A reader in northern Brooklyn reported receiving a polling call a few hours ago exclusively testing positives and negatives about former Congresswoman and DA Elizabeth Holtzman for Attorney General.
It’s the first time many insiders were aware of Holtzman’s name being seriously mentioned for AG, a post that will vacated by unannounced gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo.
The poller tested the known likely candidates in the Democratic field – Sen. Eric Schneiderman, Eric Dinallo, Denise O’Donnell, Kathleen Rice and Sean Coffey – the reader reports.
But then the poller asked about Holtzman, and posed a question early that basically asked, “Do you think her time has passed?”
It would seem like an important point, given that Holtzman, 68, last ran for office in 1993 – in a brutal runoff with Alan Hevesi to hold her post as City Comptroller, which she lost – and has since worked as a lobbyist, always a complication for a candidate.
The next questions were all about potential positive Holtzman messages – that would clean up Alabny, stands up to big business, fights for New Yorkers, wrote an anti-child pornography law. One message tested that she had publiy defended Bill Clinton against impeachment, while another said she fought for civil rights in the 1960s.
But the most interesting questions were the negative messages, which raised the notion of Holtzman as victim of a now-proven-corrupt Alan Hevesi.
The poller asked about Holtzman’s conflicts-of-interest charge in which, as comptroller, she recommended Fleet Securities for a municipal bond sale – while owing Fleet hundreds of thousands of dollars on a loan she’d taken out in 1992 for her U.S. Senate race.
The poller asked about the scandal, but then asked what the potential voter thought about the fact that it was Hevesi who brought the conflicts-of-interest charge to the public’s attention in the 1993 comptroller’s race.
Holtzman was a four-term congresswoman before she became Brooklyn DA – the first woman to do so – in 1981. She served two terms there before winning for comptroller.