ROCHESTER — When future historians assess the seeming self-contradiction of American politics circa 2011, they may recall it as the Parable of the Shirtless Republicans.
Scott Brown, the onetime nude model who last year stomped on the legacy of Teddy Kennedy (whom no one wanted to see unclothed), flipped a Massachusetts Senate seat to the Republicans by blasting away at Obama’s health care plan.
This Tuesday, there’s a special congressional election in western New York’s 26th District that may turn the other way, as a protest against Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposed Medicare plan.
The seat wouldn’t even have been in play if not for the February resignation of another shirtless Republican. Former up-and-comer Chris Lee became a down-and-goer after he e-mailed shirtless photos of himself to a young woman not his wife in the process of trolling Craigslist love.
Lee’s former district, which stretches out across the suburbs and farms between Rochester and Buffalo, is diehard Republican: He carried it with 74% of the vote in 2010. It’s the most conservative district in the state, and it went for John McCain over Barack Obama by six points. Registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by 28,000. Carl Paladino, who made his fortune in Buffalo, is hugely popular in the region and handily beat Andrew Cuomo around here last year.
Rain had lilac festival in full gloom but open for business today,” says the second-most-popular story in the Rochester News-Democrat on Wednesday. Number one? A motorcycle accident.
A slightly ashamed vending machine at the airport sells T-shirts reading, “New York, New York.” “It’s so dull up there the fireworks are in black and white,” Gotham comic Rob Taub tells me.
“This has always been a Republican district,” notes Bob McCarthy, political reporter for the Buffalo News. “This was Jack Kemp’s district.” Democrats didn’t dream they had a chance of snatching back the seat Lee vacated.
Then along came Paul Ryan.
Democratic candidate Kathy Hochul, the Erie County treasurer, has been blasting away at Republican nominee and state Asssemblywoman Jane Corwin, tying Corwin to Ryan’s plan to cut costs by essentially privatizing Medicare for the next generation. Corwin has been firing back that Hochul is an upstate version of Nancy Pelosi.
THE SPOILER: Former Democrat Jack Davis is running on the Tea Party line, even though they and Republicans disown him. (nypost/ap)
THE REPUBLICAN: Jane Corwin is keeping a low profile with the media, and spending heavily on television ads. (shannon decelle)
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So, how’s this race now? “It’s a beauty,” McCarthy says. “It’s a real live one.”
And a quirky one. The Chief Quirkmeister is a Republican turned Democrat turned whatever, 78-year-old manufacturer Jack Davis, who owns a company that makes heating elements and is worth over $18 million. He is spending some $3 million on ads, declining to raise any money from outsiders.
He ran for office three times as a Democrat, then this year tried to get on the ballot as a Republican, failed and secured the Tea Party line, though national conservatives have denounced him as a TINO — Tea Partier in Name Only.
“Jack Davis is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” says Amy Kremer, chairman of the Tea Party Express. She has been campaigning for the Republican Corwin. “He’s no more a Tea Party candidate than Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama,” Kremer says. “My guess is he’d be doing it for his own self-serving purposes or he hopes to split the votes so the Democrats win.”
Davis denies this — saying he doesn’t like the Democrats or the Republicans. All he cares about is trade. Ask him about unemployment, and he’ll say we need to slap tariffs on China. Ask him about the deficit, and he’ll say we could grow our way out of it if only we could stop cheap Chinese goods. Not only are the Chinese responsible for Buffalo losing jobs, they’re probably responsible for the Buffalo Bills losing Super Bowls.
The trade message may not make much sense to economists but it sounds good here, on the carcass of American manufacturing. Davis is a pocket Perot, a chuckling industrialist who doesn’t give a hockey puck about what people think. When a Republican operative who works for Corwin trailed Davis around with a camera asking rude questions, Davis apparently reached out and took a little slap at either the camera or the staffer (the video isn’t clear). The guy holding the camera squealed and generally took a dive worthy of Italian World Cup soccer play. If anything, the incident probably burnished Davis’ credentials as the Man Who Takes No Guff.
Davis is in third place and has little chance to win, yet his polling has helped put Democrat Hochul a hair above the presumptive favorite, GOP Corwin. Turnout is impossible to guess in a special election, but Hochul may pull off an upset.
The Democrat has all of her chips on one idea. She argues that Corwin, who broadly supports Ryan’s plan to reform entitlements and cut federal spending, is going to take away Granny’s Medicare, replace it with a tin cup and send her out to beg for spare change on the street.
About 22% of the registered voters are seniors, and seniors may be easier to coax out to the polls on a Tuesday in May. Nearly 62% of the voters are 45 or older.
If Corwin can’t win this race, in a steadfastly Republican area that is 93% white, a lot of other Republican congressmen are going to suddenly dump Ryanism faster than Maria dumped Arnold.
“Jane Corwin said she would vote for the 2012 Republican budget that would essentially end Medicare,” says a Hochul television commercial widely credited with tightening the race.
Corwin, who looks like Christie Brinkley’s slightly more studious little sister, swept into the debate in Rochester Wednesday in a perfect untouchable nimbus of blond hair and chic clothes. Hochul is only a few inches shorter, yet she looked like a badger taking on a giraffe.
Ryan wants to privatize Medicare by giving seniors a government-paid private insurer of their choice. Hochul, in debate, calls this a voucher system.
“There is no voucher involved,” Corwin replies, explaining that the government will pay your insurer directly. Ryan’s plan wouldn’t apply to anyone who is now 55 or over, who would stay under the current plan. Grandpa is grandfathered in.
Whatever. It’s a big change. Maybe a radical change. The voters of the NY-26 don’t do radical. And they, like the district, are sagging and rusting.
Corwin’s platform is all about freeing business to stimulate job growth. This puts the Democrat slightly on defense in this pro-business region, so Hochul says she’d support tax hikes only for individuals (and small businesses) earning over $500,000.
“I will also ensure that the wealthiest people in this country — the millionaires and the billionaires — pay their fair share,” says Hochul. “I will fight to the grave any program that tries to decimate Medicare.”
Hochul isn’t polished. She smiles awkwardly. She has a Rust Belt accent. Her speech comes out as a string of barely connected talking points. But when she says, “I’m fighting,” it works. The Democrat is resourceful, personable, relatable.
Corwin repeatedly calls her rival a “career politician,” but it’s Corwin’s airs that are problematic in this varicose-vein district. Corwin is rich. Her net worth is north of $58 million, according to filing statements, thanks to her parents’ company, the Talking Phonebook, a gizmo for the visually impaired that was sold to Hearst for an estimated $400 million in 2004. Corwin started delivering phone books for the business as a kid and eventually served on the board. She’d be among the 10 wealthiest lawmakers in DC if elected. And she’s spending millions of her own on the campaign, mostly on negative television ads, millions that Hochul doesn’t have. The Democrat reported assets of between $780,000 and $1.6 million.
Corwin notes in the debate that Obama’s own panel of experts concluded that Medicare is going to be insolvent by 2024. “If we continue to kick the can down the road,” she says, “we are never going to come up with a solution.”
True, but as Hochul hammers away at Medicare in answer to almost every question, Corwin fails to get across the message that the current plan is not an option. At the fork in the road, one choice leads to more privatization and the other leads to price controls, rationing, patients getting dropped by doctors. Yet the Democratic path is the one of least resistance. Who wants to admit they’re in denial?
In debate, Corwin says, “I keep hearing how my opponent wants to cut spending, but every step of the way, but not here, but not here, but not here.”
The morning after the debate, Hochul goes begging for votes at a frail little cholesterol dealership in the town of Dansville. At 10:30 in the morning, the place is full of seniors. Told by a Democrat fan of Hochul’s that Ryan’s plan would do in Medicare, 68-year-old teacher Al Jameson says, “It does? Then they oughta hang him from the nearest tree.”
Jameson is right-leaning but sounds a lot like Jack Davis: “We’re slowly being deindustrialized. Someone’s gotta put a stop to that. We can’t all be retail clerks selling things that were made in China.” Of Hochul, he says, “She’s strong on the Medicare issue. But the country’s going broke, though.”
Scott Brown’s voters and Hochul’s aren’t sending opposite messages. They’re in agreement: Everybody’s afraid of losing what they’ve got. ObamaCare made voters worry that it would make health care worse, and Ryan makes them think Medicare is going away. The candidate who can bring the scares most effectively is going to be rewarded with close attention.
Corwin’s blitz of TV commercials has been tying Hochul, literally, to Pelosi. One spot shows Hochul as a marionette dancing on strings manipulated by Pelosi, whose approval rating in the area is 25%. Hochul unwisely attended a fundraiser with Pelosi this month in New York City and then went on TV to say, “Nancy Pelosi has done a great job for this country, but I also want people to know I’m a very independent Democrat.”
The first half of that statement is considerably more credible than the second. By “very independent,” Hochul means that as Erie Country treasurer she opposed two particularly daft proposals by Democratic governors — Eliot Spitzer’s idea of giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants and David Paterson’s revenue grab that would have required drivers to pay for new license plates. Opposing such nonstarters at no cost whatsoever to herself does not exactly qualify Hochul for “Profiles in Courage.”
On the campaign trail, she spits out a line about how “spending in Washington is out of control,” but when pressed for specifics she talks about trimming defense and ending foreign aid to Pakistan. Under the most generous scenario, Pakistan would get $1.5 billion a year in US aid — one one-thousandth of the annual budget deficit. If it helps keep Pakistan from turning into Talibanistan, it’s probably money well spent.
Stumping for Corwin, House Speaker John Boehner visited NY-26 to say, “There is only one conservative candidate in this election.” But what if it’s Hochul? On Medicare, it’s the Democrat who is digging in her heels, ignoring calls for reform and defending the status quo.
Corwin may be wiser about what’s happening to Medicare — but no politician is ever rewarded for getting ahead of the voters.