank Championship is supposed to be the big payoff for all the tax dollars pumped into the Nassau County parks department. In a year with no New York-area U.S. Open, this event on the PGA’s over-50 Champions Tour — played the last weekend in June — is the biggest thing around. Yet it’s remarkable in that it fails to create any buzz beyond the community of golf addicts. This is the nation’s largest media market, and the Commerce Bank event has only the Barclays in Westchester, on the PGA Tour (which Tiger typically skips), to compete with.
Few senior tour events draw much interest in terms of who’s winning. It’s all about the personalities of the players, and last year the Commerce Bank had a pretty decent field, including Gary McCord, who is on the CBS broadcasting team at the Masters and a total hoot, and Ben Crenshaw, a two-time Masters champion who delighted the fans by making the cut last year at Augusta at age 54. They were joined by such Champions Tour headliners as Hale Irwin and Curtis Strange, who have five U.S. Open titles between them, and Rick Rhoden, the former Yankees pitcher.
Yet the publicity pictures we at the Herald receive leading up to the event inevitably feature Tom Suozzi, Commerce Bank executives and Parks Department commissioners. No word on when they’d be signing autographs.
It’s not fair to talk about attendance or TV ratings, since it poured rain all weekend last year. A better gauge is all the Eisenhower Red Course swag you see. We’ll cut to the chase: It barely exists.
Since Bethpage State Park hosted the U.S. Open in 2002, everyone who’s ever hoisted a golf bag owns at least one (and usually several) Bethpage Black Course hat, shirt, towel, visor and jacket. Those goodies, for sale in the Bethpage pro shop and online at fantastic markups, bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, which funds not only Bethpage’s upkeep but the other parks under the state’s control. The other golf courses at Bethpage — the ones for the rest of us — are kept in peak condition despite maximum use, thanks to the dollars Bethpage Black merchandise brings in.
Golfers are addicted to labels and are notorious showoffs. Offer us stuff and we’ll buy it.
But Eisenhower’s Red Course, which once hosted the PGA Championship, doesn’t even have a logo, let alone a clothing line. This unclaimed revenue costs everyone. Improvements to the other courses at Eisenhower, the Blue and the White, have been steady but slow. The greens are smooth and the fairways pristine, but last summer the sand traps on the Blue Course still felt like gravel.
I asked Suozzi about this during his re-election bid, but he dismissed the issue as unimportant. With all the issues he has to deal with, I suppose, it probably would seem like it.
But for people like me who pay a fortune in taxes and ask little in return in services — my child is not yet in school, my wife and I pay for our own health insurance and we’re rarely arrested — public parks are the only government service we use.
The county can do us a solid by promoting the famous players who will be at the Commerce — Hello! Seve turns 50 this year! — and coming up with some kind of a merchandising plan.
The extra revenue could offset whatever other self-inflicted headaches that are on the horizon.
I read an interesting twist on the story in the Albany Times-Union, which reported that Spitzer told Balboni he wasn’t allowed to get involved in the race to succeed him. Not that Balboni listened. His wife, Stephanie, appears in an ad for the Republican candidate, Maureen O’Connell, so all’s fair.
With a win, Johnson, a Democrat, would take a seat in the mostly impotent Democratic minority in the Senate, but more important, he would leave a vacancy in the county Legislature. The Democrats and Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi will appoint a successor, but that Democrat will have all of six months of incumbency — which Long Island voters seem to view as the sole measure of a candidate’s worth — when he runs for a full term in November.
Assuming the rest of the Legislature is re-elected — again — the winner of this seat will give control of the Legislature to his or her party.
Suozzi can thank Spitzer for his latest headache. Several of his other headaches, alas, are self-inflicted.
On Sunday afternoon, some friends and I attended the golf expo at Queens College. Hidden in the back, next to the Koreans offering massages (no kidding), was the booth sponsored by Commerce Bank, title sponsor of the Commerce Bank Championship, played on Eisenhower Park’s Red Course.
Not that the people manning the booth knew anything about the golf tournament. For starters, they couldn’t tell me when it would be played. “June, I think. It’s too soon to tell,” said one guy, sounding like a sixth-grader who hadn’t done his homework.
The Commerce Bank Championship is supposed to be the big payoff for all the tax dollars pumped into the Nassau County parks department. In a year with no New York-area U.S. Open, this event on the PGA’s over-50 Champions Tour — played the last weekend in June — is the biggest thing around. Yet it’s remarkable in that it fails to create any buzz beyond the community of golf addicts. This is the nation’s largest media market, and the Commerce Bank event has only the Barclays in Westchester, on the PGA Tour (which Tiger typically skips), to compete with.
Few senior tour events draw much interest in terms of who’s winning. It’s all about the personalities of the players, and last year the Commerce Bank had a pretty decent field, including Gary McCord, who is on the CBS broadcasting team at the Masters and a total hoot, and Ben Crenshaw, a two-time Masters champion who delighted the fans by making the cut last year at Augusta at age 54. They were joined by such Champions Tour headliners as Hale Irwin and Curtis Strange, who have five U.S. Open titles between them, and Rick Rhoden, the former Yankees pitcher.
Yet the publicity pictures we at the Herald receive leading up to the event inevitably feature Tom Suozzi, Commerce Bank executives and Parks Department commissioners. No word on when they’d be signing autographs.
It’s not fair to talk about attendance or TV ratings, since it poured rain all weekend last year. A better gauge is all the Eisenhower Red Course swag you see. We’ll cut to the chase: It barely exists.
Since Bethpage State Park hosted the U.S. Open in 2002, everyone who’s ever hoisted a golf bag owns at least one (and usually several) Bethpage Black Course hat, shirt, towel, visor and jacket. Those goodies, for sale in the Bethpage pro shop and online at fantastic markups, bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, which funds not only Bethpage’s upkeep but the other parks under the state’s control. The other golf courses at Bethpage — the ones for the rest of us — are kept in peak condition despite maximum use, thanks to the dollars Bethpage Black merchandise brings in.
Golfers are addicted to labels and are notorious showoffs. Offer us stuff and we’ll buy it.
But Eisenhower’s Red Course, which once hosted the PGA Championship, doesn’t even have a logo, let alone a clothing line. This unclaimed revenue costs everyone. Improvements to the other courses at Eisenhower, the Blue and the White, have been steady but slow. The greens are smooth and the fairways pristine, but last summer the sand traps on the Blue Course still felt like gravel.
I asked Suozzi about this during his re-election bid, but he dismissed the issue as unimportant. With all the issues he has to deal with, I suppose, it probably would seem like it.
But for people like me who pay a fortune in taxes and ask little in return in services — my child is not yet in school, my wife and I pay for our own health insurance and we’re rarely arrested — public parks are the only government service we use.
The county can do us a solid by promoting the famous players who will be at the Commerce — Hello! Seve turns 50 this year! — and coming up with some kind of a merchandising plan.
The extra revenue could offset whatever other self-inflicted headaches that are on the horizon.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
The tree that wouldn't let go
Walking off the 18th green at the Lido Golf Club last Sunday, stripped down to shorts and a short-sleeved shirt on an average 60-degree January afternoon, I had another typically brilliant idea. Since it was throw-out-the-Christmas-tree day, I would douse it in hair spray, nail polish remover, lead paint and bug spray and set it on fire in our driveway. If Al Gore is as right about global warming as he insists, the Viking funeral I imagined would not only honor our departed tree but also extend Long Island’s golf season to 12 months.
I didn’t, of course.
Instead I spent 45 minutes and burned through two Sawzall batteries trying to get the bottom four inches of the stump off. Collecting and decorating our Christmas tree stumps is a family tradition that goes back to the 1970s. I don’t know how my father had the patience to do it every year with a hand saw. I guess people just did it that way.
This year it was especially slow going, since the stump — and the tree growing out of it — was still very much alive, even after a month of standing in our living room next to a radiator. At one point I switched to a circular saw — at almost 9 at night, so I hereby apologize to my neighbors — and then hammered a flathead screwdriver into the cut. No good. The handle shattered and the metal shaft bent at a right angle. This tree wasn’t ready to let go.
Finally, using the claw end of the hammer, I managed to free the screwdriver and pry the stump off. It had been held on by a defiant knot that was reinforced by several ounces of sap.
I told my wife about the fight the tree had put up. She looked sad, and I knew why. She felt sad for the tree, and I did, too, and I wondered, science and logic aside, about what the tree had gone through. After all, it was a living organism with circulatory and respiratory systems. It responded to external stimuli. It gave off an aroma.
But it did not have a central nervous system, at least not as I understand the term. It had no consciousness or opinions. It knew nothing of species or class or jealousy. It had no phobias or mood swings or estrangements.
The tree had — has — a spirit, which is just as eternal but not as corruptible as a soul. Nothing could have given so much and not been a part of God. My little daughter loved the tree, almost as much as her grandfather’s trains, which ran almost constantly for a month in an oval around the tree. She liked the smell of the branches and that there were candy canes hidden within. She told everyone at school on Monday about her tree leaving.
The tree, by now certainly headed for tree heaven, such as it is, will continue to give once it gets there. I imagine it decorated with red bows and tinsel, in the nurseries of young children who left their families too early, providing shade to dogs who served faithfully and memories of home for dead soldiers.
It represented a great month in the life of my daughter, and I hope they appreciate it as much as we did.
This Christmas we visited some of my cousins, who I see far too rarely. Eight years ago, one cousin gave birth to a son with Down syndrome, and after a few hectic years of almost monthly surgeries, her husband told me that life has become more serene.
Their son was born with two holes in his heart, which continues to murmur, but now his visits to the doctor are mostly for routine maintenance. Today he is completely vocal, attends public schools in Pennsylvania full-time and, like every other 8-year-old, loves Disney movies. (His mother was dressing him one morning when he folded his arms, scowled and said, “Don’t you turn your back on me, Scar!” It’s a line from “The Lion King,” they later realized.)
The boy’s also got a gun for an arm, as I learned when we played catch. His father said his specialty is carnival games. “You know those ring tosses?” he said. “He’s money. And I think I know why: They’re pure luck, and at this point he doesn’t have just one guardian angel, he’s got a whole team of them. He must.”
And now that team has a tree.
I didn’t, of course.
Instead I spent 45 minutes and burned through two Sawzall batteries trying to get the bottom four inches of the stump off. Collecting and decorating our Christmas tree stumps is a family tradition that goes back to the 1970s. I don’t know how my father had the patience to do it every year with a hand saw. I guess people just did it that way.
This year it was especially slow going, since the stump — and the tree growing out of it — was still very much alive, even after a month of standing in our living room next to a radiator. At one point I switched to a circular saw — at almost 9 at night, so I hereby apologize to my neighbors — and then hammered a flathead screwdriver into the cut. No good. The handle shattered and the metal shaft bent at a right angle. This tree wasn’t ready to let go.
Finally, using the claw end of the hammer, I managed to free the screwdriver and pry the stump off. It had been held on by a defiant knot that was reinforced by several ounces of sap.
I told my wife about the fight the tree had put up. She looked sad, and I knew why. She felt sad for the tree, and I did, too, and I wondered, science and logic aside, about what the tree had gone through. After all, it was a living organism with circulatory and respiratory systems. It responded to external stimuli. It gave off an aroma.
But it did not have a central nervous system, at least not as I understand the term. It had no consciousness or opinions. It knew nothing of species or class or jealousy. It had no phobias or mood swings or estrangements.
The tree had — has — a spirit, which is just as eternal but not as corruptible as a soul. Nothing could have given so much and not been a part of God. My little daughter loved the tree, almost as much as her grandfather’s trains, which ran almost constantly for a month in an oval around the tree. She liked the smell of the branches and that there were candy canes hidden within. She told everyone at school on Monday about her tree leaving.
The tree, by now certainly headed for tree heaven, such as it is, will continue to give once it gets there. I imagine it decorated with red bows and tinsel, in the nurseries of young children who left their families too early, providing shade to dogs who served faithfully and memories of home for dead soldiers.
It represented a great month in the life of my daughter, and I hope they appreciate it as much as we did.
This Christmas we visited some of my cousins, who I see far too rarely. Eight years ago, one cousin gave birth to a son with Down syndrome, and after a few hectic years of almost monthly surgeries, her husband told me that life has become more serene.
Their son was born with two holes in his heart, which continues to murmur, but now his visits to the doctor are mostly for routine maintenance. Today he is completely vocal, attends public schools in Pennsylvania full-time and, like every other 8-year-old, loves Disney movies. (His mother was dressing him one morning when he folded his arms, scowled and said, “Don’t you turn your back on me, Scar!” It’s a line from “The Lion King,” they later realized.)
The boy’s also got a gun for an arm, as I learned when we played catch. His father said his specialty is carnival games. “You know those ring tosses?” he said. “He’s money. And I think I know why: They’re pure luck, and at this point he doesn’t have just one guardian angel, he’s got a whole team of them. He must.”
And now that team has a tree.
Monday, November 27, 2006
Johnny G. goes down
Some late election news broke over the Thanksgiving weekend. “Did you hear Gregorio lost?” my brother asked me. That sounded absurd. I told him he must have read it wrong. But there it was on the Internet.
The Hon. John T. Gregorio, the Democrat who has served on and off as the mayor of Linden, N.J., since 1968, lost his bid for a ninth term on Nov. 7. He lost by 74 votes out of some 9,000 cast, to a city councilman and former ally who ran as an independent.
Linden is a city of about 35,000 in Union County, just south of Newark International Airport, with about as many Navajo as Republicans. During the opening credits of “The Sopranos,” Tony drives down the New Jersey Turnpike past several huge oil tanks. That’s Linden. It’s working-class Jersey all the way, largely Polish and Italian. The city is proud of its petroleum industry, less so of its hazardous-waste disposal facilities. It was at one time home to Safety-Kleen and GAF and a huge General Motors plant. It rivals Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for good Polish delis.
My first job as a reporter was covering Linden in the mid-1990s, and dealing with Gregorio was always a guilty pleasure, so much so that I used to entertain my family with retellings of our conversations. He would call me every week and holler, “Ducklisss! Tiss is Johnny Gee!” He looked like a chiseled Ernest Borgnine. Kids and old people loved him, and everyone else kind of put up with him. Nobody serious challenged him.
His first stint as mayor lasted 15 years, until, as the Newark Star-Ledger put it, “he was convicted for hiding a financial interest in two Linden go-go bars.” It was a felony, and the mayor, who was also the region’s state senator, was given a time-out. He paid a fine and spent two years on probation, until 1990, when then-Gov. Tom Kean, a Republican, pardoned him. Why? Don’t ask. Kean never discussed it publicly. There were all kinds of rumors.
So Gregorio ran again and won again and served another 15 years, uninterrupted and unindicted — a raid of his office by the feds here and there notwithstanding, it proved invaluable to have nothing but Democratic attorneys general in the Garden State — until this year, when he was finally bested by Richard Gerbounka, a retired Linden police captain.
I remembered Gerbounka’s name but not my impression of him. (It’s been more than 10 years, after all. By 2016, God willing, I’ll have forgotten everything I know about Dorothy Goosby.) I read that he was part of the Gregorio team until they had a falling out.
With his victory, Gerbounka promised sweeping reforms. On his Web site, www.richformayor.com, he listed some of Gregorio’s more exotic schemes while pledging, if elected, to institute a hiring freeze, cut the mayor’s salary and “Eliminate the practice of providing the Mayor with a new Cadillac every 2 years as we do now.”
Times must be good. When I was there it was a Buick Park Avenue.
“I will never order the staff of our Public Works Department to snow plow personal driveways,” Gerbounka further vowed. “They will be dedicated to keeping the streets of Linden clear and safe for the public, not wasting time and tax dollars at the Mayor’s home.”
Well, I’m glad for the people of Linden. Gerbounka may be the real deal, but he owes his career to Gregorio, and there’s no reason to believe this election will change the political culture there or even that this election was any mandate for change: Gregorio is now 80, and he barely campaigned and still almost won.
But I think what happened in Linden is what could someday happen to Long Island: the machines finally got older than the population. Gregorio certainly wasn't self-made, and the political infrastructure a hack like him needed was crumbling. People were tired of being embarrassed by their government.
We on the South Shore, on the other hand, remain contented to be embarrassed. Who was the last incumbent around here to lose an election? On Nov. 7 we re-elected all of our assemblymen, state senators and congresspeople, including a couple of true boneheads. Last year we returned to office the entire county Legislature and Hempstead Town Council. The Long Beach Demo-crats, on the outs for two years after ruling for 40, easily took back power in 2005, and Tom Suozzi’s Democrats now have the same hold on Nassau County that Kate Murray’s Republicans have on the Town of Hempstead. The margins of victory in each election remain vast, largely because the improbability of an upset scares away qualified challengers.
Eventually those young families who aren’t taxed right off Long Island will decide not to put up with what their parents put up with. They’ll see the guy mowing a town park while wearing a GOP T-shirt and not just chalk it up to the way things are. They’ll see a staff photographer follow an elected official to church the same week they get their tax bill and decide they’ve had enough.
History will decide whether Linden gets the reformer its voters think they elected. Someday a slate of real reformers will courageously present themselves to the voters of Nassau County. Perhaps the voters, just as courageously, might give them a shot.
The Hon. John T. Gregorio, the Democrat who has served on and off as the mayor of Linden, N.J., since 1968, lost his bid for a ninth term on Nov. 7. He lost by 74 votes out of some 9,000 cast, to a city councilman and former ally who ran as an independent.
Linden is a city of about 35,000 in Union County, just south of Newark International Airport, with about as many Navajo as Republicans. During the opening credits of “The Sopranos,” Tony drives down the New Jersey Turnpike past several huge oil tanks. That’s Linden. It’s working-class Jersey all the way, largely Polish and Italian. The city is proud of its petroleum industry, less so of its hazardous-waste disposal facilities. It was at one time home to Safety-Kleen and GAF and a huge General Motors plant. It rivals Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for good Polish delis.
My first job as a reporter was covering Linden in the mid-1990s, and dealing with Gregorio was always a guilty pleasure, so much so that I used to entertain my family with retellings of our conversations. He would call me every week and holler, “Ducklisss! Tiss is Johnny Gee!” He looked like a chiseled Ernest Borgnine. Kids and old people loved him, and everyone else kind of put up with him. Nobody serious challenged him.
His first stint as mayor lasted 15 years, until, as the Newark Star-Ledger put it, “he was convicted for hiding a financial interest in two Linden go-go bars.” It was a felony, and the mayor, who was also the region’s state senator, was given a time-out. He paid a fine and spent two years on probation, until 1990, when then-Gov. Tom Kean, a Republican, pardoned him. Why? Don’t ask. Kean never discussed it publicly. There were all kinds of rumors.
So Gregorio ran again and won again and served another 15 years, uninterrupted and unindicted — a raid of his office by the feds here and there notwithstanding, it proved invaluable to have nothing but Democratic attorneys general in the Garden State — until this year, when he was finally bested by Richard Gerbounka, a retired Linden police captain.
I remembered Gerbounka’s name but not my impression of him. (It’s been more than 10 years, after all. By 2016, God willing, I’ll have forgotten everything I know about Dorothy Goosby.) I read that he was part of the Gregorio team until they had a falling out.
With his victory, Gerbounka promised sweeping reforms. On his Web site, www.richformayor.com, he listed some of Gregorio’s more exotic schemes while pledging, if elected, to institute a hiring freeze, cut the mayor’s salary and “Eliminate the practice of providing the Mayor with a new Cadillac every 2 years as we do now.”
Times must be good. When I was there it was a Buick Park Avenue.
“I will never order the staff of our Public Works Department to snow plow personal driveways,” Gerbounka further vowed. “They will be dedicated to keeping the streets of Linden clear and safe for the public, not wasting time and tax dollars at the Mayor’s home.”
Well, I’m glad for the people of Linden. Gerbounka may be the real deal, but he owes his career to Gregorio, and there’s no reason to believe this election will change the political culture there or even that this election was any mandate for change: Gregorio is now 80, and he barely campaigned and still almost won.
But I think what happened in Linden is what could someday happen to Long Island: the machines finally got older than the population. Gregorio certainly wasn't self-made, and the political infrastructure a hack like him needed was crumbling. People were tired of being embarrassed by their government.
We on the South Shore, on the other hand, remain contented to be embarrassed. Who was the last incumbent around here to lose an election? On Nov. 7 we re-elected all of our assemblymen, state senators and congresspeople, including a couple of true boneheads. Last year we returned to office the entire county Legislature and Hempstead Town Council. The Long Beach Demo-crats, on the outs for two years after ruling for 40, easily took back power in 2005, and Tom Suozzi’s Democrats now have the same hold on Nassau County that Kate Murray’s Republicans have on the Town of Hempstead. The margins of victory in each election remain vast, largely because the improbability of an upset scares away qualified challengers.
Eventually those young families who aren’t taxed right off Long Island will decide not to put up with what their parents put up with. They’ll see the guy mowing a town park while wearing a GOP T-shirt and not just chalk it up to the way things are. They’ll see a staff photographer follow an elected official to church the same week they get their tax bill and decide they’ve had enough.
History will decide whether Linden gets the reformer its voters think they elected. Someday a slate of real reformers will courageously present themselves to the voters of Nassau County. Perhaps the voters, just as courageously, might give them a shot.
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
The blackheart who voted for Hillary, and other tales
So here’s something I’m going to regret: I voted for Hillary Clinton.
I don’t live upstate anymore and I don’t pretend to be an expert — well, OK, I sometimes pretend — but supposedly my fellow blackhearted conservatives who sit on the board of Corning Inc. are thrilled with Hillary, and have even raised money for her. Good enough. I took the plunge.
It’s noteworthy that a junior senator in the minority party had enough juice to steer defense and aerospace contracts to upstate employers. Yea, Hillary. (But I’m obviously not voting for her for president. No way.)
I voted third-party for governor and attorney general, since the four major candidates combined didn’t equal one Pete King. Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer, since you asked, got where he is by demonizing successful people for political gain. The word for that is McCarthyism. Spitzer went after Wall Street — because everybody hates Wall Street — but did nothing about the government corruption he was elected to fix. The word for that is hypocrisy. Medicaid? Yup, still broken.
Write me letters and tell me I’m wrong. I’ll print them all. But I think I’m right.
***
Trivia question: What do Shaquille O’Neal, Bill Gates and Britney Spears have in common?
The answer is they’re celebrities who have donated their likenesses to the American Library Association, which produces posters for member branches featuring stars who promote literacy and encourage young people to read.
But when visitors entered the lobby of the Long Beach Library in the weeks leading up to the election, whose smiling face did they see on such a poster? It was every 11-year-old’s idol: Democratic Assemblyman Harvey Weisenberg, holding a book.
We’re all probably a bit numbed by how readily elected officials will dance around their ethical obligations. In this case, the poster complied with the letter of the law in that it was not, technically, campaign material on display in a taxpayer-funded library. But the spirit of the law — and really, decency itself — has been thrown under a train.
Weisenberg is just one of scores of lawmakers who posed for these posters, which were distributed free to libraries across the state by the New York Library Association, a lobbying group that knew vanity would not be in short supply in Albany in an election year. More than 80 representatives from both parties took the lobbyists up on the opportunity to model, according to the group’s Web site, and one of them was Weisenberg.
We would give a less unctuous lawmaker a pass, but for Weisenberg this is just the latest in a series of affronts to good taste. No one should need reminding that this is the man who haunted commuters for years with a questionably financed billboard featuring himself in a Speedo.
If Weisenberg wants to support literacy, he could direct more state aid toward upgrading the library’s facilities, buying new computers, books, periodicals and, yes, literacy posters featuring celebrities that young people might actually want to emulate.
Nobody on Long Island can claim to be shocked any more at the lengths to which elected officials will go to appear in print, but I must say I expected a little better of the library. Whether or not the people who run it support Weisenberg is immaterial; the poster, displayed as prominently as it is — it’s still up — is nothing if not a tacit endorsement. Weisenberg’s opponent last week, Republican Francis X. McQuade, would have faced ejection and possible arrest if he had tried to put a poster of himself up in the library.
The facility’s director, George Trepp, offered this admittedly fair response: “What if it was a poster of George W. Bush?”
To be sure, President Bush, his wife, his mother and all of his recent predecessors of both parties have appeared, honorably, in just this type of promotion. But no matter what you may think of the current president, his is an office people respect and to which they aspire. We seriously doubt young readers are inspired by — or, more to the point, were the intended target of — the assemblyman’s poster.
I don’t live upstate anymore and I don’t pretend to be an expert — well, OK, I sometimes pretend — but supposedly my fellow blackhearted conservatives who sit on the board of Corning Inc. are thrilled with Hillary, and have even raised money for her. Good enough. I took the plunge.
It’s noteworthy that a junior senator in the minority party had enough juice to steer defense and aerospace contracts to upstate employers. Yea, Hillary. (But I’m obviously not voting for her for president. No way.)
I voted third-party for governor and attorney general, since the four major candidates combined didn’t equal one Pete King. Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer, since you asked, got where he is by demonizing successful people for political gain. The word for that is McCarthyism. Spitzer went after Wall Street — because everybody hates Wall Street — but did nothing about the government corruption he was elected to fix. The word for that is hypocrisy. Medicaid? Yup, still broken.
Write me letters and tell me I’m wrong. I’ll print them all. But I think I’m right.
***
Trivia question: What do Shaquille O’Neal, Bill Gates and Britney Spears have in common?
The answer is they’re celebrities who have donated their likenesses to the American Library Association, which produces posters for member branches featuring stars who promote literacy and encourage young people to read.
But when visitors entered the lobby of the Long Beach Library in the weeks leading up to the election, whose smiling face did they see on such a poster? It was every 11-year-old’s idol: Democratic Assemblyman Harvey Weisenberg, holding a book.
We’re all probably a bit numbed by how readily elected officials will dance around their ethical obligations. In this case, the poster complied with the letter of the law in that it was not, technically, campaign material on display in a taxpayer-funded library. But the spirit of the law — and really, decency itself — has been thrown under a train.
Weisenberg is just one of scores of lawmakers who posed for these posters, which were distributed free to libraries across the state by the New York Library Association, a lobbying group that knew vanity would not be in short supply in Albany in an election year. More than 80 representatives from both parties took the lobbyists up on the opportunity to model, according to the group’s Web site, and one of them was Weisenberg.
We would give a less unctuous lawmaker a pass, but for Weisenberg this is just the latest in a series of affronts to good taste. No one should need reminding that this is the man who haunted commuters for years with a questionably financed billboard featuring himself in a Speedo.
If Weisenberg wants to support literacy, he could direct more state aid toward upgrading the library’s facilities, buying new computers, books, periodicals and, yes, literacy posters featuring celebrities that young people might actually want to emulate.
Nobody on Long Island can claim to be shocked any more at the lengths to which elected officials will go to appear in print, but I must say I expected a little better of the library. Whether or not the people who run it support Weisenberg is immaterial; the poster, displayed as prominently as it is — it’s still up — is nothing if not a tacit endorsement. Weisenberg’s opponent last week, Republican Francis X. McQuade, would have faced ejection and possible arrest if he had tried to put a poster of himself up in the library.
The facility’s director, George Trepp, offered this admittedly fair response: “What if it was a poster of George W. Bush?”
To be sure, President Bush, his wife, his mother and all of his recent predecessors of both parties have appeared, honorably, in just this type of promotion. But no matter what you may think of the current president, his is an office people respect and to which they aspire. We seriously doubt young readers are inspired by — or, more to the point, were the intended target of — the assemblyman’s poster.
Silly stats and anecdotes for those who love them
Gun nuts and gun-control nuts — like abortion nuts and anti-abortion nuts — are fond of meaningless statistics, so here’s one: Of the four Long Beach homicides the Herald has covered since 2003, only one involved a gun. But lawmakers don’t pay attention to meaningless stats; they pay attention to meaningless anecdotes. So here are a few of those:
Two weeks ago, a young man stood at the gun counter at Dick’s Sporting Goods in the Roosevelt Field Mall, returning a weapon he had apparently just bought. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt and an annoyed look. His annoyance was aimed at the woman with him, who looked to be his mother. They hardly spoke, but when they did, it was in something Baltic-sounding.
If the son’s demeanor was that of an assimilated young American — picture a lot of eye-rolling — his mother was anything but. Dressed frumpily and wringing her hands, she was clearly in distress with the way he was dressed, his dismissive tone and, most of all, the gun. Clearly, its mere presence had turned her home upside down, and she wouldn’t relax until it was gone.
Another anecdote: A day or two later, The New York Times ran an exhaustive account of state police efforts to catch fugitive accused murderer Bucky Phillips up in Chautauqua County, a mostly wooded part of western New York. Phillips had evolved from petty thief to folk hero with his daring escape from a local lockup. His daughter had lost custody of her children and he busted out, local gossip had it, to help her get her kids back.
Then Phillips killed a cop. Suddenly he lost his folksy cachet, and the cheeseburger named for him (“available only to go,” the waitress had told the Times with a wink) stopped selling. A local grocer summed up the community’s mood shift, saying, “He’s a dead man walking. Everyone around here has guns. If anybody sees him, they’re going to shoot him.” Phillips, perhaps crazy but apparently not stupid, surrendered the next day.
Meanwhile, last week a suburban South Shore couple — that would be my wife and I — stopped in a sporting goods store outside Plattsburgh en route to a camping trip near Montreal. Compared with Dick’s in Roosevelt Field, this store was an armory: rows and rows of rifles, shotguns and pistols of every size and caliber. Among the rifles, one stood out. It was half as long as the rest, and painted bright pink.
There was the rifle, and below it our 2-year-old daughter played on the floor with her Polly Pocket doll. Can you imagine? we asked each other on the way to the parking lot. We enjoyed our moment of enlightenment as we left, thinking, This is just how this part of the world is.
When we got to Montreal, it was no longer part of that world, as the city was picking itself up after its third school-shooting rampage since 1989. On Sept. 13, Kimveer Gill, a 25-year-old Goth, stormed the campus of a college he had never attended and started shooting, killing 18-year-old Anastasia DeSousa and wounding 19 others before killing himself.
Gill’s weapon was a Beretta CX4 Storm, which he apparently bought legally in Canada. It’s an assault weapon, currently legal in both the U.S. and Canada with the right permits. Gill, who was a member of a Montreal gun club, had “passed all government safety tests and qualified for a firearms license,” the Toronto Star reported, not without a hint of indignation.
No doubt by the time the ink dries on this Herald, a Montreal M.P. will have drafted legislation outlawing the CX4 and weapons like it, perhaps calling it “Ana’s Law.” The Star and newspapers like it will endorse it, and it will no doubt pass. But it won’t matter to Anastasia’s parents. And it won’t stop the next guy, who will find a way to do whatever he is driven to do, whatever it takes.
DeSousa will have died for nothing if the sum of her legacy is as the girl who inspired the latest, toothless gun ban. Most gun owners are like the good people of Plattsburgh and Chautauqua, and most murders are unpreventable.
And most parents are not as apparently clueless as Gill’s mother. CTV.com reported that she was taken aback by her son’s antisocial behavior: “She says she had no idea her son was harbouring such dark thoughts,” the Web site reported. If there is a solution to any of this, it starts with parents being like that woman at Dick’s, whose use of Old World parenting techniques led her son to do the right thing.
Back to our own meaningless statistic, the use of a gun in only one of the last four Long Beach homicides. The other weapons were a kitchen knife, a pickup truck and the lethal combination of frying pan and staircase. Incidentally, the driver of the pickup had at one point also “passed all government safety tests” and had a valid driver’s license. But the 15 or so drinks he had that night provoked their own unimaginably dark thoughts.
Two weeks ago, a young man stood at the gun counter at Dick’s Sporting Goods in the Roosevelt Field Mall, returning a weapon he had apparently just bought. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt and an annoyed look. His annoyance was aimed at the woman with him, who looked to be his mother. They hardly spoke, but when they did, it was in something Baltic-sounding.
If the son’s demeanor was that of an assimilated young American — picture a lot of eye-rolling — his mother was anything but. Dressed frumpily and wringing her hands, she was clearly in distress with the way he was dressed, his dismissive tone and, most of all, the gun. Clearly, its mere presence had turned her home upside down, and she wouldn’t relax until it was gone.
Another anecdote: A day or two later, The New York Times ran an exhaustive account of state police efforts to catch fugitive accused murderer Bucky Phillips up in Chautauqua County, a mostly wooded part of western New York. Phillips had evolved from petty thief to folk hero with his daring escape from a local lockup. His daughter had lost custody of her children and he busted out, local gossip had it, to help her get her kids back.
Then Phillips killed a cop. Suddenly he lost his folksy cachet, and the cheeseburger named for him (“available only to go,” the waitress had told the Times with a wink) stopped selling. A local grocer summed up the community’s mood shift, saying, “He’s a dead man walking. Everyone around here has guns. If anybody sees him, they’re going to shoot him.” Phillips, perhaps crazy but apparently not stupid, surrendered the next day.
Meanwhile, last week a suburban South Shore couple — that would be my wife and I — stopped in a sporting goods store outside Plattsburgh en route to a camping trip near Montreal. Compared with Dick’s in Roosevelt Field, this store was an armory: rows and rows of rifles, shotguns and pistols of every size and caliber. Among the rifles, one stood out. It was half as long as the rest, and painted bright pink.
There was the rifle, and below it our 2-year-old daughter played on the floor with her Polly Pocket doll. Can you imagine? we asked each other on the way to the parking lot. We enjoyed our moment of enlightenment as we left, thinking, This is just how this part of the world is.
When we got to Montreal, it was no longer part of that world, as the city was picking itself up after its third school-shooting rampage since 1989. On Sept. 13, Kimveer Gill, a 25-year-old Goth, stormed the campus of a college he had never attended and started shooting, killing 18-year-old Anastasia DeSousa and wounding 19 others before killing himself.
Gill’s weapon was a Beretta CX4 Storm, which he apparently bought legally in Canada. It’s an assault weapon, currently legal in both the U.S. and Canada with the right permits. Gill, who was a member of a Montreal gun club, had “passed all government safety tests and qualified for a firearms license,” the Toronto Star reported, not without a hint of indignation.
No doubt by the time the ink dries on this Herald, a Montreal M.P. will have drafted legislation outlawing the CX4 and weapons like it, perhaps calling it “Ana’s Law.” The Star and newspapers like it will endorse it, and it will no doubt pass. But it won’t matter to Anastasia’s parents. And it won’t stop the next guy, who will find a way to do whatever he is driven to do, whatever it takes.
DeSousa will have died for nothing if the sum of her legacy is as the girl who inspired the latest, toothless gun ban. Most gun owners are like the good people of Plattsburgh and Chautauqua, and most murders are unpreventable.
And most parents are not as apparently clueless as Gill’s mother. CTV.com reported that she was taken aback by her son’s antisocial behavior: “She says she had no idea her son was harbouring such dark thoughts,” the Web site reported. If there is a solution to any of this, it starts with parents being like that woman at Dick’s, whose use of Old World parenting techniques led her son to do the right thing.
Back to our own meaningless statistic, the use of a gun in only one of the last four Long Beach homicides. The other weapons were a kitchen knife, a pickup truck and the lethal combination of frying pan and staircase. Incidentally, the driver of the pickup had at one point also “passed all government safety tests” and had a valid driver’s license. But the 15 or so drinks he had that night provoked their own unimaginably dark thoughts.
Mark the anniversary with the TV off
Memories, which are never reliable to begin with, fade. Facts turn out not to be. Names are lost. Images blur.
On West 43rd Street, about halfway between Grand Central Terminal and Times Square, there was an office building surrounded by other office buildings. This one had a plaque near the door saying that it was once the headquarters of The New Yorker magazine. It still had the mechanical elevator installed by William Shawn, and literary tourists and the current tenants were shooed away from it.
On the sixth floor was a public relations firm operating out of a suite of offices whose windows overlooked West 43rd. In one of those offices were two of the firm’s young vice presidents, a P.R. euphemism for “employees.” I was one of them.
About the other one: He was heavy-set, perhaps five years older than me. He wore a white dress shirt every day but put on a tie only when he went to meet with clients. His shirts were, without fail, pit-stained. He had been a reporter for Dow Jones before switching to P.R. He had an irrational love of Rutgers football. He mumbled about “liberals.”
It’s positively strange that I remember all of this. I could go on and on about him. But don’t ask me his name; it’s gone. I have no idea and haven’t for years. This is what I mean: Memory is chaotic, sometimes cruel and often unreliable.
I lost no one on Sept. 11, 2001. I am far less qualified to consecrate or memorialize the day and its meaning than most, and I won’t try. But to tame the chaos of fading memories, I submit two of mine from that time and place. A year of working in public relations in 2001 had domesticated my journalist’s instincts, and I no longer carried around a notepad or a camera. So I missed out on the chance to record what I experienced.
That morning, my now nameless office mate, with great effort, managed to track down his wife. She was shaken but fine. All of our downtown clients, including those who worked in the World Trade Center towers, were OK.
At around 11 a.m., about the time the phones died, I stood up from my desk and looked out the window, down at West 43rd Street. It looked like the Verazzano on Marathon Sunday. My memory says thousands, but it was more likely hundreds of people. All dressed in business attire. All running for their lives. Full sprints, trying to get away from Grand Central Terminal, the fast elbowing past the slow.
After the second plane had hit, we started to hear the fighter jets buzzing overhead. From our conference room the skyscrapers and signage of Times Square were visible, and for an hour or so we sat alternately watching the news and staring at the back of the Conde Nast building, waiting for the flash of white that would end the world. Then Giuliani came on the TV and said the attack was over and the rest of us would be spared. Strangely, we believed him.
But those people running down West 43rd surely didn’t. Something happened in Grand Central Terminal that spooked them. Maybe it was an announcement, but more likely it was a rumor that led to the stampede. I never found out, and there was nothing about it on the news. I’ve never met anyone else who remembers it. So you’ve probably read about it here first, almost five years later.
Another memory: Against orders, I went to work the next morning. I walked out of Penn Station on Sept. 12, 2001, and stood on Sixth Avenue, in the middle of a ghost town. All the way up Sixth to Central Park, and all the way south as far as I could see, there were no people. No cars, taxis or buses. Perfect quiet. It wasn’t even like a movie, because at the movies you can tell yourself it’s only a movie.
Nowadays, I say it “looked PhotoShop-ed,” which is really an admission that I lack the vocabulary to convey the moment’s impact. It’s also a dodge, a distraction to cover the fact that my memory of the details has faded irrevocably. I don’t remember what side street I came up, or where on Sixth I was standing, or how I even got there. Did I take the subway? Was it even running that morning? I have no idea.
The point is, the pain of loss fades far more gradually than the memories. This anniversary will be marked by the television networks’ insistence on replaying the footage of the airplanes and talking heads telling us how to feel.
Turn off the TV. Instead, rely on your own experiences from that day, how you wept for your friends, your city and your country. That’s what’s real.
On West 43rd Street, about halfway between Grand Central Terminal and Times Square, there was an office building surrounded by other office buildings. This one had a plaque near the door saying that it was once the headquarters of The New Yorker magazine. It still had the mechanical elevator installed by William Shawn, and literary tourists and the current tenants were shooed away from it.
On the sixth floor was a public relations firm operating out of a suite of offices whose windows overlooked West 43rd. In one of those offices were two of the firm’s young vice presidents, a P.R. euphemism for “employees.” I was one of them.
About the other one: He was heavy-set, perhaps five years older than me. He wore a white dress shirt every day but put on a tie only when he went to meet with clients. His shirts were, without fail, pit-stained. He had been a reporter for Dow Jones before switching to P.R. He had an irrational love of Rutgers football. He mumbled about “liberals.”
It’s positively strange that I remember all of this. I could go on and on about him. But don’t ask me his name; it’s gone. I have no idea and haven’t for years. This is what I mean: Memory is chaotic, sometimes cruel and often unreliable.
I lost no one on Sept. 11, 2001. I am far less qualified to consecrate or memorialize the day and its meaning than most, and I won’t try. But to tame the chaos of fading memories, I submit two of mine from that time and place. A year of working in public relations in 2001 had domesticated my journalist’s instincts, and I no longer carried around a notepad or a camera. So I missed out on the chance to record what I experienced.
That morning, my now nameless office mate, with great effort, managed to track down his wife. She was shaken but fine. All of our downtown clients, including those who worked in the World Trade Center towers, were OK.
At around 11 a.m., about the time the phones died, I stood up from my desk and looked out the window, down at West 43rd Street. It looked like the Verazzano on Marathon Sunday. My memory says thousands, but it was more likely hundreds of people. All dressed in business attire. All running for their lives. Full sprints, trying to get away from Grand Central Terminal, the fast elbowing past the slow.
After the second plane had hit, we started to hear the fighter jets buzzing overhead. From our conference room the skyscrapers and signage of Times Square were visible, and for an hour or so we sat alternately watching the news and staring at the back of the Conde Nast building, waiting for the flash of white that would end the world. Then Giuliani came on the TV and said the attack was over and the rest of us would be spared. Strangely, we believed him.
But those people running down West 43rd surely didn’t. Something happened in Grand Central Terminal that spooked them. Maybe it was an announcement, but more likely it was a rumor that led to the stampede. I never found out, and there was nothing about it on the news. I’ve never met anyone else who remembers it. So you’ve probably read about it here first, almost five years later.
Another memory: Against orders, I went to work the next morning. I walked out of Penn Station on Sept. 12, 2001, and stood on Sixth Avenue, in the middle of a ghost town. All the way up Sixth to Central Park, and all the way south as far as I could see, there were no people. No cars, taxis or buses. Perfect quiet. It wasn’t even like a movie, because at the movies you can tell yourself it’s only a movie.
Nowadays, I say it “looked PhotoShop-ed,” which is really an admission that I lack the vocabulary to convey the moment’s impact. It’s also a dodge, a distraction to cover the fact that my memory of the details has faded irrevocably. I don’t remember what side street I came up, or where on Sixth I was standing, or how I even got there. Did I take the subway? Was it even running that morning? I have no idea.
The point is, the pain of loss fades far more gradually than the memories. This anniversary will be marked by the television networks’ insistence on replaying the footage of the airplanes and talking heads telling us how to feel.
Turn off the TV. Instead, rely on your own experiences from that day, how you wept for your friends, your city and your country. That’s what’s real.
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