The smoke has barely cleared from the roasting that the New York GOP got in last year's statewide elections, but already the next round of moths--and in some cases, the same ones--are darting toward the flame.
This originally started out as a comedic article, to point out the "Black Knights" of New York politics, people who simply don't know when they've had their careers in politics ended.
Such as Scott Noren, the dentist from Ithaca who thinks that the US Senate is his next career step, even though he couldn't manage enough signatures to get on the primary ballot, let alone win an election. If you intend to run for the United States Senate, have something on your resume that doesn't involve cavities. While the Senate's "debates" may remind one of a root canal, that's where the resemblance ends.
And Joe DioGuardi, who apparently isn't satisfied with only being beaten almost two to one by Senator Gillibrand last year, and apparently thinks that his chances will be better after already getting humiliated once, and in a Presidential election year in one of the deepest blue states in the country. Perhaps he wants to go back and lose the eight counties out of sixty two that he actually won.
But the more I dug into things, the more I realized that there's a few items which the public needs to be reminded of, lurking in the background of the third target I had lined up for this... another escapee from the bin of former elected officials, and who is now making noises about a return to politics and a run for the United States Senate from New York against Kirsten Gillibrand. None other than our very own least favorite former Lieutenant Governor, Betsy McCaughey.
You may recall that McCaughey was picked as a running mate by George Pataki in 1994 despite his never having met her, after she became a rising star in Republican circles for her loud (and impressively dishonest) opposition to Clinton-era healthcare reform, and because in the words of NY Times writer Joseph Fried, Pataki "saw in her a political neophyte liked by conservatives and attractive to many independent voters and women." Or as her 1995 Washington Post profile, "Her toothy good looks, body-conscious suits, Vassar BA and Columbia PhD reduced right-wingers to mush."
Presumably, McCaughey is now hoping that New Yorkers have forgotten that unpleasantness about 15 years back, when she was effectively fired from the Lieutenant Governor's job by the state's Republican brass, starting with a series of allegations leaked to the New York Post from then Senator D'Amato's and then Governor Pataki's inner circles. Accusations that McCaughey had mistreated her staffers, abused her state police security detail by using them as chauffeurs, and painting a picture of a power-hungry and ambitious climber interested in usurping the top of the ticket.
In other words, she's New York State's own private version of Sarah Palin.
More recently, McCaughey was flagged as one of the worst propagandists during the Obama healthcare reform push, having invented the "death panels" lie popularized by Sarah Palin, and describing HCR provisions as "euthanasia for the elderly." This and other outright lies got her called on the carpet by such non-partisan organizations as FactCheck.org, Politifact, and WNYC, as well as the watchdog group Media Matters for America (founded by one of McCaughey's fellow Manhattan Institute veterans, David Brock), but not one iota of it slowed her down.
In many ways more troubling, however, is a series op-eds that McCaughey wrote for The Wall Street Journal from 1989 to 1993--and here is where we begin to find nothing funny about the situation. All of the op-eds deal with matters of race: McCaughey attacking lawsuits aimed at the racial integration of schools in Connecticut and New Jersey, claiming that the courts didn't have the authority. (McCaughey, Elizabeth P. "Can courts order school integration across town lines?" The Wall Street Journal. October 28, 1992, p. A19)
Condemning New York City's plan to comply with the Voting Rights Act as "dangerous quotas." (McCaughey, Elizabeth. "Perverting the Voting Rights Act." The Wall Street Journal. October 25, 1989, p. 1. McCaughey, Elizabeth P. "New York City's dangerous quotas." The Wall Street Journal. March 6, 1991, p. A8.)
Advocating the selection of a white, rural, conservative jury for the retrial of black Democratic Congressman Harold Ford Sr. on the grounds that a black Memphis jury would be prejudiced, but that the white, Republican counties of western TN would be "color blind." (McCaughey, Elizabeth. "Like justice, jury selection should be colorblind." The Wall Street Journal. March 3, 1993, p. A15.)
And praising a Supreme Court decision that (very tenuously) upheld a suit filed by five white voters in North Carolina who alleged that their voting rights were being infringed because the redistricting plan designed to comply with the Voting Rights Act placed them in a black-majority congressional district--in the process claiming that the Voting Rights Act was used for "racial gerrymandering," that requiring minority-majority districts is immoral, and that white voters who end up in black majority districts are being deprived of their right to representation. (McCaughey, Elizabeth. "Court deals a blow to racial gerrymandering." The Wall Street Journal. June 30, 1993, p. A15. McCaughey, Elizabeth P. "Stopping racial gerrymandering." USA Today. June 29, 1993, p. 11A.)
In all these cases, McCaughey's tack is eerily similar and familiar: that there is really no such thing as racism, racial prejudice, or racial inequality in the bright, shining world of 1989 to 1993, and effectively that any complaint to the contrary is reverse racism, unwillingness to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps, and an assault on the rights of white people. Indeed, in 1993 while she was writing the latter two op-eds, she was also on a "scholarship" from the conservative think-tank The Manhattan Institute for the purpose of writing a book on race and the justice system, which was to be titled "Beyond Pluralism: Overcoming the Narcissism of Minor Differences."
The book never made print--a shame, since I'm sure we'd all like to know what insights into racial issues in the justice system we could glean from a Vassar and Columbia graduate who grew up in Connecticut, and has never worked in the legal system, and whether those "minor differences" include the attitudes of rural white Tennesseans to an accused black man. Or how she reconciles her opposition to state courts integrating state schools, but has no problem with the US Supreme Court telling the state of North Carolina how to run their legally correct redistricting plan. And perhaps we'd have gotten an answer whether she thinks that black people in white majority districts are having their right to representation violated, or if that only applies to white people represented by black folks.