Onetime Panther Has Eyes on Gracie

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The New York Sun

Charles Barron, a City Council member from the East New York section of Brooklyn, talks about running for mayor as if he really believes he will win. He won’t acknowledge he is a long shot in the 2005 Democratic primary, and he sees a way to tot up the votes in his favor. He even put a positive spin on the latest poll from the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, released last week, which found that in a field of Democratic hopefuls the council member finishes dead last.


“Polls are a snapshot of the moment,” Mr. Barron told The New York Sun in an interview. “If you look at the polls when the Democrats run against themselves, Fernando Ferrer gets 38% and 24% of those surveyed are undecided. I am at 4%. I used to be at 2%. If you take that 24% of undecideds and add 4%, well, that’s 28%, and that puts me in the runoff. You have a city councilman who has the least money and name recognition and he can poll that well? I am extremely encouraged.”


Mr. Barron’s math doesn’t entertain the possibility that all those undecided Democrats might decide, in the end, to vote for someone other than him. Even if they went against him, he said he could still come out on top. There are college students in the city who are eligible to vote, and he thinks they are his to woo. And there is a huge population of disenfranchised voters he says he can appeal to.


“No other candidate can win the disenfranchised like I can,” he said. “The other candidates are too traditional. The 60% to 70% of voters that stay home are my target. I think I am going to shock New York City.”


Mr. Barron, 54, a Democrat and former Black Panther, has a fiery way about him. When a judge in Queens, Laura Blackburne, was removed from the criminal court bench and reassigned to civil cases for refusing to let police arrest a convicted drug dealer in her courtroom last summer, Mr. Barron said officials were “trying to lynch her through the media.” He once said that for his mental health he would like to slap a white person – no one in particular. He invited the homophobic Zimbabwean strongman Robert Mugabe to visit New York. He wants reparations for slavery.


Clearly, he is not a mainstream mayoral candidate. And he says as much. “I have to be the hippest mayoral candidate, if nothing else,” he said, laughing.


Political analysts, however, said that to focus on Mr. Barron’s chances of winning City Hall is to miss one of the fundamental goals for citywide candidates in this new era of term limits. Because of term limits, the analysts said, elected officials always have to work with an eye to the next job. There is no better way to play to a citywide audience, and boost name recognition, than running for mayor – even for the also-rans.


The new campaign-finance law, on which the City Council overrode Mayor Bloomberg’s veto last week, means most contributions of $250 or less will get matched with city funds at a six-to-one-ratio for candidates in city elections who face wealthy opponents – such as Mr. Bloomberg. In other words, the city could contribute as much as $1,500 toward a campaign for each contribution that met the campaign-finance law’s other requirements. That is a lot of seed money to jump-start any race: mayoral or otherwise.


Many Brooklyn politicians and political analysts suggested that Mr. Barron’s mayoral campaign is meant to be a springboard for a possible run at the congressional seat of septuagenarian Edolphus Towns, whose district overlaps with Mr. Barron’s. Mr. Towns is expected to retire soon.


“If Ed Towns retires there will be a lot more people running than Charles,” political consultant Hank Sheinkopf predicted. “That said, he could work Towns’s district very effectively as a mayoral candidate with no loss to his future. Congressional district seats don’t open that often, so it won’t be Charles Barron’s for the picking, but the mayor’s race could give him a leg up, for sure.”


Other mayoral contenders privately said they didn’t expect Mr. Barron would file his papers for the mayoral race in July. He could campaign as he has been doing for nearly a year now and never have to leave his council seat. He only has to forgo a campaign for another term on the council after he files papers with the elections board for the mayoral primary instead. “Charles isn’t stupid,” one mayoral contender said, declining to be further identified. “He can get a lot of mileage out of running for mayor without ever giving up his seat. Then he is positioned for the Towns race.”


Mr. Barron didn’t rule out a congressional race in the future, but for now his focus, he said, is on the top municipal job. “I might run for Congress one day,” he said, “but I am running for mayor to become mayor and I am shooting to do that in ’05.”


The councilman said he is running on a “People’s Platform,” which includes, among other things:


* bringing down crime through community policing;


* providing real affordable housing – he said $60,000 to buy a house is not affordable for people making $25,000 a year;


* free tuition for the City University of New York;


* reparations for descendants of slavery in New York;


* levying of a stock transfer tax and a tax on people making $250,000 or more a year.


“We need a more equitable distribution of the city’s resources and power structure,” Mr. Barron said. “We need a more genderly balanced and racially balanced power structure. I think the neediest communities need most of the budget. The mayor is looking at the Jets and Nets stadiums, and those will benefit the rich far more than the poor in New York City. That’s why 47% of the people surveyed are against these projects. Mayor Bloomberg hasn’t done development for the poor. I would.”


In a one-to-one matchup with Mr. Bloomberg, according to a Marist poll released last week, the mayor bests the councilman by 44% to 38% with 18% undecided.


The New York Sun

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