In a last-minute surprise, President George Bush met with Queens firefighters and watch the live broadcast of Vice President Dick Cheney’s convention speech at this heavily guarded social hall in Elmhurst. Tribune photo by Ira Cohen. Outside The Garden, A Battleground The speechmaking and political networking inside Madison Square Garden and at scores of parties, luncheons and smaller events happening all over Manhattan during the week of the convention only told half the story. Outside, on the streets around the convention site, demonstrators opposed to the policies of the Bush administration seized on the occasion to strike back against the GOP with a week of marches, street theater and civil disobedience. The week began with the largest protest march to sweep through the streets of New York City in decades, in which hundreds of thousands of demonstrators wound their way in loop from Union Square past Madison Square Garden. According to United For Peace and Justice, the umbrella group that organized the march on Aug. 29, an estimated half million marchers participated, though most independent reports suggested that the group’s estimate was too high. Despite concerns that the massive march would degenerate into chaos after Mayor Bloomberg and the Parks Department barred a post-march rally in Central Park and protest organizers rejected alternative sites, the march ended peacefully, and only 35 people were arrested. The crowd, composed of everyone from families with strollers to political radicals with signs denouncing Bush as a war criminal, chanted “Hey, ho, Bush must go!” and “Four more months!” as the procession moved past the heavily guarded convention center. Before the march, one group recruited random marchers to act as pallbearers for dozens of makeshift caskets draped with American flags, symbolic of the hundreds of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the week wore on and the convention got underway, however, the peaceful partisan atmosphere of the Sunday march evolved into tense street skirmishes between activists and the thousands of cops assigned to secure the blocks around Madison Square Garden. On Aug. 31, a day slated for nonviolent confrontation and civil disobedience by activists groups, police arrested over 1,000 people. At one point, dozens of protesters affiliated with the pacifist War Resisters League moved into the street near Herald Square, just blocks from the convention, a staged a “die-in,” laying down like corpses and blocking the street. A unit of cops on bicycles swooped in and arrested the protesters. Down by Ground Zero, hundreds of demonstrators preparing to march up to the convention site were swept up in a mass arrest, with police using orange nets and metal barricades to divide the marchers before placing them in plastic handcuffs and herding them into buses. Republican Queens With RNC delegates and alternates from all corners of the nation flocking to New York City, the fabled cosmopolitan stronghold of liberal culture and Democratic Party politics, many observers have jokingly observed that the additional 5,000 registered Republicans staying in Manhattan hotels for the week would seemingly double the GOP population of the city. Though the statistics are not nearly so lopsided, demographic information largely confirms the conventional wisdom: New York City is indeed a heavily Democratic town. In terms of presidential politics, the entire of state of New York has been all but ceded to the Kerry campaign, as Bush partisans long ago decided to focus limited national resources on the “battleground” states. Yet Queens is not entirely monochromatic when it comes to the red versus blue of party politics. The borough is home to 133, 427 registered Republicans. Out of 47 elected officials that represent the people of Queens on borough, city, state and national levels, three proud Republicans hold their party’s banner high in elected office: City Councilman Dennis Gallagher and State Senators Frank Padavan and Serphin Maletese. According to Professor David Beveridge, a sociologist and demographic expert at Queens College, the success of these three politicians is due more to quirks in the political system than the strong presence of registered Republicans. “Queens isn’t really that Republican,” Beveridge said, noting that even the most consistently Republican districts in the borough rarely host a Republican majority. Those two Republicans sent to Albany, he contends, have one of the oldest tricks in the electoral playbook to thank: “very careful gerrymandering,” Beveridge says. This same technique also assists the Democrat-dominated State Assembly, Bevridge noted, where precisely drawn districts allow Queens to send Democratic representatives from all 18 Assembly districts. The only area with a GOP majority in voter registration is Malba, an exclusive waterfront neighborhood near the Whitestone Bridge. Other areas with Republican registration in the 40 percent range include Middle Village, Glendale, Whitestone, College Point, Douglaston and Bayside, Beveridge said. Douglaston Manor, with 45 percent Republican registration and expensive homes, is a typical neighborhood in what passes for Republican Queens. “The very high end neighborhoods of Queens,” Beveridge says, “the highly professional and wealthy neighborhoods. These are very elite, almost suburban neighborhoods.” In contrast, the more urban and hardscrabble areas of the borough contain virtually no registered Republicans. According to Beveridge, Springfield Gardens in Southeast Queens is the least Republican neighborhood in the borough: only 1.8 percent.

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