I’ve been pondering Adam Haber’s post-mortem on last fall’s election results (3/14/2021, Dems Must Get Their Act Together) because I was equally mystified, and I couldn’t get my head around it either.
With a solid registered Democrat advantage, this was a stunner. Mr. Haber’s piece clarified the matter for me, although not the way he would have wanted.
Mr. Haber offered this:
“So how did this happen? Here’s one explanation. Local Dems have several splintered liberal factions, which fight among themselves. Then when the primaries are over, the losing factions stay home. On the other side of the aisle, the Nassau County Republicans have a simple, unified message and they stick to it. Blaming Curran for higher taxes from a broken assessment process was disingenuous, but it worked.”
“The Republicans also kept the issues local and focused on stopping crime, even though Nassau is among the lowest crime counties in America. On crime, the far-left (sic) Democrats wanted to defund the police while the moderate Dems stayed mostly silent. This brought the Republicans out to vote.”
Hold it right there.
Some of you may remember a piece I wrote called “Betrayal of a County Legislator,” published last May. Quoting here, “There’s a lot of dirty stuff that’s gone down in the county when it comes to how law enforcement engages with minority communities that doesn’t make headlines. Like a lot that goes on here, either you know or you don’t. But it’s always been there. The George Floyd incident, almost providentially, provided a pretext to deal with it.
So when it came to a police reform plan, the county executive politely listened to representatives of the communities most likely to be affected.
And then blew them off. Three (Democratic) county legislators, none of them white, voted against the plan.”
Ms. Curran’s spokesman had the gall to say “After hundreds of meetings and countless hours of input from community stakeholders, the Nassau Police Reform Plan passed the legislature in a bipartisan manner.”
My God.
Could it be that if Ms. Curran hadn’t dismissed those legislators like they were house servants, or hadn’t trolled dozens of community leaders who endured “hundreds of meetings and countless hours” on a reform plan for nothing, and the perceived hostility Jay Jacobs’ has for certain candidates is the real reason many Democratic voters stayed home?
Could it be Mr. Haber has this backwards? That continuous slander against who he calls the “far left?” Maybe they weren’t “far left” at all. Maybe they were real Democrats, the kind the party leadership doesn’t bump into at Bryant & Cooper’s. Because for the Democratic Leadership, no other electoral cohort counts.
We don’t need Republicans to slander so-called “progressives” as closet Marxists. We have Nassau “Democrats” doing it for us.
Don’t call yourself a Democrat if you think throwing someone a crumb of dignity is a magnanimous gesture on your part. Politically knowledgeable readers will know exactly what I’m talking about.
Mr. Haber continues:
“Instead, she publicly knocked the whole left, which is contrary to everything Curran stood for while county executive. It’s hard to trust politicians when they spew hypocrisy.”
Odd. If that was “contrary” to what she stood for while in office, how do you conclude the “whole left” abandoned her come election time? Could the reason for her shortfall lie elsewhere? Like maybe executing a gross insult to a natural Democratic constituency?
Ironically, Mr. Haber vilifies the one group of Democrats who aren’t acting like Republicans as the scapegoat for electoral failure.
The “far left” isn’t the outlier here. The local leadership is completely out of step with Democratic voters, the Party and its platform. The Route 25 crew are just a bunch of over moneyed ward heelers with no grasp of public policy, who haughtily deign to bequeath us with “sensible” policies that keep everything in its place.
Besides, who cares what party holds office? Both act as funnels for wealth distribution from the electorate to the civil service and entrenched business interests, and there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between them. Why trash voters when you don’t give them a reason to vote?
Then there’s this gem: “Congresswoman Kathleen Rice summed it up best saying, “No wonder Democrats in Nassau County lose with this kind of leadership.”
Oh, thank you, Ms. Rice. Your money’s on the night table, sweetie. Don’t leave office without it.
Donald Davret
Roslyn