Although in many instances it takes years to plan a run for public office, I usually see primaries as a one-hundred-day countdown. I usually start counting on the Sunday before the first Tuesday when petitions are circulated, and I take it down to the day of the primary itself. That’s the Sunday when you gather your troops (petition-carriers, technicians, relatives, friends, etc.), and put your final plans in place for the petition-effort. The next day you usually go to the printers with your drafts in hand, hoping to pick them up on the Tuesday morning. Well-to all my white friends reading this (especially) – let me say that’s how some of us do it on the other side of the tracks/lol. It aint pretty; in fact it’s pretty ugly sometimes. But it could be fun if you are a political-junkie like me. First, you roll up your sleeve, then you tap the receiving vein two or three times, then you take the election-needle and you stick it in. If you are a pro at this, you don’t even flinch. It’s a fix good for at least one hundred days.
Anyway, today marks the mid-point of the primary season. This is where you do serious evaluation, assessment, re-evaluation and re-assessment. It’s introspection and retrospection time all in déjà vu. It’s not a nice day for fledgling campaigns; usually the wall starts writing ominous things all over itself. You filed your petitions, now you wait. It’s like taking an HIV test and waiting for the results; there are hazy memories of a one-night-stand or two. You bite your fingernails. The days get more hours for some strange reason; it takes a week for a day to go by.
This is where-as a candidate who is not well financed-you start pawning the jewelry and start up negotiations to sell your first-born. Of course the rent is late; otherwise it’s missing like Jimmy Hoffa. The credit-cards people are calling; you are not taking calls from people leaving extensions to their call-back numbers. You are shamelessly hitting up the relatives, co-workers and in-laws for money. The printers smile when they see you coming. Your wife doesn’t. Jerry Skurnik is now a good friend. This is where-like Al Gore-Maurice Gumbs and I invented the term “soft-loan”. One perennial candidate created the “gimme-something- to- work- with” pitch. It didn’t work well. Maybe he didn’t pitch it well.
The mid-point of the primary season could also be a good booster for your ego; that’s if you called things right. It could also be the “preparation-H” for your political ego if you called it wrong. Many people have been referring to my “Dear Tom Suozzi letter” written exactly seven weeks ago today. Go see for yourself. Click on “Rock Hackshaw’s blogs” right here on Room Eight; it will come up. Read it. Tell me what you think.
At the mid-point of the 2001 elections I told Congressman Ed Towns, that the militant Charles Barron will win the 42nd city council district. He doubted me; he bet me twenty dollars that Barron would lose. Ed Towns hasn’t paid me as yet. I refuse to collect now. If Ed had won that bet then, he would be on vacation today. Instead, he now has to be living in the subways and campaigning like a homeless person. Barron is on his ass folks; like white on rice.
The mid-point of any primary season is when the lawyers start stalking you for their deposits/and/ or final lump–sum payments. They are worrying about their winter-vacation deposit checks; you are worrying about the carriers whose buff-cards you forgot to check. Did someone do a “kitchen-table” on you sheets? Is pagination fatal? You wait on the postman with bated breath. You become a Board of Elections groupie, scoping the challenger-lists with irritating frequency. You know the clerks by first name; they give you photos of their grandkids. You eat junk food from greasy hot-dog vendors.
If you are lucky enough the commissioners give you clearance to move forward. Now you dread facing Judge Gary because he is worse than Judge Judy. You expect a line-by-line to be costly. You are sweating bullets from the summer heat; you are hearing talk that the opposition has “specked” you under the required number; and you are still eating junk-food from greasy hot-dog vendors.
Sometimes you end up in Albany on appeal. By then you are desperate. You are physically exhausted-so too is your wallet. You start dreaming that the incumbents are laughing at you. You make a mental-list of all those in the district who double-crossed you. Who was the fool that put this “run-for-office” idea in your head anyway? And then you realize it was you.
Now you start hating lawyers; you think that they are all a bunch of liars, idiots and/or clowns. After all, some people print their names when they sign it, don’t they? Thank God, Jehovah or Allah, or Buddha, or whoever, that we don’t have to write in the EDs anymore.
Mid-point is when some insurgents start talking to themselves, after starting to regularly talk in their sleep. Their favorite questions are: “what the fuck am I doing in this race” and “why am I doing this to myself”. Something is telling me that Tom Suozzi is having this conversation with himself just about now; likewise K.T.Mc Farland.
The mid-point of the primary season is not a nice place folks, especially when the July filing shows that your opponent has raised ten times more money than you. You know who the unions are going to support, and it’s not the man in the mirror. This is when you get to what Madari Pam Miller calls the “3: am place”. Let me explain that for all you rocket-scientists. She is a good friend of mine, and an educator.
When as a candidate you are short on money, you usually push yourself real hard to compensate. Before you know it you are doing 18 and 20 hour days. Hitting the subway stations at rush hour; hitting doors of registered voters at dinner hour. Rushing back to your office for strategy meetings in which your campaign workers question all your tactics. Then one night you get home around 11: pm and you start making phone calls, or returning phone calls, or catching up on phone calls, whatever. You do this until someone asks you: “do you know what time it is”? That’s when you suddenly discover a wrist-watch on your hand saying three a.m.
As we hit the mid-point of this year’s primary season folks, remember this: incumbents win at a 98.5% clip. Insurgents could get better odds at Foxwoods casino or at the neighborhood Off Track Betting Parlor. Somewhere between the primary mid-point place and the calendar mid-August place, you can usually stick a fork in most insurgents: they are done. Cooked. Finished. However, most are not even aware of that reality. They plug on nonetheless. In the predominantly-white areas of Brooklyn, insurgents are a dying breed. There are hardly ever primary elections anymore. Maybe white folks recognize political futility and /or political suicide quicker than black folks. Or maybe their representatives do such a superior job there is no need for recall. I know on the black side of the tracks, many feel the way I do: that there is a need for total recall.
In Manhattan you will still find some primary contests; mainly during the city council elections. Maybe it’s the campaign finance money that’s attractive. Maybe. Whatever it is, that’s when candidates come out like cross-dressers in the Village Halloween parade. In Harlem they still fight now and then. By now I am sure that everybody knows that Bill Perkins and Keith Wright don’t exchange Christmas gifts. In fact, it is said that if the Patterson senate seat hadn’t opened up, Wright would have been facing a challenge from Perkins for his assembly seat, this year. I am told that in last year’s Boro Prez race; Perkins got more votes than Wright did, in Keith’s own assembly district. That would have been a nice primary, no?
In many Hispanic areas you can still get a primary or two. Sometimes the Bronx gets heated up over some political family-feud; especially when the Espadas or Riveras are involved. But even here, there seems to be a dearth of primary contests lately; seems like the Espadas are on the run and the Riveras are running things.
In New York, most registered voters are still Democrats, despite the fact that most of the rest of the country has slowly been going Republican since Ronald Reagan. Maybe we get things ass-backwards in the big-apple. Maybe. Even in Staten Island the Republican Party is on the endangered species list. You could quicker find Osama bin Laden than find a black republican in Brooklyn. The few who exist in Queens come to the polls incognito.
In Queens County -up in Flushing, to be exact- the Chinese are fighting the Koreans for power, and at the same time they are both fighting the whites. Didn’t we do this course in university: “Race and Ethnicity in American Politics”? Sure we did. When demographics and new realities clash, the end result is change.
The first time a Chinese guy won an Assembly seat in New York’s state legislature, lore has it that a warehouse full of workers walked to the machine and voted. Rumor now has it that the first Chinese elected to New York’s city council (John Liu) is going to run for Public Advocate in 3 years. He is raising big money folks. I hope he does run. I wish him luck. Change is good most times.
Also in Queens, the East-Indians have jumped into the fray. From those born in Pakistan, to those born in India, or Guyana, or Trinidad or Bangladesh, they have been running candidates like nobody’s business. Last year they even drew blood and guns in their quest. Times are changing folks. Soon, we will get a Mexican-American running for a seat in New York. Soon. Watch. It’s inevitable.
Stay tuned-in folks. The pre and post- Labor Day phases are still to come. And then –of course- there is always the “Thursday before the Tuesday”; don’t forget.
Isn’t this fun?
Wait till election-day; that’s when you overdose.