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There are 300 members of the Democratic State Committee. Each Assembly district gets two, one man, one woman. They are elected every two years, along with the Assembly members, charged officially only with placing candidates for statewide office on the primary ballot (though candidates can also get there by collecting petition signatures) and attending regular meetings.
Voters tend against ousting incumbents or voting in primaries at all, which is part of what made the race this year for state committee in a downtown district a surprise to many, including the incumbent himself.
Lawrence Moss was first elected to the state committee in 1990, and served from 1996 through 2004 as the chair of its reform caucus. He is a lawyer in private practice who also represents an international group called Human Rights Watch at the United Nations. And he is a man who wants another term in his role shaping the policies and positions of his party.
He is being challenged by Arthur Schwartz, also a lawyer in private practice. Schwartz has counted many unions and union members among his clients, and was general counsel to the Transit Workers Union from 2001 through last December’s transit strike. A former district leader who served 10 years before declining to run for reelection last year in the face of a tough challenge, he has worked to get his union clients more involved with the political process.
The district is within the Assembly district of Deborah Glick, which runs roughly from Fulton north to 16th Street and from the Hudson River east to First Avenue.
More than personal statistics or political positions, the differences between Moss and Schwartz are about their concept of what the position of state committeeman should be.
Moss sees himself continuing to write policy resolutions for party members in Albany and Washington, and lobbied the elected officials to adhere to these positions in the votes they cast within the legislature. He says this has pulled the party to more progressive positions.
“What I use the position for has given it an appearance of prominence that it doesn’t have in the rest of the state,” he said.
“I’m a resource on state issues. If you look at our local politics, we’ve got so many people on community boards and clubs working on local issues,” he said. “When I analyze this job … the state committee should be used to take the downtown perspective on progressive issues and take it to the state level. It’s a peculiar position.”
Schwartz said with his take on the job of state committeeman, “the difference is more in oomph and style and how I look at it.”
He would supplement the standard duties of the office with many that he had as a district leader, and be more present at meetings throughout the district.
“You can use the position to be an ombudsman for the community and an organizer around elections,” he said. “There’s the potential to push the Democratic Party on important issues.”
Schwartz has embarked on an aggressive campaign to win the spot, putting far more time and effort into the race than average for a spot on the State Committee, arguing that he would bring this same level of energy to the job if elected.
As both struggle to gain voter attention enough to win, Moss said that he believed his strength would be in his endorsements from all the local elected leaders and the four local political clubs: Downtown Independent Democrats, Village Independent Democrats, Stonewall Democrats and Gay and Lesbian Independent Democrats. He is also doing some campaigning on the street, which he says presents challenge of trying to explain to voters what the office is and then to convincing them to re-elect for him.
“We’re not going to compete based on slick mailings,” he said. “I think I have a record that stands for itself, as one of the real progressives of the state who’s tried to push the party on those progressive issues.”