So the district attorney of Kings County, Charles “Joe” Hynes, is going to stand for re-election after all — as a Republican. The life-long Democrat lost his party’s nomination in the primary last month. At a spirited rally Tuesday at Brooklyn Borough Hall, he announced he would stand on the Republican and Conservative lines.
Well, welcome to the fight. I say that as another long-time Democrat who eventually concluded the party was headed in a different direction. My own switch happened after September 2001, when I entered the polling place for the mayoral primary and asked for a ballot that would permit me to vote for Herman Badillo.
The lady at the table leafed through her book and looked up at me. “You can’t vote for Herman Badillo,” she announced. “He’s a Republican.”
“What?” I exclaimed. “Herman Badillo’s a Republican?”
Badillo, after all, had sought the mayoral nomination on the Democratic line at least five times between 1969 and 1985. But by 2001 he’d come to realize that his worldview — sensible, common sense, principled, inclusive, pro-American, centrist — was no longer on the right edge of the Democratic Party. It was the view of the GOP. So he switched.
And so, as a result, did I.
Joining the GOP, though, is no guarantee of victory, as Badillo learned. He didn’t have Michael Bloomberg’s billions or the ability to fund the largest personally financed campaign in the history of the city, if not the universe. The better man lost that primary, and Bloomberg went on to win two elections on the Republican line.
Once in office, Bloomberg tried to hornswoggle the city into a charter reform that would have created “nonpartisan elections.” The New York Sun, which I edit, called the idea both “fishy and foul” — a scheme “to finagle the system in an effort to maneuver voters into electing different candidates than the ones they’ve been electing.”
Voters saw through the gambit and rejected nonpartisan elections overwhelmingly. They grasped that the idea might have attractions for a billionaire. Where, though, did it leave the rest of us New Yorkers, who need political parties to pool the kind of resources any candidate needs to win an election?
Bloomberg failed to appreciate the question. He spurned the opportunity his mayoralty and millions gave him to help build up the Republican Party on whose line he’d won his office. He indulged in his pet projects, sometimes helping Republicans, other times Democrats, and he formally ended up as an independent.
For the GOP itself, Bloomberg turned out to be a strategic zilch.
What kind of Republican Joe Hynes is going to be, it’s a question. At Borough Hall, he declared that he was “very grateful” for the chance to stand on the Republican and Conservative Party lines. He said he’d previously dismissed the idea of running as a Republican as “unrealistic.”
What changed his mind, he said, was that only 18 percent of Brooklyn’s registered Democrats had voted in the Sept. 10 primary and that the nomination had been given to his opponent, Kenneth Thompson, by “slightly more than 9 percent” of voters. If he stood on ceremony and remained out of the race, he said, “82 percent of Brooklyn voters would be blocked from the election.”
He was also energized by the Post scoop revealing the presence in the Thompson camp of Clarence Norman, Jr., the former Democratic boss in Brooklyn whom Hynes sent to jail for corruption. Norman fetched up running the get-out-the-vote effort for Thompson. So Hynes took the leap into the arms of the Republicans.
It’s not so clear, though, that Hynes is making a strategic shift. He noted the “diverse outpouring” of support he’d received as a candidate and declared, “This is not about party politics, it’s not about labels, it’s about public safety.”
That kind of talk sounds good, and Hynes certainly deserves his share of the credit for the drop in crime in Brooklyn during his years in office. But if the idea is to institutionalize this progress for years to come, the first job will need to be building a party in which not just people but principles endure.
It’s not a good sign for the GOP that Herman Badillo eventually went back to the Democrats.
Lipsky@nysun.com