Big Daddy’s Handshake Hasn’t Lost its Grip

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The New York Sun

City Council Member Tracy Boyland says her goal was to shake 1 million hands before last Tuesday’s Democratic primary for the 11th Congressional district in Brooklyn. Even if she was including each person’s left and right hand, that was still an ambitious 500,000 people, nearly 17 times the number of voters who actually made it to the polls.


In local races such as the one Ms. Boyland just endured, it all comes back to the handshake. It’s grab and go and grab and go and, knock on wood, a couple of them will remember your name. The constituents can forget what you say or what you stand for – you just need them to remember who you are. Print up leaflets and pop into a radio station or two, but if you’re not squeezing flesh, you’re not coming out on top. On election eve, Ms. Boyland put it this way: “When people recognize me they grab my hand a little tighter. I’m hoping we have touched enough people.”


It was early last spring when Ms. Boyland, 35, and her fellow council member, Yvette Clarke, 39, both decided to run against the incumbent congressman, Major Owens. While few believed that the 11-term congressman was at serious risk of losing his seat, his challengers’ announcements raised the curtain for one marvelously catty campaign. All three of the candidates come from well-known Brooklyn political families, which only boosted the race’s value in the gossip mill.


All three have personal ties going back over a decade. Indeed, both challengers could be seen as indebted to the incumbent. Rep. Owens supported Ms. Clarke’s mother, Una Clarke, when she ran for City Council in 1991. And Ms. Boyland interned for the congressman on the Hill when she was in college.


Depending on your point of view, it was a case either of two ingrates trying to unseat their mentor or of a dozy, over-the-hill politico at risk of losing his sinecure. Spectators who would have preferred to hear about divergences in their substantive concerns were out of luck; there weren’t really any issues on the table, at least not of the kind you can debate in public without looking like a petty numskull. (The subtext was always “I gave you your first internship!” “I deserved it, you old fogey!”)


The 11th Congressional District is one of the poorest in the city. Not surprisingly, the three candidates all said they wanted economic development, affordable housing, and employment opportunities, so there wasn’t much arguing they could do on that front. The congressman’s opposition to the Brooklyn Arena got buried under the catnip. Instead, the spotlight remained trained on the contenders’ fraying personal ties, and the campaign came to resemble a backstage intrigue-strewn Miss America contest, where the only thing at stake was who would walk off with the crown.


In an effort to cast his challengers’ decision to jump in the ring as one big no-thank-you note, Rep. Owens and his son Chris Owens, who has his eye on the seat in 2006, started referring to the council members as the congressman’s “proteges.” The message was deliciously simple: Big Daddy was being betrayed – and by his own adopted daughters no less.


“Do I feel a little betrayed? I feel a whole lot of betrayed,” Rep. Owens harrumphed from his car phone on Election Day. The incumbent was patrolling the polling sites, looking for “little ways the other candidates are cheating.” The greatest offense he found? A couple of people at a senior center wearing bright orange “Team BOYLAND” T-shirts within 100 feet of a polling site. “We made them take them off,” he said.


What a far cry from well-oiled machines running this year’s presidential campaign. This was old-school campaigning at its most basic and broke, with loudspeakers inside scratched-up vans, rush-hour campaigning at subway stops, flyers jammed under doorways, and politicians dragging friends, neighbors, fellow churchgoers, and anyone else found lingering on the street corner to the polls. When it became apparent at the 11th hour that Ms. Boyland’s campaign was short on volunteers, her family paid for her team to round up community members and pay them each $100 and a big bag of potato chips to stand outside polling sites and hand out flyers featuring a picture of Ms. Boyland and David Dinkins, who, it must be mentioned, hadn’t officially endorsed her.


But this election wasn’t about endorsements. Just getting constituents to remember faces and names – or even just to cast a vote – was enough. “We’re going back to old-fashioned campaigning,” Yvette Clarke’s campaign manager, Michael Roberts, declared the day before the election. “We’re going back to the streets with a bullhorn.”


In most elections clasping hands will only get you so far – it’s the money that will really take you places – but there isn’t much money being tossed around Brooklyn’s 11th Congressional District. Major Owens’s campaign reported the highest campaign coffers of the trio. According to his August 25 pre-primary report, he’d raised $380,000, barely enough to buy a one-bedroom apartment in the more fashionable parts of his district.


Common wisdom has it that the incumbent always wins the primary, and this year was no exception. Even Clarence Norman, the leader of the Brooklyn Democratic Party who’s under indictment on corruption charges, won by a landslide. Rep. Owens won’t be vacating his office, either. Even though he’s widely criticized for not getting much of anything done in his 22 years in Washington, he trounced his challengers, besting each of them by at least 15% of the vote. In a contest where the hand grab is the land grab, the guy who’s had 22 years to shake paws is all but unbeatable.


When you can’t distinguish the candidates based on their issues, personal ties are bound to come to the fore. Indeed, voters used relationships as their rationalizations – be it that they knew a candidate’s mother or son, or had even just met one of the candidates one more time than the others. And when the candidates spoke about one another, it was never long before the conversation fell into muddy personal territory. Sure, there were a couple of jabs at the congressman’s record, but the real venom came out when attacking his personality. (Ms. Clarke went so far as to call him a “windbag.”) At a Brooklyn Council of Churches forum, Ms. Boyland turned it into a family feud, saying of Mr. Owens, “this campaign has brought out the ugly side in my opponent and my family has had to bear the worst of it.” Aligning herself with her family was a smooth move; when asked what about Ms. Boyland’s message drew them to her campaign, her aides all responded that they had known her family for decades.


When politics get this personal, the last-minute tricks that come out tend to have little to do with what ought to matters to the voters. Outside some polling sites on Election Day, volunteers were handing out mock newspapers financed by Rep. Owens. At the bottom of Page 1, there was a National Enquirer-ish item offering four free movie tickets to the reader who can correctly identify where Tracy Boyland lives (“Brooklyn’s Chauncy Street …COLD…East Orange, N.J…FEELING HOT, HOT, HOT!!!”).


As evening fell on Election Day, Rep. Owens stood outside his Washington Avenue headquarters glorying in his victory and defending himself against criticism of being too old to do his job. “I’m going to keep the agenda going,” he told a New York 1 reporter. “I’m against the war in Vietnam.” He looked mortified by his gaffe. “I mean – the war in Iraq.”


He issued a nervous laugh and proceeded with his talking points, but it was hard not to dwell on the incumbent’s slip-up and wonder at his 12th consecutive triumph.


The 11th Congressional district has a dubious tradition of political skullduggery, ranging from slandering the opposition to nepotism (Tracy Boyland’s father relinquished his City Council seat after the last election and passed it on to his son) to flat-out corruption. State Senator Vander Beatty served time for tampering with ballots, only to be shot by a constituent after he got out of jail.


While no one questions that Major Owens won this year’s primary fair and square, one has to wonder if the 11th District could be better represented in Congress if its elections were decided by something slightly more grand than the number of the incumbent’s handshakes. Next time they should agree to campaign with their hands tied behind their backs and see what else they can come up with.


A stroll through the polling room of PS 138 on Tuesday afternoon turned up several bored-looking poll-watchers and one lone voter. The only sunny thing in the school’s gym room was the lemon-colored walls.


The New York Sun

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