Even before last night’s Waterloo, those of us on the center and left who’ve railed endlessly against the perfidy of the WFP/ACORN/DFS axis of evil have found ourselves hamstrung by several inconvenient factors.
The first is that our outrage has inconveniently coincided with Republican outrage mostly focused on ACORN slovenliness, as opposed to illegality. Even I have defended ACORN from such calumny in the past, though Republicans may have a point about ACORN’s failure to adequately separate the not-for-profit sectors from the political sector. Of course, Republicans may want to reflect upon the fact that their insistence on privatizing so many government functions is what led ACORN to be the recipient of so many government contracts during their administrations.
The second factor hamstringing people like myself and Daily Gotham’s Mole333 has been the fact that in many, if not most races, the WFP candidates appeared to be the preferable ones —something which I admitted in my editorializing.
One need only look at my endorsements lists to see the failure to extend my general anathema against the WFP to many actual races. It was hard for me, with a clear conscience, to tell people to vote against Jimmy Von Bramer, Danny Dromm or Jummanne Williams. How those campaigns were financed may have been problematic, but the candidates on whose behalf such activities were undertaken seemed mostly to be sound.
As individuals, these candidates were mostly fine; as a group they are a major concern, which will grow exponentially as their combined success leads more pols to fall into the WFP party conga line. As such, some not so unhappy results have led to a sad day, especially for those who live in communities with land use issues on the horizon.
Moreover, this day is bound to be repeated shortly in Citywide form, as Mark Green spends the next two weeks of his life preparing for an ass-kicking he can do nothing to prevent, as he becomes this year’s Liz Holtzman about to get the stuffings taken out of him by this year’s Alan Hevesi (possibly in more than one manner).
John Liu will probably also benefit, but he should remember Reagan‘s injunction to “Trust but verify,” since he is not the priority; and as reported in yesterday’s City Hall News, the WFP/ACORN/DFS operation was perfectly willing to jettison him to help DeBlasio in places where that seemed advantageous.
The one silver lining to this dark cloud is that the WFP’s candidate did not attain the office they will probably need the most in the days to come:
Manhattan District Attorney.