David Yassky is my City Councilmember. I've always liked him. I have met him personally and was happy to support him for the City Council. Then I heard he will be running for Congress in my district (NY-11, currently held by Major Owens). That presented me with a dilemma. You see, Chris Owens, who I also know and like very much, is running to replace his father in Congress.
As of now, Yassky has lost any chance of getting my vote:
Yassky Draws Fire Over Sampson Endorsement
By Thomas Tracy - The Park Slope Courier - 9/5/05
City Councilmember David Yassky's endorsement of State Senator John Sampson for Kings County District Attorney hit a political roadblock last week with critics charging that the Brooklyn Heights legislator's decision was motivated strictly by his political ambitions.
Sampson is allied with the extremely corrupt, four-times indicted Clarence Norman who dominates the corrupt and ineffective Brooklyn Democratic machine. The Norman machine presides over farcical County Committee meetings, delivers abysmally low voter turnouts, and favors corrupt, lousy judges over far more qualified judges. The Norman machine is almost as corrupt as the Halliburton Republicans. Sampson's run for Brooklyn DA is a blatant attempt to quash the four indictments of his political mentor, Clarence Norman. And yet, David Yassky is aligning himself with this corrupt machine.
I think we are witnessing the loss of Yassky’s idealism, his absorption into the corrupt machine that must be hard to avoid if you want to get anywhere in Brooklyn politics. The problem with his doing so is that his district is one of the heavily reform districts, which is why Major Owens and his son Chris can be successful despite their opposition to the machine. Yassky is selling out his ideals and his district’s ideals.
This is horribly sad to me because I had viewed Yassky as one of the “good ones,
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