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Friday, June 29, 2012
With Three Spirited Primaries, Competitive Democracy Is Breaking Out in New York
She doesn’t call him, she doesn’t talk to him, Mr. Lopez says. It’s rude. “I get a lot of agita as leader,” explains Mr. Lopez, a hulking fellow who is perhaps the city’s foremost practitioner of tomahawk-in-the-forehead politics. “Why not say to me” — Mr. Lopez offers his closest possible approximation of a cheery tone — “ ‘Hi Vito’; ‘How are you, Vito?’; ‘Are you well, Mr. Democratic Leader?’ ” He goes silent at the other end of the telephone line, to let the absurdity of her affronts sink in. (He persuaded City Councilman Erik Dilan to mount a tough challenge to Ms. Velázquez, a longtime reform Democrat.) “If there is a tiger, you wouldn’t go around kicking it, would you?” he says. “That wouldn’t be very wise, would it?” I allow that this sounds unwise. We are deep into New York’s own curious Arab Spring, an almost disorienting outbreak of competitive democracy. Often a one-party town, New York will at least play host to three spirited and unusual congressional primaries on June 26. In a race for an open congressional seat in Queens, the Democratic boss and Congressman Joseph Crowley, who rules that borough from his home in Virginia, passed over his cousin, Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley, and endorsed Assemblywoman Grace Meng. In Manhattan, a remnant of a once-fabled Harlem machine, Representative Charles B. Rangel, faces an extinction-level challenge from State Senator Adriano Espaillat, whose victory would offer one more sign of Dominican political ascent. Back in Brooklyn, Mr. Lopez carried out a little more home wrecking in the Eighth Congressional District, where he convinced the long-serving and near moribund Representative Edolphus Towns that retirement was preferable to leaving (metaphorically) feet first. “I made clear it was time to go,” Mr. Lopez notes. “That’s all the context you need.” Mr. Lopez gave his nod in that district to Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, who is bright and personable, a leader in the fight against police stop-and-frisk tactics and a touch too close to hedge fund donors and charter school champions for the comfort of some. He faces off with Charles Barron, a natural born politician whose enthusiasms range from rhetorically slapping Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to assailing stop-and-frisk tactics to celebrating the lives and legacies of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and Robert Mugabe. Asked about the historical penchant of those two leaders for thuggery and torture , Mr. Barron replied that stop-and-frisk was no less a human rights issue. While it’s true that a federal judge recently held that the Police Department routinely violated constitutional protections, that is a radical stomp of an analogy. Our police officers do not hang suspected malefactors upside down, nor do they practice execution. The scent of change may hang thick, but so do odors less edifying. In Brooklyn, Mr. Dilan is a dynastic product. His father, Martin, ran in 2001 for the State Senate and bequeathed his Council seat to his son. The Dilans, who run a small duchy in the shadow of Vito Lopez’s far grander operation, much admire the milk-cow of patronage known as Wyckoff Heights Medical Center. Not long ago, the hospital hired Jannitza Luna-Dilan, wife of the younger Mr. Dilan, as its $75,000-a-year director of public relations. Mr. Lopez’s own Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council has proved a bountiful spring of jobs and campaign workers for decades. In Manhattan, Mr. Espaillat recently dissolved a nonprofit group that had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in state money and accomplished not so much. (Before we rend cloth for Mr. Rangel, it’s worth remembering that the congressman sluiced tens of millions of dollars into Harlem, some of which produced admirable low-income housing and social services, and some of which produced jobs for his own formidable political machine). In Queens, as the maverick consultant and journalist Gary Tilzer points out, the Democratic machine now wheezes but has not yet been eased into the crypt. Its phalanxes of campaign workers long ago disappeared — it’s instructive to recall David I. Weprin, a loyal if dead-eyed party soldier who ran for Congress last year. His consultant yammered about his field operation, which amounted to unenthused union workers who retired early for beers. Mr. Weprin fell to a Republican businessman, Bob Turner. The Queens Democratic machine’s legal soldiers offer more elite services. Although a striking number live in Nassau and Suffolk Counties, they are expert at knocking candidates off the ballot, or putting them on. Earlier this year, they stood accused of trying to tuck an extra Jewish candidate onto the ballot, to siphon support from Assemblyman Rory I. Lancman, who is Jewish. In Brooklyn, democracy has agreed with Ms. Velázquez. After a couple of unspirited terms in Congress, she sounds like a woman revived. She paused recently to talk about Mr. Lopez. “I advocate for cleaner politics, and he appoints cronies as judges.” She shrugs. “So be it. I will face the music and so will he.” As for Mr. Barron, I caught up with him late last week. We talked foreign policy, sort of. I asked about Syria, he told me to ask about Africa. I asked about Sudan’s attacks on South Sudan, he replied by talking about the West’s recolonizing of Africa. What about Syria? “I’m not sure I will tell you,” he said, “but I’m sounding pretty good. You’ve convinced me to vote for myself.” As for Mr. Jeffries? “He’s not part of our movement,” Mr. Barron replied. That might be just as well.
