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Archives: June '06
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The Modern Political Machine - Some things have changed, some have not Staten Island for Democrats? - Registration says yes, but Marchi race raises doubts McFarland Volunteers Seek Jobs, Security Connor-Diamondstone Court Case Comes to a Close Diamondstone Making It Rough for Martin Connor Race For Dollars in 74th Assembly Battle Connor Seeks to Knock Primary Challenger from Ballot Quinn’s Budget Reforms Called Good First Step Farrell’s Future Uncertain Search for Campaign Finance Board Director Underway Pasta with Helen Marshall The Congressional Race No One Wanted
The Rangel Wannabees Marty Connor’s Long, Hot Summer State of the Unions Wooing and Winning in the AG’s Race Stop Knocking the Opportunists Letters to the Editor A Modest Proposal to Avoid the Albany Infighting Pataki Blowing Smoke on Cigarette Tax In the Chair Troubled Youth no Trouble for Sara Gonzalez The Hairpiece For Those Who Top the City Council Rug, Quinn’s Locks Make the Cut The Notepad: Marcia Kramer Imagemakers Full Court Press from Knickerbockers Elsewhere The Problems and Promise of Citywide Wireless Where Are They Now? — Carol Bellamy In the Trenches A Lawnmower Ride to Borough Hall Crystal Ball On the Agenda Hall-Way Eating: Reach for Ruben’s A Missed Opportunity to Expand by Paula Gavin Poverty is the Problem, Not Public Schools by Amy Stuart Wells Focus on Students and Teachers Before Charters by City Council Member Robert Jackson Performance, Not Politics, Should Dictate Charter Expansion by Peter Murphy 
The Modern Political Machine
The political machine is dead, long live machine politics.
Decades after Tammany Hall, decades after the reform era, and with ever more of the city’s roughly 168 elected positions in Democratic hands, certain of the party’s men and women (though mostly men) have taken charge.
Some are young. Some are old. Some are establishment. Some are less than a decade on the scene. Some are unions. Some are individuals.
Sometimes they coordinate, sometimes they do not. But together, they are the engine which runs New York City.
With money and thick member rolls, they accumulate influence. With influence, they accumulate more money and more members, racking up dominance and political debts.
And all the while, their aspiring successors wait on the edges, making friends with their enemies, collecting smaller favors--and taking notes.
In this landscape, the power of the Democratic county organizations, party centers in each of the five boroughs, is still major: they can supply money and volunteers. Moreover, they can grease the wheels into office, collecting ballot petitions for candidates they support, then providing lawyers to protect these petitions and contest others’, frequently in front of judges who themselves were put on the courts by the county leaders--an often impenetrable closed circuit.
Receiving this backing is “like going to school and getting the books and textbooks, and [someone] telling you how to study for your exam,” said Peter Vallone, Sr. (D), the former City Council speaker.
And what of what of Denny Farrell’s fate as state Democratic chairman?
Read “Farrell’s Future Uncertain.”
In Vallone’s home borough of Queens, the principal of the school is Tom Manton, the former seven-term congressman. Eight years after leaving Congress, he is still running the show.
Manton’s age and faltering (some say failing) health have not sapped him of the political strength to set the Queens agenda. When people move against him, Manton exacts revenge, as many saw in the case of Council Member James Sanders (D-Queens). Sanders had to fight off a county-backed 2005 primary challenger. He won, but was subsequently stripped of his Economic Development chairmanship.
Sanders still will not discuss the situation.
Perhaps this, more than anything, is the greatest measure of organization power: even secure politicians known for cultivating autonomous personae will not talk machine on the record, though they speak about bullying midnight phone calls and closed door threats once granted anonymity.
“It’s carrot and stick,” said one Council insider, describing the approach as “if you listen to us, good things will happen to you. If you don’t, you’re in big trouble.”
Everything from future political opportunities to business prospects of the candidates and their families can be put on the table.
“Imagine like a B-movie,” continued the Council insider. “Everything you imagine is exactly what happens.”
This is far from unique to Queens.
“People have been called in and cajoled, threatened. Bartering was going on. I’ll get you a job, that sort of thing,” said a Brooklyn Council member who has enjoyed the support of the county organization in the past but dislikes the system.
Council Member Darlene Mealy (D-Brooklyn), who last year toppled the establishment favorite, shied away from the topic as well.
“Of course” county and other local leaders told her to sit out the race, she said. She was never offered any deals, which Mealy attributed to them being unconcerned with her until very late in the election.
Without the support of her own political club going into the primary, Mealy won a seat she can likely hold comfortably for at least two terms, through 2013.
But even with this anti-establishment background, she too declined to discuss machines.
“That’s too deep,” she said, refusing to elaborate over a phone she indicated might not be secure.
The influence does not end once the voting booths close on Primary Day, either. In the Council—which has many more members beholden to the county leaders than the Albany legislature does—but in the State Senate and Assembly as well, the traditional political organizations can exert their power over everything from budget allocations to specific language written into bills.
“The county bosses have quite a bit of say,” said one Manhattan Council member, noting that of those hired and those laws passed as a result of boss influences, “sometimes they’re qualified people, and sometimes they’re good programs.”
Different county leaders enjoy different levels of power. [See sidebar.] But beyond these usual channels, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D) has been gradually cobbling together clout since Upper West Siders first elected him to the Assembly in 1976. In 1992, he won an election for Congress, and was able to help maneuver his protégé, Scott Stringer, into his old Assembly seat.
Carolyn Maloney was also first elected to Congress in 1992 and started constructing her own nexus of power on Manhattan’s East Side. But while she helped Gifford Miller get elected Council speaker and make a mayoral run, it is Nadler’s efforts which are blossoming now.
In 1998, a lawyer out of Nadler’s political club named Eric Schneiderman was elected to the State Senate. Four years later, he was elected the Senate’s deputy Democratic leader.
Then came Nadler’s political annus mirabilis. Last September, Stringer won a nine-way primary for the Manhattan borough presidency. In January, longtime constituent and political ally Christine Quinn became City Council speaker. Later that month, Nadler helped usher his former Manhattan office director, Linda Rosenthal, through the county committee process which gave her the all-important Democratic nomination in the February special election to succeed Stringer in the Assembly. And with the current Democratic leader, State Sen. David Paterson, running for lieutenant governor instead of reelection, Schneiderman is now a leading contender to be the new Democratic Senate leader by the end of the year.
As to whether recent events have given him more power around the city, Nadler said he did not think in those terms, while citing the continuing wait for the rail freight tunnel between Brooklyn and New Jersey which he has been advocating for almost 30 years as proof that he lacks wider sway.
Nonetheless, Nadler has already flexed his newly strengthened Stringer-Rosenthal muscle several times, staging many joint events and bringing the collective authority to endorsements of gubernatorial candidate Eliot Spitzer and attorney general candidate Andrew Cuomo.
“Insofar as elected officials like me and Scott and Linda would agree on supporting one candidate for mayor, or attorney general or something, I suppose our joint endorsements are more important than if we went in different ways,” he explained. “And insofar as we have a close personal and political relationship, that’s more likely to happen.”
With these sort of stakes, there is not much room for gambling.
Take Mealy’s Brooklyn Council race, which the supposed anti-establishment groups counted as a victory of their own. Mealy said she had only received their support once her fundraising and organizing started generating real traction.
After one particularly good campaign finance filing, she recalled, “I got a call. They said, ‘Who’s backing you?’ I said, ‘God.’ They said, ‘Who’s backing you?’ I said, ‘The people,’” she explained, describing the moment. “They said, ‘if you do another filing, you’ll get another call.’”
She did, and shortly thereafter all the unions endorsed her simultaneously. With the Working Families Party, more money, volunteers and organizational support started pouring in, helping her ultimately win the all-important Democratic primary.
Still, though the support of any of these leaders can be crucial, some say their resurgent heyday is waning.
“The modern political machine is money and media,” said Council Member Lewis Fidler (D-Brooklyn) describing a new level of sophistication and access among voters which prevented anything like the days when organization volunteers rang doorbells on Election Day to offer “a turkey and a bag of coal” in exchange for the household’s votes.
“Unfortunately, anything that the old grassroots type of machine organization did can be purchased,” said Fidler, who is close to Assembly Member Vito Lopez, the new Brooklyn Democratic chair.
Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion (D), widely expected to run for mayor in 2009, said that this was how he understood the future of city politics.
“The ability to get directly to the voter, a move from wholesale politics to retail politics—I think that’s the new reality,” he said. Notably, Carrion, who has been rumored to have been at odds with the Bronx county organization in the past, just last month delivered $40,000 to his county organizations for the sake of “building stronger relationships,” he said. “It adds value.”
But if anything, for Carrion and others, Nadler’s example has whet the appetite for new organizations in certain sections of the city, where the seeding process is already underway to reap similar successes 20 years from now.
Many see the future of organization in identity groups rather than geography. Among the names buzzing as potential 21st Century rainmakers: Quinn, Carrion, Brooklyn Council Member Letitia James and Manhattan Assembly Member Adriano Espaillat. All enjoy strong support among the communities from which they hail as well as crossover support, giving them increasing access to the ears of other leaders.
“We’re trying to coalesce and bring some kind of consensus so that we can move forward as a community,” said Espaillat, speaking about his own efforts to unify the Dominican and larger Latino communities.
Espaillat was one of the people Stringer bested in the Manhattan borough president’s race, and has both run against and with the organization at different points in his career. He says what he has learned from the experiences, especially the most recent one, is that the work starts now.
Meanwhile, a new citywide African-American powerbase seems to be in development with Comptroller Bill Thompson, Rep. Gregory Meeks (Queens) and Paterson at its center, replacing a generation of leaders which is going increasingly gray.
There are other factors in play. Lobbyists and fundraisers continue to have power at City Hall and more so in Albany, where the contribution caps are higher, the laws are laxer and the “pay to play” system is more firmly entrenched.
But many Democrats, especially those in state government, have begun to believe the polls which show a victory for Eliot Spitzer in the governor’s race, and already talk about the new reality this is likely to bring: less power for Silver, who has been the lone Democratic leader in Albany for 12 years, and many other changes to the status quo he is expected to champion.
How much of this will affect the acrobatic circus juggling of gambits and IOUs remains to be seen.
Voter turnout remains low, however, and as the pool of dependable voters grows smaller, the people able to control set groups are left with even more power.
But as Michael Bloomberg clearly showed when he ran for mayor in 2001, this can matter little in the face of money, which has become an increasingly important factor in all politics, New York City and State included.
“A lot of this is impressions and illusions and smoke and mirrors, but when some party boss calls you in and tells you to get out of the race, what’s the actual effect?” said Schniederman. “Money is the boss, and that makes it much harder to consolidate power, because it makes it much harder to turn off the tap.”