Domenic Recchia, go home.

Brooklyn City Councilman Domenic Recchia has been making the rounds on Staten Island in recent weeks. Some speculated that the Daily News Knucklehead award winner( http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2006/12/26/2006-12-26_how_stupid_can...) was visiting the forgotten borough because he was seeking citywide office. Others correctly speculated that he was contemplating running a primary against Steve Harrison for the right to attempt to unseat Vito Fossella, New York City’s only Republican member of Congress, who represents all of Staten Island and a portion of Brooklyn. Crain’s and the Staten Island Advance confirmed his potentially disastrous for those wanting to Veto Vito, ambitions.

Brooklyn attorney Harrison ran a gallant campaign last year, losing by a smaller percentage of the vote than any of Fossella’s opponents since he supplanted the Molinari dynasty in 1997. Harrison accomplished this despite being out spent 12-1 by Fossella, largely because people like Recchia, who represents a tiny portion of the Congressional District in the Council, did squat for Steve.

Harrison has not formally announced his repeat candidacy yet, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that he’s likely to run based on his ubiquitous presence on Staten Island since the election. He also couldn’t announce because of party chair John Lavelle’s death and three first quarter 2007 special elections in Staten Island.

Azi "Wolfman" Paybarah howls at the proverbial moon while we're waiting for Bill Richardson to arrive.

I wonder if when people talk about "those crazy bloggers" they have an image like this in mind.

I've been meaning to post this for a while now. This item on NYP's Page Six made me laugh because it happened to me just days before.

Michael, David and I were invited by Dave Pollak (grok, please tell me I go his last name's spelling right or I'll have to rend my shirt and gnash my teeth) to a fundraising event with Nancy Pelosi the same day John Edwards came into town.

Now, mind you, I'm poking fun at Dave and Eliot because ... well ... do I have to have a reason?

I arrived at Cipriani's early to scope the room and get a feel of how I was going to photo & video blog the place. So I'm checking my camera's batteries and find out the dang rechargables are dead. On my way to the corner store I find Eliot Spitzer already pressing the flesh. I nod a hi and run out. On my return, I have about 8 packs of batteries, just to make sure my darn camera doesn't go dead (it did, days before, during a John Leguizamo interview).

Eliot notices the mess of cells and asks incredulously, "Why do you need so many batteries?" As non-minxish as I could (the man is gorgeo although not as tall as I thought he would be) I responded, "So I can film you saying The Daily Gotham is the best blog in New York City."

The City Board of Elections denied Independence Party candidate to replace the late John Lavelle representing Staten Island’s North Shore in the March 27 Special Election Kelvin Alexander’s bid to place his made up Family First line (Not to be confused with Working Families which supports Democratic opponent Matt Titone ) as an additional line on the ballot. The board ruled that 611 of the petition’s 1616 signatures were invalid, leaving him short of the 1100 he needed for that additional line.

Alexander, a Staten Island Democratic County Committee member, is running on the Independence line and potentially turning a potential easy Democratic win into an opportunity for Republican Rose Margarella because the party chose Titone over him. He is undecided if he’ll fight the ruling with the state Supreme Court.

Alexander has accused any challenge of his fabricated party petition as marginalizing minority voters. I find that a stretch since he’s already on the ballot as a better known party’s candidate.

I also need to clarify that I am supporting Titone in this race. I have donated money to Titone, campaigned with Matt and have a Titone sign on my front lawn. There are some comments on the Link TextStaten Island Advance’s SIlive political forum that take out of context my initial backing of Alexander in the Daily Gotham. Although I would have voted for Alexander in the first round of voting at the County Convention had I been allowed to participate, I would have switched to Titone in subsequent rounds. Also for the SIlivers who read my blog, I was not one of the January Committee additions thought loyal to Olivari. I was told I was added in June 2006 and still haven’t been named to the Committee and thus still can not vote in County matters.

Life used to be so simple.

Back in the good old days of hazy memory – what, maybe six weeks ago? – when you wanted to browse a blog devoted to New York City politics, you basically had The Politicker, and that was pretty much it.

OK, that's a gross oversimplification in the service of nostalgia, because there are many other fine blogs out there. That said, it's also fair to say, fellow bloggers, that Ben Smith set benchmarks for the local blogging scene. There was one place you could go to and find out what was going on in the Imperial City and its surroundings. Hence, the Ben-Smith-osphere.

No more. Ben's now at The Daily Politics under the Daily News masthead; further, some of his commenters now have their own platform at Room 8; and now, with a flourish, and as recently previewed on The Daily Gotham, the New York Times enters the fray with The Empire Zone. That one-stop-shopping simplicity is a thing of the past.

Oy. Just how many people care about this stuff, anyway? Or are we all collectively, perhaps, creating a new audience to take an active interest in the decisions of our state and local governments and the players who make them?

Stay tuned.

I was looking for something on The Politicker last night; I forget what it was, but it required me to take a look at the various categories into which that blog groups its content. I noticed there is a separate category for 'conservatives', just as there is for 'republicans', 'Democrats' and other areas of lesser or greater interest; but there is no separate category for 'Progressives'.

Seems like a bit of an oversight, considering that 'conservatives' in New York really don't matter all that much, while we Progressives are on the cusp of a historic election victory and have spent the last few cycles sweeping away heavily gerrymandered conservative bastions.

I'm sure this is just an inadvertent oversight, but it does speak to something larger: the difficulty the media have in discarding their over-arching paradigm of conservative dominance. Today, conservatives are as bereft of ideas – even the god-awful, twice-hashed-over ones like, say, privatizing Social Security – as they are ethically and morally compromised, with scandals washing over them as regularly as the tides. Meanwhile, the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party is flexing its muscles and winning the battle of ideas – on everything from energy independence to homeland security to health care to budget policy.

Problem is, you'll never hear about it, since it doesn't get covered. Why, you ask? Because the press isn't asking the right questions or looking for stories in the right places. Instead, the media keep on publishing stories that portray tired conservative retreads as the only game in town.

For the final results, check out Gotham Gazette Campaign 2005 - November 8, 2005 General Election Results

I urge everybody to read Micah Sifry's post-mortem of the Rasiej campaing.

[via micah.sifry.com]:

Emboldened by a sense that the Internet is enabling more people to participate, inspired by all the evidence of public disaffection with politics as usual, and motivated by a desire to push a 21st century vision of government and civic life, we dove in and tried to put into practice what many of us have been talking about. What follows is meant to be a continuation of that conversation, neither its beginning nor its end.

It's an amazingly candid and insightful review of not just what happened but what everybody in grassroots politics could be learn from their experiences. Awesome work that merits a third reading before I comment on it.

Ben over at The Policker talks about the retroness of the Bloomberg's campaign tactics in The Politicker: The Return of the Telephone - NYO. I have to agree with him and I am going to go one further (because I already did here : Bloomberg knew that Ferrer was going to hit the pavement and so he did as well. He used his money to buy himself a grassroots to destroy the Democrats effort. And contrary to what would be the obvious, many of these 'grassroots' by my own account were immigrant men from the Caribbean and Indian/Pakistan region. Or at least they were the ones who were unleashed on my kneck of the woods.

And of course, there is the level headed op-ed from Gigi E. Georges and Howard L. Wolfson, Singing the Blues in a Blue City on the matter of campaign financing:

One way to avoid repeating this situation is to re-examine the city's campaign finance law. We do not think it wise to infuse more public money into campaigns, but when candidates who pay for their own campaigns significantly exceed the law's spending limits, opponents who stay within the system should be permitted to raise larger contributions.

And I can't believe Will over at OnNYTurf posted a snippet of an email from a discussion a few of us had about the Ferrer campaign : Blame the campaign not the candidate. Or as Mole wrote on that email :

"They started out HORRIBLY organized and improved to merely poorly organized. But a couple of days before the election, it seemed to me that the whole campaign was unraveling. I heard reports from organizers that their Ferrer contacts in essence threw up their hands and told our people that we were on our own. This meant that on election night, there was almost no Ferrer campaign presence. At PS 321, one of the highest turnout polling places in the city, from 5:30-7 PM I was the only Ferrer person there. No one was there before me from what I could tell, and when I called in to the people I knew covering the district I learned that because the Ferrer campaign had sent them no people, they couldn't cover PS 321 at all. Folks, that is SURRENDER by the Ferrer campaign. In the end, we did more for Ferrer than his own campaign did, I think."

I honestly believe that the people who were working for Ferrer fucked it up out of not just incompetence but lack of true support for him. Can we discuss career politickers for a moment? These consultants that go from campaign to campaign : Are they doing it just for the paycheck or are they working from a core set of liberal values? Because, honestly, I was slammed with a lot of cynicism from the Ferrer people.

The Media and the '05 Elections
Join The Politicker, Gotham Gazette, and the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy in a conversation about the role of the media in the 2005 New York City elections

Wednesday, November 16 5:30 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.
The Tank @ chashama

Featuring a roundtable discussion with:
Patrick Healy, The New York Times
Ben Smith, The Politicker
Evelyn Hernandez, El Diario La Prensa
Jonathan Mandell, Gotham Gazette
Andrea Batista Schlesinger, Drum Major Institute for Public Policy

To RSVP, please email dmi (at) drummajorinstitute.org or call 212.909.9663.

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