The City’s only real three way general election is bound to produce its share of stories, and the 45th AD certainly has been living up to this opportunity.
Today, Brooklyn’s insurgent GOP blog is urging Republicans and Conservatives to desert their 45th AD Assembly candidate, Russ Gallo, and instead support the Independence Party nominee, Ben Akselrod as the best candidate to beat incumbent Democrat Steve Cymbrowitz.
Money quote:
"For various reasons, it is my view that Cymbrowitz represents the past way of doing things in the "old 45th AD" — Ben Akselrod represents what's happening in the "new 45th AD" — and Russell Gallo doesn't fit in any 45th AD, new or old."
I could quibble.
Cymbrowitz (CW Post, Adelphi & Brooklyn Law) is considerably less Ivy League elite than his predecessors Steve Solarz (Brandies & Columbia), Chuck Schumer (Harvard & Harvard) and Dan Feldman (Columbia & Harvard).
More to the point, even with his predecessors’ occasional concessions to political expedience, Cymbrowitz is considerably less liberal than Solarz, Schumer and Feldman.
Further, while the next Assemblymember from the 45th AD (after Cymbrowitz) will probably be Russian, it is by no means certain that they will be an anti-choice social reactionary in the mode of Akselrod.
But the observation that "Russell Gallo doesn't fit in any 45th AD, new or old" is dead on smart.”
However, to be fair, I must concede that the day’s biggest story belongs to Gallo.
Normally, Rudy Giuliani endorsing a Republican would be snooze-worthy.
But Steve Cymbrowitz was once a Rudy guy.
Cymbrowitz and his late wife, Assemblywoman Lena C, worked hard for Rudy. Lena, a Sephardic Orthodox, was, before her election to the Assembly, a veteran political fund-raiser who has played a role in both the election of Giuliani and one time Rudy running mate, Assemblyman (as he was then) Jules Polonetsky.
When Rudy won, Cymbrowitz ended up with a job as NYCHA’s Director of Intergovernmental Affairs and Albany lobbyist.
Unfortunately for Steve, in 1999, a marginal State Senate seat opened up in the suburbs.
Like any suburban candidate of either party, the Democrat in the Rockland County Senate race, Ken Zebrowski, pledged to support the commuter tax's abolition, and held a joint press conference with Dick Brodsky (D-Westchester), the Assembly sponsor of an abolition bill.
The tax was long a bone in the throat of suburbanites.
In 1999, Mayor Giuliani and City Council Speaker Peter Vallone aggravated them further by proposing to spend a $2 billion city surplus by enacting a tax break. Suburban legislators of both parties responded by complaining that, if NYC was so flush with cash that they couldn't think of any education, housing, transit or other needs to spend their money on, then perhaps it was time to end the commuter tax.
Even the most liberal suburban Democrats figured they had voted to give NYC billions for education, police, transit, and other needs, and now saw the City tax cut as a reason to bring home a little pork of their own.
Silver initially resisted the pressure from members of his conference.
The Republicans responded to the press conference by quite accurately pointing out that it was the Assembly, not the Senate, which was stopping abolition.
Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno the scheduled a Senate vote to prove the point and thereby help his candidate.
This put tremendous pressure on the Assembly's marginal suburban Democratic members, especially those from Rockland, who started begging Shelly Silver to abolish the tax.
Silver didn't give a rat's ass about Ken Zebrowski, but Shelly is very sensitive to threatened marginals, and even more sensitive to any possibility of in-house revolt. He thought he had both on his hands, and let it be known he was inclined to repeal the tax.
Rudy then called Silver up and asked him not to do it.
Silver responded that, if the Mayor wanted the bill stopped, he should get Bruno to pull it; but that if the Senate passed it, the Assembly would pass it too.
Silver suggested that Bruno, who was then a big supporter of Rudy's Senate bid, would respond to Rudy.
Rudy responded that he’d already sent Bruno a memo of opposition.
Rudy, a bully with the powerless, then deployed the modicum amount of courage he usually displayed when dealing with the powerful; he sat on his hands and did nothing.
The Senate brought the bill up to a vote.
Bruno let all the City Republicans off the hook and allowed them to vote against it, even Guy Vellella, who represented a portion of Westchester, and was actually a co-sponsor of the repeal bill.
However, Bruno knew he could do this because all he needed for passage was the vote of one Democrat and he had the sure votes of two, Westchester's Suzi Oppenheimer, who, like all suburban legislators of both parties, always supported repeal, and Albany's Neil Breslin, who had a couple of hundred constituents who commuted to the City to work.
With those votes, the bill was passing, and it did, with several other Democrats joining with their superfluous votes to give Zebrowski cover.
Shelly then added insult to injury by passing the Senate bill without changes, even though certain changes could have cushioned the impact on the City's budget, and would probably been acceptable to Bruno.
Hell, why risk helping the City when your marginals might get some flack?
Rudy held his tongue until the bill was safely passed, and only then attacked Silver, barely mentioning Bruno.
A real profile in courage, once again proving that he may have been America’s mayor, but when push comes to shove, he wasn't New York’s.
But angered by his inability to admit his own failure of will, Rudy looked for scapegoats and found them in one Brooklyn Assemblymember, one of his administration’s Albany lobbyists.
As the Times noted, Cymbrowitz’s position as an administration favorite changed overnight when Lena followed Shelly’s orders and voted for repeal.
As the Times noted:
Suddenly the Cymbrowitz name was being dropped in City Hall, but with a thud.
Now Steven Cymbrowitz cannot be found; governmentally speaking, he has been ''disappeared.'' And those who are paid by the public to answer its questions about government suddenly view the telephone as a conduit for electric shocks from City Hall. One government aide returned a call only to say: ''This is a courtesy call to say that I'm not calling you back.''
Here are the all-too-sketchy details of l'affaire Cymbrowitz:
Early last week, the State Legislature voted to repeal the commuter tax, punching a hole in the city's budget plans. While committing to memory the names of legislators from the city who had voted against the city's interests, mayoral aides found this: Cymbrowitz, Lena.
The very next day, a city official said, Steven Cymbrowitz was handed a letter postmarked City Hall. It informed Mr. Cymbrowitz, the director for intergovernmental relations, that he was being demoted, and would soon be receiving lighter paychecks.
Mayoral aides said that Mr. Cymbrowitz had been, shall we say, reassigned. But this particular employee, of the more than 250,000 who work directly or indirectly for the city, had long been in their sights because his job performance was, they said, unsatisfactory. That he was demoted the day after his wife's vote, they said, was merely unfortunate timing.
Coincidence? And the Giuliani administration? Assemblywoman Cymbrowitz did not think so. Phone calls were made, accusations were traded, and rumors flew. The New York Post reported that Mr. Cymbrowitz had indeed been banished…'
In pursuit of the truth — and of Mr. Cymbrowitz — four messages were left at the Assemblywoman's office and one at home. None were returned. And several calls made to Mr. Cymbrowitz's office at the Housing Authority prompted the same verbatim response: ''He is not available.''
Thankfully, the Housing Authority has an office of public information, where several telephone messages were left over four days for the office's director, Hilly Gross. But Mr. Gross did not return those calls for the longest time; Cymbrowitz, it seems, had become the name too dangerous even to whisper.
To find out why, a reporter paid an unannounced visit to Mr. Gross's office. The deputy director, Tim Sullivan, assured him that Mr. Gross would be along any minute, then walked away. Three minutes later, Mr. Sullivan called a secretary sitting near the reporter to pass on the message that Mr. Gross was unavailable.
When the reporter asked to speak to Mr. Sullivan instead, she said that he was also suddenly unavailable. The quick-footed deputy director, she said, had somehow placed the call from outside the building.
Plaintive messages were left Thursday for various Housing Authority officials, including John G. Martinez, the authority's chairman, after which Mr. Gross finally performed the duty for which he is paid: he returned a call.
When asked why he had been avoiding phone calls, he said cryptically, ''It just didn't work out.'' And all he would say about the Cymbrowitz matter was: ''He has been reassigned, pending review of his job performance.''
Mr. Gross dearly wanted to hang up the telephone, but the barrage of questions prevented him. Was the authority acting on orders from City Hall? Was it related to the commuter-tax vote? Does Mr. Cymbrowitz now work — God forbid — in the Bronx?
He said he would call back, but he did not. Perhaps he cannot bring himself to utter the name ''Cymbrowitz.''
Lena died of cancer the next year and Steve won her seat.
That was 12 years ago, but for a connoisseur like Rudy 13 years in the life of a grudge means it is is barely out of its adolescence. It must, like a fine wine, be allowed to age, and must not be consumed before it reaches full flavor.
Yes, Steve Cymbrowitz was present at the Giuliani creation, but someone still needs to blamed for Rudy’s lack of cojones in standing up to Joe Bruno, and after all, if Steve Cymbrowitz were really effective in Albany, he would have delivered his wife’s vote without being asked to do so.
Who the fuck hired him to work at NYCHA anyway?