Tuesday, September 10, 2013

5 Things to Watch in Rockland's County Executive Primary

The polls close in less than an hour in the Democratic primary for Rockland County Executive.  Two Democrats are on the ballot- David Fried, a former county legislator and Spring Valley justice and Ilan Schoenberger, a current county legislator.  Both have been around politics their entire adult lives (Fried is younger, though) and have virtually identical stands on the issues-- to the extent they have taken any.  A pitched November battle with the Republican standard bearer, Ed Day, awaits and what passed in a low interest primary won't hold up under the General Election glare.

But, for now, here are 5 things to watch in tonight's results:

1. Results in the Town of Clarkstown- Clarkstown voters are fickle between the parties and this will be a key battleground in November.  Day represents a Democratic heavy district here, despite running and winning as a Republican.  A decisive win by either Schoenberger or Fried in Clarkstown would demonstrate an ability to effectively compete in Day's base in November.  If there is very low Clarkstown turnout today, Democrats have a rough ride in the next two months and will need to spend money fast to close that enthusiasm gap among the party's most loyal voters.

2. Hudson v. Hasidim- Fried expanded his traditional base among Spring Valley's black and Haitian-American voters to include the very liberal, activist riverfront communities (Nyack, Piermont, et. al.).  Fried's vote there is being driven, in part, as a reaction to the strong support Schoenberger has in the Orthodox community.  Facebook postings by riverfront activists have protrayed Fried, who always enjoyed support from the Hasidim, as someone who will stop the growth of the Hasidic community.  The Hasidim feel betrayed by Fried's embrace of many of their political adversaries and have not been shy about saying so.  It is a dangerous fault line between Democratic constituencies that will need each other in November.  Strong turnout among both constituencies with lopsided results would indicate a polarized party.  If Schoenberger prevails, he will need to persuade progressive activists that they will have a voice in his administration or risk losing them to the Day campaign.

3. Local primaries- The County Executive race has been shaped in part by other primaries in Rockland municipalities.  The Spring Valley circus-like mayoral campaign could lead to a victory by the incumbent, Noramie Jasmin, who is under federal indictment.  There was a lot of joint promotion of Fried and Jasmin in Spring Valley and that may alienate general election voters countywide.   The sharp personal and ethnic divisions between the mayoral candidates and within the Haitian-American community could come into sharp relief tonight; a unified vote from Democrat-rich Spring Valley is essential for the Democratic candidate this November. The tug-of-war for control of the Democratic Party in Haverstraw is also a factor.  The establishment Haverstraw Democrats did not include an endorsed candidate for County Executive on their literature, widely perceived as a slap at Schoenberger.  If Fried wins Haverstraw, look also for a stronger than expected showing by Rita Louie, who is opposing the incumbent Supervisor Howard Phillips and is endorsed by the Sierra Club.  Her key issue is fighting a proposed desalination plant on the Hudson.  A strong Louie vote will also be noticed by the Cuomo Administration, which is reviewing the project.  A Louie victory would doom the proposal.

4. Day's Write-Ins- Preserve Ramapo, an anti-development group that embraces anti-Hasidic rhetoric, launched a write in campaign for Ed Day in the Democratic Primary, declaring that it would not accept Fried as the "lesser of two evils" from the Ramapo Democratic Party. But Day's campaign has been quiet- smart, because they do not want to become invested in a difficult and unpredictable effort like a write-in.  Lots of write-ins, though, and Day can claim he will benefit from a wave Democratic discontent.  If the pickings are slim, he can deny that any real effort was expended.  But Preserve Ramapo has offered a tell of its strength- always a risky proposition in a business where perception is often reality.

5. Open Bar and Music- Neither candidate is having a party tonight aside from supporters, soda and chips at their respective headquarters.  That means one thing-- both campaign have blown through a lot of cash.  A dry primary night tap usually means a 7 a.m. start to general election fundraising calls the next morning.  The victor at 9pm will confront Ed Day's $250,000 warchest and months of repressed Republican energy.

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Salvation in Spring Valley

I.
“It is a story of corruption, mismanagement and abuse of power,” Daniel Friedman said as his voice aspired to a preacher’s cadence and elicited some amens from the mostly black crowd at a candidate’s forum in Spring Valley’s youth center.  Lamenting the sins of the incumbent (and indicted) mayor he is running against, he vowed to revitalize the downtown of this multi-ethnic community.  “Papa John’s is not economic development,” he roared.

Friedman, in the fourth year of a tenure on the Town of Ramapo Council he began at age 23, decided to try to exchange his current legislative role for an executive one a year ago.  Before the mayor he planned to challenge was arrested in an FBI-led corruption sting.  Before the building where he governs, Ramapo Town Hall, was raided by the feds.  Before the village’s already swirling cauldron of ethnic strife, real estate interests and financial stress bubbled over onto the front pages of New York City newspapers with tales of wiretaps, clandestine meetings and undercover agents.

His polished and well-honed attacks on village officials for taking large pay raises while taxes climbed reflects a smart, disciplined campaign and he has relentlessly pursued impressed voters with the zeal unique to younger candidates.  Friedman makes the only credible claim to outsider status on the village government’s problems. But his polish can also seem out of place amid the village’s traditional street theater politics. Friedman recently moved to Spring Valley from his home right outside the village borders.

II.
Papa John’s could be as good at it gets for the village.  The store is one of the bright spots on Main Street- because of its loud lights, not because it attracts many customers.  While ethnic food stores in rundown buildings can still brim with regulars, a dozen newly built stores are vacant and have been since they were constructed.
As Democrats ponder their choices in Tuesday’s primary election, the signs of the mayoral aspirants clog the commercial artery.  Cynical and disinterested residents have heard political promises of downtown renewal before.  And the candidates know it.

Many say the mayoralty of this community has become a tarnished medal, even for those like Village Trustee Demeza Delhomme who have come close to this prize before.  Addressing the same crowd as Friedman, Delhomme, a Haitian-American, said he was unsurprised by either the scandals that have brought federal corruption indictments against fellow Haitian-Americans Mayor Noramie Jasmin and her Deputy Mayor or what he sees as deterioration in the municipality’s urban center.  “I told you what was going to happen and it did,” Delhomme said.
Nearly four years ago, after Jasmin defeated him, Delhomme had pledged to work closely with the new Mayor, who swelled the community's pride as its first Haitian-American mayor.  But he soured as he felt Jasmin’s mayoralty was growing increasingly imperial and controlling.  The always independent Delhomme wanted none of it.

Delhomme is a street fighter.  Shopkeepers, friends and enemies call him, Madonna-like, by his first name.  His twitter account is @TeamDemeza. Delhomme has an easy intimacy with voters, the gathered booty of a decade and a half of elections seeking both Haitian empowerment and his own seat at the table. 
In 2003, Delhomme, a revered figure for many Haitian youth, won a hot Democratic primary in a county legislative district drawn specifically to elect a Haitian and give that underrepresented community a voice in Rockland's county government.  But his bid faltered in the November election when his rival, David Fried (now a candidate for County Executive) successfully accused him of making anti-Semitic remarks on Delhomme’s cable show.  Delhomme’s remarks were disturbing and widely condemned at the time, but he has been a relatively consistent vote for the religious needs of the village’s Hasidim as a trustee. 

And while his remarks are history to many, Delhomme has the memory of an elephant.  He is enthusiastically supporting Fried’s opponent this year—who coincidentally has strong Hasidic support.
By all accounts, the prize in this election should be Demeza’s.  Friedman and Joseph Gross, the two candidates in the race from the large and growing Orthodox Jewish population, were stunned by a pre-Rosh Hashanah rabbinical pronouncement barring community members from electing an Orthodox mayor.  The edict rendered by Rabbi Israel Hager, leader of the large and powerful Vitznitz sect, could turn out the primary night lights for both Friedman and Gross, an incumbent village trustee and Hasid.

III.
It was a unique Spring Valley moment as Gross made his case to the room filled with NAACP activists, political leaders and random campaign volunteers.  This was not a friendly crowd, riveted as the town is with tensions between the Hasidim and racial minorities.  But Gross was determined to cross the divide, proudly appearing in his distinctive black frock.
Asked about building code violations in the village, he promised not tougher enforcement but more affordable housing—the key concern of his constituency, young Hasidic families struggling with village property tax bills that are among the highest in the state.  The crowd, unimpressed, also provided no applause when he said he wanted “the best public schools.”  The tension was palpable—and unfair.

Gross has struggled for his voice with minority audiences but has pursued support from all quarters of the village with cheer, enthusiasm and determination.  At a rainy Haitian Flag Day parade, he bounded from one side of the street to the other, his distinctive strawberry blond side curls swinging, as he handed out t-shirts with his name and the Haitian flag.  When an activist complained that the colors on the flag were wrong (the dark navy should have been a brighter blue), Gross shrugged.  “I’m here to celebrate with the entire community,” he said.
Gross’s candidacy was on life support for a while after Friedman knocked him off the election ballot with a legal challenge to the trustee’s nominating petition.  He clawed his way back on with a court case of his own and is campaigning in the village’s many study halls and synagogues with unabashed verve, handing out High Holiday prayer books with his name on it.

Fighting with Friedman, also an Orthodox Jew, for that community’s support may leave both candidates as runners up.  Orthodox voters, even if voting in lockstep, do not (yet) have sufficient voting power in a primary to elect one of their own without other coalition partners.  And, as Rabbi Hager’s pronouncement revealed, may not want to even if they could.

Yet the village’s politically dominant Haitian-Americans—currently holding 4 of 5 seats on the village’s governing board- also find their power receding as an influx of Latinos joins the Orthodox as the fastest growing populations in town.

IV.
Jasmin’s ascendant political star plummeted with her arrest in April on federal corruption charges, but she has rallied her base of Haitian-American women as the election draws near.  Fashionable, smart and quick on her feet, Jasmin has used all the tools of her mayoralty to unify the Haitian vote behind her and change the headline on her political obituary before the ink dries.
It is often difficult to tell whether Jasmin is running for re-election as mayor or matriarch.  She refers to village taxpayers as “my people,” dispenses advice to both longtime associates and newcomers on health habits and dress and exudes the public warmth that marks the most successful retail politicians.  She quickly climbed the political ladders in the often patriarchal Haitian community, with major assists from her mentor, former village mayor George Darden.  Her mayoral victory was secured by the overwhelming support of ultra-Orthodox leaders—few of whom will publicly back her today. 

If the indictment lowered Jasmin’s volume it did not change her tenor.  Where opponents see empty stores, she sees the seeds of the community’s renewal.  Championing Darden’s urban renewal program, she has cut the ribbons on multiple housing projects and welcomed a glistening new Walgreen’s.  But black, Haitian and Latino groups claim the housing is skewed toward the Hasidim.  And numerous zone changes have certainly fostered that community’s growth.
Jasmin swats back talk of dissolving the high tax municipality with ringing defenses of the services it provides.  And she understands the levers of power.  She tacked a $300,000 road improvement bond on to a village board agenda, cornering her electoral rivals and fellow board members Gross and Delhomme.  The Mayor pushed for an immediate vote; her colleagues understandably balked.  The next day, Jasmin took to the radio, blasting her opponents for jeopardizing the village’s infrastructure.

Figuring Spring Valley’s electoral math can require an advanced degree.  With two Orthodox candidates and three Haitian candidates (Vilair Fonvil, a frequent office seeker who would have easily won a seat on the Board of Trustees is also making another long shot bid for Mayor), victory depends on voting patterns in individual churches and religious sects.  But the corruption scandals seems to have depressed, rather than motivated, the electorate.  Outside the echo chamber of political activists, even reliable Democratic voters express a resigned skepticism about the ability of any of the candidates to lead effectively.

Lost in most of the electoral shuffle are the concerns of the village’s African-American voters  Longtime owners of smaller homes on the village’s “hill” section and residents of the Gesner Gardens public housing complex—the base of Spring Valley’s once vaunted Democratic Party machine—find their concerns shunted aside in the ethnic fracas.  Jasmin has retained support from some of those old line Democrats who are part of her administration.  Sherry Scott, Jasmin’s appointed Village Clerk, and Patricia Caldwell, the former Democratic Party leader who chairs the community’s Zoning Board, are among the more prominent African-American leaders in Jasmin’s corner.

V.
Late last month, the Board of Trustees voted to accept funds left in the bank account of the Tiger’s Den, a defunct recreation program for village teens (the Tiger is the mascot of Spring Valley High School).  Few in the audience that night were even familiar with the program, once prominently housed on Main Street near the long-closed Village Tea Room restaurant.

White and black teens gathered at the Tiger’s Den, often with local teachers and recreation program leaders.  When it opened, it marked a transition of its own for village’s Main Street, where teens formerly gathered at the soda fountain.  It also tracked the emergence of a reform, multiracial movement within Spring Valley’s Democratic Party.  Village leaders were toppled in primary challenges lead by a secular Jewish housewife named Rhoda Friedman, who turned a random stint as an election day poll watcher into a 30 year career as Spring Valley’s chief powerbroker and one of Rockland County’s most influential political leaders.

Indeed, it was Friedman, wise to the increase in Spring Valley’s Haitian population, who first recruited Jasmin.  Friedman was looking to stop the rise of Demeza, who was gaining a street following for challenging the exclusion of Haitians from positions of local political power.  It worked.
Now, Jasmin is in the fight of her political life, the local Democratic party is non-functional and residents who once filled village board rooms with complaints and criticism now burst out of overflowing churches and synagogues.  More people attend Sunday services on one stretch of Main Street than will vote in Tuesday’s primary and today’s village residents are more comfortable in the pews than at the polls.
No one in Spring Valley is seeking salvation through politics anymore, except maybe the candidates themselves.