Wednesday, October 04, 2006
The aftermath of the Democratic primary; Sylvia Friedman a Working Families candidate
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Sylvia Friedman will run in the November election as a Working Families party candidate for the NYS Assembly, 74th District, even though she lost the September 12th Democratic Primary to Brian Kavanagh. He had 5055 votes, against Sylvia’s 4681, Ester Yang’s 934 and Juan Pagan’s 792. Now she, the current incumbent, will be on the ballot as the candidate of the new party that has become the putative balance tipper in tight elections, as the Liberals were in the past. She has held the Assembly office since February 2006, having been successful in getting the nomination of the Democratic County Committee in its not-too-well-attended convention on January 29. She drew 57% of the votes, over the then recently resigned incumbent Steve Sanders’s chief of staff Steve Kaufman after Donald Tobias dropped out, and won in the February 28 special election.
Brian Kavanagh, who moved to East 29th Street from the West Side two years ago, and lost in the primary against Rosie Mendez for the City Douncil District #2 seat in 2005, after Margarita Lopez’s term expired, did not participate in the DCC contest. He had just spent $100K in the 2005 race, contributed largely by friends and political associates on the West Side, where he was chief of staff for CCM Gale Brewer of District 6, originally of former BP Ruth Messenger’s political establishment, and is in good standing with BP Stringer. He has City Hall credits from working in the Koch and Dinkins administrations on homeless and housing problems, and community credits for volunteering with the Nativity Mission on Forsythe Street while in high school and later. A scholarship grad of Princeton and a honors scholar at of NYU Law School, at age 39 he was an obvious comer, needing territory. Ater the CC2 experience, AD74 was the obvious choice, and he raised another $120K, while looking for endorsements.
Of the four Democratic clubsin the 74th AD, three endorsed Friedman, the Lower East Side CODAs, smarting over Kavanagh’s clash with Mendez, the GSIDs, Friedman’s home club, also the Eleanor Roosevelts, although their DLs split at the County level. Only the Tilden membership, still remembering fights of 10+ years ago when they had district sharing problems with the GSIDs, endorsed Kavanagh. He also tapped into a campaign management/ PR firm, Knickerbocker SKD, with a young political genius, Micah “The Slasher” Lasher (that’s how the blogs have it) who has been winning elections, most recently Yvette Clarke’s Congressional Primary in Brooklyn’s 11th CD.
Meanwhile Sylvia Friedman, age 67, was busy making her future in the Assembly. A 40 year veteran in the 74th AD area (Delancey to Tudor City), the retired school teacher and social worker had all imaginable neighborhood credits, as the GSID DL, elected member of the Democratic State Committee, leader of the Reform Caucus in the NY County Committee, where they took Sheldon Silver to task (not to his liking although he dutifully endorsed her), head of the Homeless Shelter program at Friends, member of Community Board #6, where she chaired the Homeless and other committees, leader in the Lower East Side Call For Justice group and candidate, in 1993, for CC#2 seat, losing to Antonio Pagan.
Very individualistic, Friedman had some problems. For one, she had beaten Steve Sanders’s hand-picked candidate for his replacement. Then, Kavanag’s campaign discovered that she had missed two Assembly votes, while attending to her fund-raising. It did not matter that the issues were sure Democratic winners, Medicaid and cigarette taxes, won at 137 to 2 and 138 to 7, they looked good on the flashy literature his campaign mailed out almost daily. So did the NY Times endorsement, which expressed regrets that Friedman, despite early promises, had become part of the system, and the one from Sanders, much respected in the ST/PCV community.
Questions have been asked about the newcomer Kavanagh’s involvement in local issues. Newbies are common in NYS; note that such illustrious performers as Clinton, Kennedy and Buckley were all initially tagged as carpetbaggers. Kavanagh’s enthusiastic campaign manager Jesse Dixon (whose day job is on staff of a NYC lawmaker) protests, citing the candidate’s local residence below 16th Street prior to moving to 29th Street (not confirmed), and work with CCMs Garodnick and Glick on the ST/PCV tenant ownership proposal. The impression is, though, that Kavanagh is a very private individual, in contrast to his godfather Sanders, who virtually went sleepless during the East Side landlords’ push to coop apartment buildings in the early 1980s, calling tenant meetings in lobbies and auditoriums and extemporaneously speaking for hours, explaining housing laws and offering tenant strategies.
This is where the issues stand. Friedman will run on the Wprking Families ticket, not much afraid that a split vote will lose the Democratic seat, since the 74th AD balance is hugely against the GOP (my ED at Primary closing time had over a hundred Democratic vs. one GOP vote); Republican candidate Frank Scala, a ST/PCV resident and activist, reports that Juan Pagan hass endorsed him, and Esther Yang has some leanings in his direction. Fence mendings in all directions are indicated. My best regards to Steve Kaufman, who taught me the ropes 20 years ago, when I was haunting City Council meetings , speaking out against the proposed Police Academy move.
Moving a lot more West, this column has been watching the Democrats’ campaigns to wrest potentially vulnerable Congressional districts away from their Republican incumbent, the numbers ranging from 20 to 35 (the magic number is 15).
An interesting prototypical campaign is in the Ohio 15th CD, with Deborah Pryce, a lawyer, holding the seat for GOP since 1993. The contender is Betty Jo Kilroy, is a Franklin County commissioner. This district encompasses Columbus and its suburbs, and Ohio State University, the one succesful area in a state that has lost its industries, replaced by low pay service jobs - WalMartr instead of GM is the chief employer - and plagued by scandals in the GOP government, in power for a decade and a half. Now Bob Ney (18th CD) was found to be an Abramoff accomplice; Gov. Bob Taft of the sacred name let his coin dealer buddy Tom Noe make a failed investment of $50M of state monies in supposed rarities, accepting golf outings and other favors. The traditionally Republican voters are seething, but wil they go for a black GOP reform governor candidate rather than vote Democratic?
A recent public debate of the 15th CD contenders, led by the editors of the Columbus Dispatch, showed the attack points,responses and vulnerabilities of the opponents, with clues to wooing the middle. Iraq was key.
Pryce defended Bush on the conduct of war, while expressing regrets about the faulty intelligence that led to its inception (“if we knew then, there would have been no vote to go to war”), while Kildoy accused her and the Republican Congress of abrogating their oversight role. Pryce considered Iraq key in fighting terror, while Kilroy pressed the fact that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. She also linked the incumbent to the attempted privatization Of Social Security and the national deficit, while Pryce pirouetted away by distancing herself and expressing embarrassment for the budget results, then counterattacked Kilroy as a potential tax raiser, when the challenger indicated intent to revoke the new estate tax cuts and the income tax reductions for the rich. One can see the local priorities - in NY the contender would have played up the pressure on local property taxes resulting from the fed cuts.
Kilroy has a one-point advantage, tenuous, but is suffering from lack of funds. If you feel sympathetic and want to help, e-mail wally@ix.netcom.com for details, or visit my blog (you will find it by searching Wally Dobelis & Looking Ahead) for more, or go to www.kilroyforcongress.com.
Sylvia Friedman will run in the November election as a Working Families party candidate for the NYS Assembly, 74th District, even though she lost the September 12th Democratic Primary to Brian Kavanagh. He had 5055 votes, against Sylvia’s 4681, Ester Yang’s 934 and Juan Pagan’s 792. Now she, the current incumbent, will be on the ballot as the candidate of the new party that has become the putative balance tipper in tight elections, as the Liberals were in the past. She has held the Assembly office since February 2006, having been successful in getting the nomination of the Democratic County Committee in its not-too-well-attended convention on January 29. She drew 57% of the votes, over the then recently resigned incumbent Steve Sanders’s chief of staff Steve Kaufman after Donald Tobias dropped out, and won in the February 28 special election.
Brian Kavanagh, who moved to East 29th Street from the West Side two years ago, and lost in the primary against Rosie Mendez for the City Douncil District #2 seat in 2005, after Margarita Lopez’s term expired, did not participate in the DCC contest. He had just spent $100K in the 2005 race, contributed largely by friends and political associates on the West Side, where he was chief of staff for CCM Gale Brewer of District 6, originally of former BP Ruth Messenger’s political establishment, and is in good standing with BP Stringer. He has City Hall credits from working in the Koch and Dinkins administrations on homeless and housing problems, and community credits for volunteering with the Nativity Mission on Forsythe Street while in high school and later. A scholarship grad of Princeton and a honors scholar at of NYU Law School, at age 39 he was an obvious comer, needing territory. Ater the CC2 experience, AD74 was the obvious choice, and he raised another $120K, while looking for endorsements.
Of the four Democratic clubsin the 74th AD, three endorsed Friedman, the Lower East Side CODAs, smarting over Kavanagh’s clash with Mendez, the GSIDs, Friedman’s home club, also the Eleanor Roosevelts, although their DLs split at the County level. Only the Tilden membership, still remembering fights of 10+ years ago when they had district sharing problems with the GSIDs, endorsed Kavanagh. He also tapped into a campaign management/ PR firm, Knickerbocker SKD, with a young political genius, Micah “The Slasher” Lasher (that’s how the blogs have it) who has been winning elections, most recently Yvette Clarke’s Congressional Primary in Brooklyn’s 11th CD.
Meanwhile Sylvia Friedman, age 67, was busy making her future in the Assembly. A 40 year veteran in the 74th AD area (Delancey to Tudor City), the retired school teacher and social worker had all imaginable neighborhood credits, as the GSID DL, elected member of the Democratic State Committee, leader of the Reform Caucus in the NY County Committee, where they took Sheldon Silver to task (not to his liking although he dutifully endorsed her), head of the Homeless Shelter program at Friends, member of Community Board #6, where she chaired the Homeless and other committees, leader in the Lower East Side Call For Justice group and candidate, in 1993, for CC#2 seat, losing to Antonio Pagan.
Very individualistic, Friedman had some problems. For one, she had beaten Steve Sanders’s hand-picked candidate for his replacement. Then, Kavanag’s campaign discovered that she had missed two Assembly votes, while attending to her fund-raising. It did not matter that the issues were sure Democratic winners, Medicaid and cigarette taxes, won at 137 to 2 and 138 to 7, they looked good on the flashy literature his campaign mailed out almost daily. So did the NY Times endorsement, which expressed regrets that Friedman, despite early promises, had become part of the system, and the one from Sanders, much respected in the ST/PCV community.
Questions have been asked about the newcomer Kavanagh’s involvement in local issues. Newbies are common in NYS; note that such illustrious performers as Clinton, Kennedy and Buckley were all initially tagged as carpetbaggers. Kavanagh’s enthusiastic campaign manager Jesse Dixon (whose day job is on staff of a NYC lawmaker) protests, citing the candidate’s local residence below 16th Street prior to moving to 29th Street (not confirmed), and work with CCMs Garodnick and Glick on the ST/PCV tenant ownership proposal. The impression is, though, that Kavanagh is a very private individual, in contrast to his godfather Sanders, who virtually went sleepless during the East Side landlords’ push to coop apartment buildings in the early 1980s, calling tenant meetings in lobbies and auditoriums and extemporaneously speaking for hours, explaining housing laws and offering tenant strategies.
This is where the issues stand. Friedman will run on the Wprking Families ticket, not much afraid that a split vote will lose the Democratic seat, since the 74th AD balance is hugely against the GOP (my ED at Primary closing time had over a hundred Democratic vs. one GOP vote); Republican candidate Frank Scala, a ST/PCV resident and activist, reports that Juan Pagan hass endorsed him, and Esther Yang has some leanings in his direction. Fence mendings in all directions are indicated. My best regards to Steve Kaufman, who taught me the ropes 20 years ago, when I was haunting City Council meetings , speaking out against the proposed Police Academy move.
Moving a lot more West, this column has been watching the Democrats’ campaigns to wrest potentially vulnerable Congressional districts away from their Republican incumbent, the numbers ranging from 20 to 35 (the magic number is 15).
An interesting prototypical campaign is in the Ohio 15th CD, with Deborah Pryce, a lawyer, holding the seat for GOP since 1993. The contender is Betty Jo Kilroy, is a Franklin County commissioner. This district encompasses Columbus and its suburbs, and Ohio State University, the one succesful area in a state that has lost its industries, replaced by low pay service jobs - WalMartr instead of GM is the chief employer - and plagued by scandals in the GOP government, in power for a decade and a half. Now Bob Ney (18th CD) was found to be an Abramoff accomplice; Gov. Bob Taft of the sacred name let his coin dealer buddy Tom Noe make a failed investment of $50M of state monies in supposed rarities, accepting golf outings and other favors. The traditionally Republican voters are seething, but wil they go for a black GOP reform governor candidate rather than vote Democratic?
A recent public debate of the 15th CD contenders, led by the editors of the Columbus Dispatch, showed the attack points,responses and vulnerabilities of the opponents, with clues to wooing the middle. Iraq was key.
Pryce defended Bush on the conduct of war, while expressing regrets about the faulty intelligence that led to its inception (“if we knew then, there would have been no vote to go to war”), while Kildoy accused her and the Republican Congress of abrogating their oversight role. Pryce considered Iraq key in fighting terror, while Kilroy pressed the fact that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. She also linked the incumbent to the attempted privatization Of Social Security and the national deficit, while Pryce pirouetted away by distancing herself and expressing embarrassment for the budget results, then counterattacked Kilroy as a potential tax raiser, when the challenger indicated intent to revoke the new estate tax cuts and the income tax reductions for the rich. One can see the local priorities - in NY the contender would have played up the pressure on local property taxes resulting from the fed cuts.
Kilroy has a one-point advantage, tenuous, but is suffering from lack of funds. If you feel sympathetic and want to help, e-mail wally@ix.netcom.com for details, or visit my blog (you will find it by searching Wally Dobelis & Looking Ahead) for more, or go to www.kilroyforcongress.com.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 1:32 PM 
