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Brian McLaughlin: Reformer & Pragmatist
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| McLaughlin and Schenkler
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By MICHAEL SCHENKLER
The New York State Legislature is an awful body.
For those of you tired of reading that in this column, don’t run away. Although, it is so very true, it is not my topic today.
In that awful, embarrassing, dysfunctional body, there are some rather remarkable public servants. This somewhat contradictory concept is clearly embodied in Brian McLaughlin.
Brian, an old friend, requested the sit-down and came over to our office for a brief visit and wound up staying three hours as the two of us renewed our relationship, touched on politics but focused on reform.
He is like nobody else in the 150-member body. Although he’d deny it, Brian is in a class by himself.
He is a powerful labor leader who rose through the ranks of Queens-based International Brotherhood of Electricial Workers, Local 3 to become president of the Central Labor Council. He has parlayed the labor/Assembly combo to become the legislature’s most effective fundraiser and clearly its strongest candidate.
In the borough, even though he denies any interest in succeeding Tom Manton as County Leader, his name is mentioned in every discussion of the subject.
In the City, until he withdrew his name, he was viewed as one of a small handful of possible Democratic candidates to run for Mayor against Mike Bloomberg.
From his days as a “common man,” as he described it, Brian has become a skilled politician, a serious legislator and respected figure in the State Capital, an accomplished speaker and a very quick study on whatever topic of the moment he chooses to further the cause of the working class.
In spite of his many successes, Brian holds firmly to his roots.
But it was not the McLaughlin magic that brought him to my office to chat. Although, with a campaign war chest of almost a million dollars and no opposition on the ballot, Brian came to make the case why the Tribune should have endorsed him. He is a very serious candidate. Running for election without an opponent, Brian spent hours going door-to-door talking to constituents and meeting the people. He worked harder than most candidates do in contested elections.
But as part of our campaign for change in Albany, we chose not to endorse any incumbent who had not come down this year clearly on the side of reform. We spent many column inches proclaiming the need for radical change in Albany and chose not to endorse competent or even exceptional incumbents unless we believed they were committed to significant and quick change of the broken system.
Although he played a major role in an aborted attempt to bring change to the Assembly four years ago, Brian had not placed his name as cosponsor on any of the three pieces of legislation introduced recently to reform the State Legislature. Therefore, in spite of our belief he is as good as they get in Albany, we didn’t endorse him. We tried to make it clear that the Tribune was and shall continue to be a single issue endorser until lightning strikes the Albany roadblocks that have caused our State budget to be late 20 years in a row and our legislature’s performance and process to be a total embarrassment to our state.
Although they weren’t his words, Brian McLaughlin doesn’t disagree.
In our sit-down, he declared himself a “reformer.” He just wasn’t sure whether the variety of intros offered this year were the best way to go.
I am sitting down with a group of other legislators and we will have our own reform package. He was supportive of most of the concepts I raised in our discussion or have been raised in this column and the Brennen Center report.
He also rattled off a couple of old concepts he introduced previously:
-The addition of “None of the Above” to the ballot would allow voters to tell candidates running unopposed or against meaningless opposition, what they really think of them – it would serve as a report card for elected officials.
-Every public record of every public body in the State should be available on the internet. Open government and an informed electorate is a key to bringing about change. “Technology replaces civic and union meetings,” he emphasized to make the case for the information to be available.
-Every bill must be voted upon, lobbyists and leadership could not bottle them up in committee.
As the hours went on and we sat there agreeing about Albany change, I wondered out loud, “Brian, since you clearly feel strongly about the need for radical change, why haven’t you been yelling for reform?”
“Half of me is a reformer,” Brian said with a smile, “and the other half is pragmatic. In Albany relationships mean a lot. I work with the Republicans in the Senate and I have to deliver for my district. If I want that [let’s say] library, I have to work with leadership.”
As Brian tries to balance principle and pragmatism, the Assembly Democrats will be convening at month’s end, in a Manhattan hotel, to consider reform. It will be a curious struggle between cosmetic and real change. This writer worries that the system is so dysfunctional that little of substance will be done.
But Brian McLaughlin will remain a credit to New York State.
While the New York State Legislature is still an awful body.
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Not The Result But The Reasons
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| Manny Gold speaks out on the election of our country.
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By
EMANUEL R. GOLD NYS Senate-Retired
What scares me most about the 2004 Presidential Election is not so much the result, but the reasons given by people for voting for President Bush. The polls indicated that more people were worried about “moral” questions than they were worried about the war in Iraq or the economy.
In other words, if someone had a child fighting in Iraq, and was on unemployment, that wasn’t as important as whether or not a gay couple was living together or someone 1,000 miles away was getting an abortion.
Are we such a country of malcontents that we can only boost the quality of our own lives by worrying about what our neighbor is doing and downgrading other people’s personal beliefs?
Thousands and thousands of people are dying in Iraq - not only Americans, but Iraqi citizens and soldiers from other parts of the world. This war is costing a fortune.
If people voted for George Bush because they believe in this war and that it protects America, I can respect that logic.
Huge numbers of our citizens are unemployed or working at jobs below their skill levels and their families’ futures are in jeopardy. If someone voted for George Bush because they believe that the economy is on the upswing or that the best chance of economic survival is with the policies of George Bush, I might disagree with that but I can respect the motivation for the vote.
Safety from terrorism is something else I can understand, and if someone believed that the Bush policies would protect them better, I can respect that reasoning as well.
But in the 2004 Election, 11 states were preoccupied in changing their constitution to basically ban gay marriage.
Now understand, there is no law in this country forcing people to be gay or to enter into gay relationships. Every straight American has the absolute right to stay straight.
Why then are people so preoccupied with what is happening in their neighbor’s home? The only answer I can come up with is that they are malcontents and that they are so unsure of their own way of life that they must ban someone else’s way of life to gain their own happiness.
A man has been elected to the United States Senate who has stated that doctors who perform an abortion should be subjected to the death penalty, as should the women who were their patients. There is no law in America forcing anyone to obtain an abortion, and anyone who does not believe in the right of a woman to control her own body need not participant in an abortion.
But apparently, there are tens of millions of people in America who find no other way to justify their own belief that abortion is wrong than by fulfilling a need to force their opinion on someone else.
If these “crusaders” into other people’s lives do not fit the definition of malcontents, then I don’t know what does.
It has been said that we are a country divided. It is what divides us which is scary. A country half Republican and half Democrat is not scary; a country half liberal and half conservative on certain kinds of issues is not scary.
But what is scary is a country that is divided among people who are content enough to live their owns lives without attempting to force their position on others versus malcontents, would-be crusaders, who have the constant urge to meddle in everyone else’s affairs.
When that latter group becomes a political force, America is truly unsafe. The country that was created by people who fled Europe for religious and other freedoms now threatens to become just another a place on this earth where ideological freedom dies.
From my beginning days in politics I have heard it said that the political pendulum swings back and forth. I believe that the health of this nation depends upon that pendulum swinging back away from the devastating danger posed to this country by the closed-minded theological bigots who challenge the freedom of their fellow Americans AND challenge that freedom over and above their own economic interests and family interests.
Yes, gay marriage has been banned in 11 states and to some of our misguided fellow Americans that seems to be more important than the lives of our servicemen overseas and the destruction of our economy.
So you see…it is not the result of the 2004 Presidential Election which is half as scary as the reasons given by so many Americans for their vote.
What We Learned From The ElectionBy Henry SternThe national election is everyone’s concern today. The trends it showed are both encouraging and disturbing. The good news is that both candidates reaffirmed America’s commitment to fighting terrorism, wherever it occurs or is being planned. The bad news is that social conservatism emerged as a major political force in Midwestern and Southern states. The voters in eleven states amended their constitutions to define marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman, a viewpoint which has been widely held, in theory if not always in practice, for millennia. The unjustified fears stirred of any official sanction for same-sex relationships resonated in support for the reelection of the president, who many people felt could be more depended upon to maintain what remains of the existing social order. Democrats will have to think carefully what they will offer the public in 2008. This year they had the advantage of running against an incumbent who had begun a war, perhaps justly, but had not been able to end it. The Democratic candidate was the better debater, and during the campaign he became a stronger speaker. He did have credibility issues relating to his four-month Vietnam service, punctuated by three Purple Hearts, but still, he volunteered and he was in combat four months longer than the president, who had military issues of a different nature. The political problem the Democrats face is shown clearly on the map of the United States, with the states in blue and red. Apart from the Northeast, the upper Midwest and the Pacific Coast, America is almost entirely made up of red states. And even if Kerry had barely taken Ohio, he would still have been three million votes behind in the popular vote. In 2000, Gore got 500,000 more votes than Bush, but lost, as you know, in the Electoral College. We narrowly missed the reverse result this time, with Bush winning the popular vote but losing in the electoral count. Some people thought that would be a fair outcome, erasing what they saw as the injustice of 2000. It would have been fearful symmetry, but quite unfair for a candidate of either party to receive three million more votes than his rival and end up being counted out because his supporters lived in the wrong states. The Senate and House are more strongly Republican than before, so New York City has no reason to be optimistic about its counterterrorism funding desires, or new federal assistance for transportation, housing or other urban needs. Perhaps our Republican mayor can help; he has done so in the past, quietly but effectively. New Yorkers’ political views and votes may be noble, but there is often in life a price to be paid for one’s convictions. As we watched the final campaign dance on TV, John Edwards seemed aggressive and frustrated, while John Kerry appeared comfortable in his role and expressed gratitude to his supporters. On the other side, Dick Cheney was as cheerful as he ever gets, and the president spoke well and reached out to “those who voted for my opponent.” If his attitude and his actions live up to his expressed intentions, his second term should be better than his first. A couple of hours later, a French official said publicly that the American election brings “a new start” in the Middle East, whoever won. People have a way of coming to terms with reality, even if it is not quite the reality they sought. |
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Not4Publication.com by Dom Nunziato |
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