MESSAGE
| DATE | 2005-09-24 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] The New New York
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September 18, 2005
Peach-Fuzz Pols
By ALEX MINDLIN
Correction Appended
IN New York, 2001 was a year to remember for the young and politically
savvy. That year, newly imposed term limits flushed out most of the City
Council, and recent changes in the city's campaign-finance regulations
meant that candidates could receive windfalls in public financing.
In the years since, young people have become more visible than ever in
city politics, whether forced by term limits to seek higher office
(Gifford Miller, 35, is a prime example), or encouraged by the vacuum of
power to seek election. The tide is so powerful that the staff employees
of many former council members have run for council seats themselves,
among them Jessica Lappin, 30, and Gur Tsabar, 32, both former aides to
Mr. Miller. (In Tuesday's primary, she won, he lost.)
Running for office at a young age is never easy. Candidates are
typically struggling to establish themselves in a career, and invariably
face the easy contempt of rivals who run campaign ads calling them
"inexperienced" - code for "too young." Nevertheless, making it through
these trials seems to be an early qualifier for high office; a 2003
study by the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers found that
roughly half of all governors, United States senators and members of
Congress held their first electoral office before the age of 35.
The study also found that politicians under 35 are overwhelmingly male
(as are elected leaders in general), that 81 percent of them are white
and that 29 percent have relatives who are or were in politics.
Theodore Roosevelt, elected to the State Assembly at 24, is perhaps the
most famous of New York's early bloomers, but recent history provides
more examples of prominent politicians who started young: Senator
Charles E. Schumer won an Assembly seat at 23, and Representatives
Anthony D. Weiner and Vito J. Fossella were first elected to the City
Council at 27 and 29, respectively.
And there is a generation of even younger political mavens. For such
people, some of whom juggle two or even three volunteer positions, the
campaign season is like catnip. They spent this summer cheerfully
handing out leaflets on street corners, and toiling in musty campaign
offices amid cups of stale coffee. Here are three of these youngest of
young Turks.
ROBERT REILLY
The sort of young man who refers to Congressman Fossella as Vito.
IF the tiny world of Staten Island Republican politics were a family,
Robert Reilly would be its adored baby. In 1993, while his mother
volunteered for Rudolph W. Giuliani's second mayoral campaign, Robert,
then 9 years old, used to sit in a corner of Richmond County Republican
Club headquarters, coloring and playing with Ninja Turtles. Sometimes,
he recalled, staffers asked him to carry envelopes or do other such
tasks - "They'd give me little jobs that made me feel important."
Later, when an uncle was gravely ill, Mr. Reilly's parents used to stop
at headquarters on their way to the hospital, leaving their son in the
care of powerful island political figures like Vito Fossella, now a
congressman. "Everyone in politics watched out for me," Mr. Reilly said.
According to his mother, Mary Reilly, it was this early and intense
proximity to campaigns, rather than her admitted love of politics, that
sparked Mr. Reilly's political interest. "Naturally I encouraged him,"
she said, "but I never felt that I influenced him. I exposed him to
politics, just as my husband and I exposed him to baseball." (Both
influences took; Mr. Reilly is now a diehard Yankees fan.)
As he got older, Mr. Reilly's family grew more involved with the
Republican Party. His mother became first vice chairwoman of the
Republican county committee. His father, who owns a billing agency for
hospitals, began letting candidates use his automatic dialer to make
campaign calls; his bayside office, with its multiple phone lines, has
served as a call-in point for Republican poll watchers since 2000.
The son, 22 and broad-shouldered, with a dark crew cut and thick
eyebrows, is today the very model of a connected young Staten Island
Republican, down to the way he refers to Mr. Fossella familiarly as
Vito. Mr. Reilly has volunteered for so many campaigns that he
distinguishes between those with which he was heavily involved (nine)
and those in which he merely lent a hand (too many to count). He
attended both of George W. Bush's presidential inaugurations, and spent
so much time at last year's Republican National Convention that he
stayed in a Manhattan hotel all week, to be closer to the action at
Madison Square Garden.
Despite his passion for the minutiae of government, Mr. Reilly sometimes
seems embarrassed about talking politics in front of people who don't
quite share his passion for delegate counts and judgeship contests. This
was apparent one recent afternoon when he and two friends were having
lunch in a diner in Grasmere, the sort of place where the three had
eaten so often that none of them needed to look at the menu.
"He keeps it at home with his mom," Danielle Fischetti, who had
accompanied him to the last inauguration, said of Mr. Reilly's passion
for politics. "When he's hanging out with us, he's not thinking about
work."
Mr. Reilly would agree with this assessment. If he's with his friends,
he said, it's all about the Yankees "and what girl's cute."
But he doesn't need much encouragement to climb aboard a political
hobbyhorse. When Mr. Reilly describes his personal politics, he cites
issues high on every islander's list of irritants: overdevelopment, too
few express buses off the island, high tolls on the Verrazano-Narrows
Bridge. "This is a bridge that they told us wouldn't be charged for once
it was paid for," he said. "Politicians should have stepped in when the
M.T.A. raised the tolls again."
AFTER lunch, sitting behind a desk at his father's company, where he is
rotating through the departments to learn the ropes, Mr. Reilly was even
more voluble. Of police salaries, he said: "Our cops get, what, 28? And
we're the biggest city in the world." As for term limits: "You lost a
lot of institutional memory. There were people who didn't know where the
bathroom was."
For Mr. Reilly, there is a particular pungency to any discussion of term
limits. As a senior at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, from which he
graduated this year with a degree in political science, he wrote his
thesis on the subject of the city's limits ("New York City Term Limits
and Their Effects on Policy-Making in the City Council"). While doing
research, he figured out that up to 39 of the 51 council members might
have to give up their seats in 2009, leaving him an opening to run (he
will be 26).
Among other things, such a move would please his mother. "My mother
loves politics," he said, "and I'd probably want her to be my campaign
manager." Meanwhile, though, he has had trouble finding offices to seek.
"There's not a lot of seats in Staten Island to run for," he admitted.
In 2000 he decided to pursue a seat on his community school board, and
had collected 500 signatures when the State Legislature postponed the
election and eventually dissolved the board. "I was kind of
disappointed," he confessed. "When you're going for yourself, it's
different. You're more of a maniac."
SOPHIE WASKOW
The sort of child who played 'Office' rather than 'House' in the family
playroom.
HER shoulder-length red curls bouncing behind her, Sophie Waskow hurried
down a long corridor in the Woolworth Building and entered an office out
of which Councilwoman Eva S. Moskowitz was running her campaign for
borough president. (Ms. Moskowitz ended up coming in second, to
Assemblyman Scott Stringer.) She was greeted by a storm of cooing from
six young women, all of them campaign staffers, and none of whom had
seen Ms. Waskow since she left for vacation a month earlier. "Your skirt
looks great," one said. Another added: "Your hair looks shorter. Did you
cut it?" A third woman chimed in with gentle irony, "Girls' club!"
Despite this younger-sister treatment, Ms. Waskow, 20, had probably been
associated with Ms. Moskowitz longer than anyone in the room. Since age
15, she has spent nearly all her summers working for the councilwoman.
Over the summer of 2004, she served as Ms. Moskowitz's constituent
liaison, in charge of wrangling with balky agencies and consoling
distraught East Siders. And this past summer, she coordinated the
recruitment and deployment of 75 volunteers for Ms. Moskowitz's
petitioning process, a job that regularly involved 12- and 14-hour
workdays.
The other day, over coffee in an Upper West Side diner, Ms. Waskow
described with relish the trials of her job as liaison: "The
constituents call in and say, 'There's a pothole.' I would say, 'O.K.,
where's the pothole?' And then you send letters to the appropriate
agencies. And then you send the constituent a letter saying, 'Dear Bob,
here's what I've done.' And then, a couple of weeks later, you follow up
with the agency and they've lost the letter, and you fax it over."
Ms. Waskow, the daughter of a technology consultant and a high school
librarian and currently a junior at Brown, was the sort of child who
played "Office" rather than "House" in the family's basement playroom,
and she adapted easily to her first volunteer position with Ms.
Moskowitz, at 15, because, as she put it, "I like filing."
At Brearley, the rigorous Upper East Side girls' school that Ms. Waskow
attended through high school, she was class president in both her junior
and senior years, and even when on the sidelines found it hard to tamp
down her natural desire to organize. When the senior class was planning
its traditional end-of-year pranks, for example - in this case, making a
mountain of student desks and roping off a cafeteria table with caution
tape - Ms. Waskow could not resist the urge to coordinate events, even
though she was out with a bad cold. "I was really ill," she said, "so I
was trying to do things from home."
Ms. Waskow met Ms. Moskowitz in 2000, when Ms. Waskow was in the ninth
grade, and the newly elected councilwoman spoke at her school. Ms.
Waskow volunteered that summer and was invited back for the next, when
she helped organize a "Dear Neighbor" letter-writing campaign for Ms.
Moskowitz's re-election bid, in which 500-person mailings were sent from
supporters to their neighbors.
SHE'S extraordinarily responsible, and she was so in ninth grade," Ms.
Moskowitz recalled. "I keep thinking that she's graduated college. When
she was in ninth grade, I thought, 'Finally, she's graduated; I can hire
her full time.' And she had to remind me, 'No, I have to go to 10th
grade.' "
Typically, having worked at Ms. Moskowitz's office one summer, Ms.
Waskow kept returning. "I don't really like to do things and then stop
them," she said. "I've done ballet since I was 3."
It is with a certain detached amusement that Ms. Waskow views the
budding political operatives, mostly male, who often intern with council
members, help with campaigns, and view government jobs as political
steppingstones: "I haven't met many girls who want to run for president,
and I have met guys who want to run for senator or president," she said.
"It's not a bad thing that they know what they want to do, but I'd hope
they understand what it is to be behind the scenes before they say, 'I
want to run.' "
And her political goals? "I don't know what I want to do this weekend,"
she said, "let alone in the year 2009."
GEORGE ESPINAL
He has called 311 so often (300 times, he estimates) that some operators
greet him by name.
ON summer evenings in lower Inwood, Dyckman Street is thick with cars
headed for the dark, tree-lined stretch near the marina. There, teenage
drivers fling open their car doors and park half the night, merengue
blaring from their speakers.
George Espinal, an 18-year-old Dominican-Puerto Rican with expressive
brown eyes and a shy smile, could easily have passed for one of those
drivers. He had the requisite goatee, the oversized T-shirt, the baggy
jeans and the droopy little backpack. But as he marched down the street,
he was clearly fuming.
"These cars are just like live entertainment systems," Mr. Espinal said.
In the newsletter he publishes, put out by his block association,
Friends of Payson Avenue, Mr. Espinal has printed pictures of the
interiors of the cars; one of them, a van, was lined with huge speakers,
transforming it into a moving boom box.
Noise is without question a serious problem in upper Manhattan; the rate
of calls to the city's 311 number, at 66 per 10,000 people annually, is
the city's highest. But something more than a bunch of noisy teenagers
lay behind Mr. Espinal's irritation. Heading down Dyckman Street, he
ticked off a list of small crimes that, in his opinion, worsen the
quality of life in his corner of Inwood. There are the men smoking
marijuana on the sidewalk, unmolested by the police. ("God forbid a kid
runs into them. What kind of example are they setting?") There are the
illegal sidewalk barbecues and garbage cans full of household trash.
("Think about if everyone did that.")
That phrase, "Think about if everyone did that," is Mr. Espinal's
mantra. In a laissez-faire neighborhood where children play basketball
in the middle of the sidewalk and women sell fruit juice from makeshift
stands, he stands for order and neighborhood spirit.
Despite his youth, Mr. Espinal clearly aspires to be his neighborhood's
unofficial leader. He runs a block association, administers an Internet
chat group for his neighbors, serves with the auxiliary police and has
organized a series of drives to clean up Inwood Hill Park. He has called
311 so often (300 times, he estimates) that some operators greet him by
name.
And he gets results: on his block alone, he has gotten two trash cans
installed, successfully petitioned the city's Department of
Transportation to install a speed bump, and persuaded the Department of
Sanitation to make sure people clean up after their dogs, resulting in a
wave of summonses that angered some neighbors. ("My stepfather got mad
and said, 'You shouldn't be complaining,' " he recalled.)
Mr. Espinal comes from difficult family circumstances; his father has
been in federal prison for involvement in a car-theft scheme since Mr.
Espinal was 3, and his mother, who lives in Kingsbridge in the Bronx and
suffers from epilepsy and crippling anxiety, cannot work. Her former
husband, Mr. Espinal's stepfather, still lives in Inwood, and Mr.
Espinal uses his house as a base for his advocacy work, though he spends
nights with his mother.
"None of my family members support what I do," he said matter-of-factly
one day. "I'm going to Gracie Mansion on Thursday. If I told my family
about that, they'd make some idiot remark."
Although the roots of Mr. Espinal's activism may be murky, it has no
doubt helped that he can be stubborn as a mule. When his mother lived in
Canarsie, for example, he refused to attend the notoriously violent
local high school because he felt unsafe.
"I'd roam around the neighborhood until school was dismissed," he
recalled. "I'd look at different houses, have a slice of pizza. I was
going to prove to them that I wasn't going to a school I didn't feel
comfortable in." He ended up attending Washington Irving High School
near Gramercy Park, a school he loved so much that during a conversation
last June, he was unable to say exactly what day classes ended. "I don't
care," he insisted. "I like school. I see new people, I learn. It's a
clean, safe, quiet neighborhood."
On the beat in Inwood, Mr. Espinal keeps a sharp eye on his
neighborhood, almost as if he were being paid to do so. "Those people
are very clean with their store," he'll say, pointing to a deli. Or "a
female got beat up on that corner." (Mr. Espinal sometimes talks like a
police officer, even down to his use of 24-hour time; "Let's meet at
1300 hours," he'll say.)
Most local politicians know him by name, and many have good things to
say about his work. "George is very visible and vocal," said Councilman
Miguel Martinez, who gave Mr. Espinal a citation on Sept. 4, honoring
his work for his neighborhood. "It's rare that we see young people
involved to the magnitude that George is."
IN his own assessments of local politicians, Mr. Espinal sometimes shows
a teenager's impatience. "They fight over stupid issues," he said during
a walk through the neighborhood, gesturing toward a railroad substation,
now empty, that sits beside an overpass. "They've been talking for four
years about making this into a Dominican cultural center. Instead,
they're arguing about jurisdiction."
Mr. Espinal has just begun his freshman year at John Jay College; and
his last act for Inwood left him with mixed emotions. Last month, he
organized a community meeting about the noise produced by cars on
Dyckman Street and the Latin club at the marina. About 60 residents
attended, and for the next two Sundays, police officers and Parks
Department staffers closed part of the street to cars.
Since then, Mr. Espinal has heard both praise and muttering. "I had a
lot of applause," he said. "I got a lot of e-mails saying, 'George,
great job.' " But a neighbor who attended the meeting, and didn't know
that Mr. Espinal was its organizer, accused the anti-noise crusaders of
"trying to destroy the community." "She was like, 'Oh, because it's
Spanish music, because of gentrification, the white people are trying to
get rid of us,' " he said.
Mr. Espinal was learning a hard political lesson, surely the first of
many. His predicament recalled a comment he had made earlier in the
summer. "I'm the bad guy for caring about my community," he said then.
"But I'm also the bad guy if I do drugs. So where am I supposed to
stand?"
Correction:
A front-page article last Sunday about young politicians in the city
misstated the age of Theodore Roosevelt when he was elected to the
Assembly in 1881. He was 23, not 24.
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