Some of us don't think Brian Kavanaugh is a nice guy, Liza. Not the way he campaigned. He made a despicable run against a far better and way more progressive person--the kind of campaign Dan Millstone bemoaned in his blog. Kavanaugh's campaign dog was Micah Lasher, the creature who devised and designed the Ferrar-Sharpton attack flyer that probably cost Mark Green the election and--as you've said--your support. Lasher ran the same signature attack crap in the 74th against Sylvia he's run elsewhere. He defamed Sylvia on sheer innuendo as an corrupted insider and painted Kavanaugh, the quintessential insider, as the poster boy for reform insurgency. Nice trick! Especially when Kavanaugh had the execrable Eva Moskowitz on his side. People who should know better, including the Times, bought it. He even put out palm cards that looked (to anyone who didn't look closely, which means most voters) as if Hillary Clinton and Carolyn Maloney had endorsed him. They did not. Carolyn in fact, along with Liz Kruger and Tom Duane, was Sylvia's biggest supporter.

I could go on--and if anyone is interested I WILL go on with specifics about a dirty campaign that may have taken down Sylvia Friedman, the most progressive Assemblyperson in Albany--but the campaign phase is over. Done. They don't ask you how you won, but if you won. It only matters what we learn from it. (And the results, BTW, may not be in. With just 300 votes separating the two, no one should claim victory. Absentee ballots, challenge ballots. machine and tally checks can turn it around. Thery have before in this district. Stay tuned.)

One comment on the two candidates you say you knew nothing about until you went to vote. There's a reason you knew nothing abouty them, and it wasn't just their lack of campaign funding. Esther Yang was just about the worst candidate I've ever seen run for anything. She campaigned like she was an aspirant for junior class secretary, and her talks were more motivational than political. In the two debates she attended, she deflected every substantive question about Albany and legislation and actual community needs, repeating instead ad nauseum that she would "work for us," and if she didn't we could throw her out. My thought at the time: why wait?

Juan Pagan had more polish, and clearly some conception of what Albany does, but he had just one issue: fathers' rights in divorces. And his point of view wasn't just a call for fairness--and a case can be made that the present system unduly favors mothers--but he wants a bias toward dads. He's part of a national effort looking to change state laws, and it's opposed by every feminist group in the country. (The good ones, too. Not just the nutty ones.) I'd like to see some fairness, too, but Pagan's isn't the way to go. Sylvia took him on. Kavanaugh did not.

But you're not wrong about the problem of the only candidates in this polyglot district with a chance of winning being white. The solution isn't to better grease the run of a twit like Yang or a one-horse candidate such as Pagan, but to facilate better residents across the board in running. Sylvia Friedman had the local liberal clubs behind her. Kavanaugh had oodles of money and a nasty shit for a campaign director whispering in his ear. Ordinary citizens should get a leg up, too, and better state financing laws are one way to that.