Kinderhook, New York looks like a classic American village, the home of Martin Van Buren and also the home of our new Republican congressman, John Faso. We have a pretty little town square, a great library, a couple of nice restaurants and a host of realtors catering to second home buyers from the big city. We also have a whole bunch of people who are outraged by Donald Trump’s serial abuses of power over the past ten days.
Some background on NY-19. The district was crafted by our Republican legislature to carefully exclude any cities and skirts Albany, Troy, Schenectady and Poughkeepsie to create a pretty much all-white district. Even so, Democrats Kirsten Gillibrand and Patrick Murphy have been elected here when this was a slightly different NY-20 so you could say NY-19 is a swing district. John Faso was not a sure thing to fill retiring Republican Chris Gibson’s seat and was up against one of the more dynamic young Democrats, Zephyr Teachout.
Zephyr is a respected constitutional lawyer, an ardent Bernie supporter, a strong primary contender against Democratic governor Cuomo in 2014 and carried our county. And right now, Zephyr is a leading attorney in the January 24 lawsuit based on his violation of the emoluments clause. So you would think she had a decent chance to win the district – until the vulture capitalist Robert Singer and hedge fund boss Richard Mercer began to pour money into the faltering campaign of John Faso, best known as a veteran lobbyist in Albany. (Mercer’s daughter Rebekah is a major, if discreet, presence inside the Trump White House.)
The Mercer and Singer-funded effort pulled out all stops and launched, believe it or not, a classic Red-baiting attack on Zephyr. Among the nonsensical charges cluttering the air waves was that she was endorsed by a virtually unread communist newspaper from the dreaded New York City a hundred miles to our south. Oh, and she was gonna take your guns away. And she was a PROFESSOR at Fordham law!! (If you have the stomach, see Faso’s own website proclaiming Commies Backing Teachout” )
In one of the great moments of the campaign, Zephyr challenged Faso’s billionaire backers Singer and Mercer to a debate. Makes sense if they’re the ones paying for Faso, right? (For some reason they declined) In November, none of this mattered, probably because so much of NY-19 extends into far less prosperous rural areas than Kinderhook where the Red- and Professor-bashing had credibility – places like the faded factory town where I grew up seventy miles west of here.
With this kind of backing, you would think Faso is all set to be a reliable rubber stamp for Trump’s dismantling of democracy and that certainly seemed to be his intention. But people around here are not going to make it easy for him, and marched a few days ago to his very nice Victorian home a block form the village square. Video below:
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Mr. Faso doesn’t sound like one conversation with his neighbors is going to persuade him to abandon his billionaire buddies, so folks living in the district may want to keep him updated on their views. Thus far, my experience has been that the people answering his phones aren't able to really explain where he stands on anything but I promised to call them back.
Washington office 202-225-5614
Kinderhook office 518-610-8133
Delhi office 607-746-9537
Kingston office 845-514-2322