Same old song and dance

The lunacy on the left continued, as a number of Mayor Valerie Keehn’s supporters stormed out of the city Democratic Committee’s endorsement meeting this weekend. Party leaders were left scrambling for members, after the abrupt departure left them without quorum. Keehn’s contingent seems to believe that if their candidate chooses not to accept an endorsement, then no endorsement should be made at all.

“Let's put it in front of the voters,” Al Ormsby, a committee member from District 11, told The Saratogian after the meeting. “There is no reason to endorse candidates unless someone from outside the party wants to run on our line. That wasn't happening. It's unnecessary.”

And so the politicking continues, allowing the party divide to deepen. Or at least that’s the postulation foisted from Kamp Keehn. They insist county Democratice Committee Chairman Larry Bulman swooped into this spate of sparring last week, asking the committee to make no endorsement and thereby allowing the party to mend this divide.

But this is specious reason, to say the least. There will be no divide mended until the primaries are over in September. Even then, there are bound to be some grudges; much more than when Keehn plucked the nomination away from Hank Kuczynski two years ago. The time for conciliation was long before Democratic challenger Gordon Boyd announced his bid this winter, and long before the vitriolic bickering started echoing throughout City Hall.

The time for mending was November 12, 2005, just minutes after the voting results affirmed Keehn as the mayor. When this opportunity was carelessly pitched aside by Keehn –and maybe even Public Works Commissioner Tom McTygue –the party split was complete.

Today’s city atmosphere is also much different than it was two years ago. When Keehn came to office, she was a political wildcard; an unknown spouting some pretty ambitious plans for the office. She also rode the coattails of discontent that had grown quite long behind then- incumbent Michael Lenz; it’s not too difficult to see that many of Keehn’s votes were more a factor of the public discord with the Republican leadership, hence the so-called Democratic sweep.

This time around, the swing vote will not be in Keehn’s favor. In fact, it’s quite possible these votes may either swing in favor of the GOP candidate, former tort-lawyer Scott Johnson, or just simply not turnout to the polls at all. Regardless, the mayor’s office appears ripe for the Republicans again. After what is bound to be a vicious primary, it’s doubtful the Dems will have the war chest to take out a very wealthy challenger.

Speaking of Johnson, the candidate is already showing signs of being a prototypical Republican candidate for the office: oily, elusive and filled with double talk. When contacted by The Saratogian recently, Johnson could not “confirm or deny” his interest running, despite the fact that his candidacy was almost a foregone conclusion around the city. Two days after the article was published, he “officially” launched his candidacy.

In true Patakian fashion, Johnson chipped a press release out to the media Friday afternoon, and then didn’t bother to stick around long enough to field calls from a Times Union reporter –though it appears as though at least one news agency got through to him. To some, this might not sound like a big deal. But this could be but a small glimpse of how the attorney plans to run the mayor’s office: with carefully worded press releases fed through a fax machine at 4 p.m. before the weekend.

Casting aside both of these very minor instances, there are some fairly significant issues that seem linger in Johnson’s past, or at least that of his former law firm. Most know Thuillez, Ford, Gold, Johnson & Butler as the Albany team of attorneys that helped the state win a $25 billion master settlement agreement against the tobacco companies for public health costs related to cigarette smoking; the firm netted itself $84.3 million in fees from the case in 1998.

But the agreement was somewhat besmirched when it a state Supreme Court judge in Manhattan discovered Johnson’s firm and five others were billing New York something to the tune of $13,000 per hour for legal work done on the case. The insinuation was that the lawyers had colluded with big tobacco to become profiteers in the landmark deal. After a few years of legal wrangling, an appeals court halted the judge’s inquiry at the behest of then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who argued such a probe could not legally be revised in a way that would benefit taxpayers.

Voters will have to hash through all of this come November, when the city could quite feasibly be facing a three-way election with no viable candidates other than the wrong ones. This appears more of a trend than an anomoly in American politics: flood the polls with money, guile the voters with lies, and then do a tap dance on the hopes of the proletariat once victory is assured.