The 90`s

On the campaign trail with candidate Barbanel

Note: Written by Howard Barbanel, Published Week of December 1st - 7th, 1993

"Good Morning.  I'm Howard Barbanel running for City Council.  How are you?"

"Hello, Howard Barbanel, running for Council, I hope to get your vote..."

Starting right after the Democratic primary on Sept. 14, I repeated that mantra early mornings too numerous to count at subway stations all over the 9th City Council District where I was the Republican candidate for the job.  Six weeks of street campaigning in diverse neighborhoods such as the Upper West Side, Morningside Heights and Central Harlem. Weekday mornings and Sundays (on Shabbat we rested). During the final three we were out there meeting people during the weekdays and in the evenings again at the subway.

"Hey, I just saw you here yesterday."  "I've seen you here three times this week,"  passerby's would comment upon gazing at my permanently affixed and ever-present outstretched hand.  "I really want the job," and "I hope to get your vote" would be my standard replies.

Campaigning at subways is a time-honored New York tradition - it’s where the people are.  Each station has its own personality and the people there their own characteristics. Interestingly, the most polite and pleasant straphangers were up in Harlem.  Almost everyone would accept a piece of literature and virtually everyone would shake my hand. The further South one went, the more one encountered people in a rush, before heir daily caffeine fix or just the variously impolite.  Always at subway stations I went with campaign staff and volunteers, so there would be a sizeable presence and to facilitate the distribution of literature. There are many different kinds of handshakes as well: There's the full-grip firm shake, for both men and women (women today want to shake your hand the same way as a man, and woe unto you if you try the pre-1960- finger-tip approach); there is the "I'm clutching my token in my palm, so you get two fingers" handshake; there is the token-in-the-fingers so you get a thumb-shake (when faced with toke-clutchers, I would say, "I want your vote, not your token.") and the left-handed shake because of tokens, newspapers and coffee in the right hand. 

Out on the stump most would take your hand (or part of it) and many, whether they voted for me or not, would wish me good luck in my quest for the Holy Grail.  All told, during the six weeks of street campaigning I must shook 14,000 or so hands, enough to qualify me for a Palmolive commercial with Madge.

The Candidate

In the famous movie, The Candidate, starring Robert Redford, he is recruited by the party professionals who tell him, "here's the deal, we want you to run and make a good fight out of it, but you lose."  Of the 51 City Council seats, more than 10 went unopposed - with Democrats being re-elected by acclamation. This is something that I believe is extremely unhealthy for the democratic process and only encourages poor, complacent, disinterested government.  New York is a Democratic town, but this year we Republicans had a shot - this year Rudy Giuliani was going to make it and this year we needed to field as many aggressive candidates as possible so that we could win Gracie Mansion.

My district is a terribly gerrymandered pastiche of different neighborhoods, bound by nothing in common whatsoever.  The Upper West Side and Morning Side Heights have next to nothing in common with Central Harlem or Manhattan Valley, yet through the machinations of the political poobahs we found ourselves, as in a shotgun wedding, bound together for better or worse in the same district.  There was no way we could allow the incumbent to run unopposed and there was every desire to let the-powers-that-be-know that the residents of the southern end of this crazy district are extremely unhappy about the state of city services we were receiving.

The campaign in the Spring with petitioning following heavy fund-raising through the Summer.  During the whole six month period I can conclusively say that I've never before worked on any project as pervasively bone-crunching in the sheer magnitude of work it entailed.  Running for public office makes running Jewish organizations seem like childplay.

The key to running a good campaign is the staff and I was blessed with a crew of intelligent, dedicated people.  The main figure were my brother - Lewis Barbanel who was treasurer cum campaign manager. As were registered with the City's Campaign Finance Program we had to fill out a myriad of forms detailing every dollar raised and spent and Lewis managed this with aplomb.  Out on the streets I had the help of two indispensable Columbia students, Erica Adler and Darren Schlanger - both Democrats. They both worked tirelessly from dawn to dusk and beyond, with me daily at the subways, at speaking engagements, debates and everywhere we needed to be.  In Harlem, our campaign manager was James Williams. Now, Mr. Williams is a retired city worker, Republican stalwart and master street campaigner who unflinchingly, along with Harlem Republicans (yes, they do exist) trooped about 125th Street, Lennox, Powell and Douglass boulevards pressing the flesh and passing out the brochures.  They put their all into it and any candidate couldn't ask for me.

Media: We opted to spend the bulk of our funds on very visible bus station and subway stations ads that would be up for the whole month.  Let me tell you, it is much more comfortable campaigning at a subway station where your poster is on the staircase. On Broadway we had a bus shelter on literally every other block.  Being that my picture adorned these ads, I was no longer just a face in the crowd and people would stop me on the way to the cleaners, to the grocers or what-have-you to engage me in political discourse.  My Sentinel columns had to stay clear of local politics, much like Ronald Reagan movies being barred from TV during the 1948 election.

We also hand distributed more than 40,000 flyers and palm cards along with 25,000 copies of a four-page, full-color campaign newspaper which discussed my positions on all the issues in some depth.  The bus shelters and newspapers engendered high praise from other Republican candidates and officeholders, including Rudy Giuliani himself. It was an unorthodox approach, relying exclusively on print advertising, but having been a newspaper man for 14 years, we went with what I knew best and the results on the Upper West Side and Morningside Heights paid off. 

The Issues

The first three issues for me as an involved, committed Jew on running against C. Virginia Fields had to do with things that very much hit home.  First, she is a good pal of Professor Leonard Jeffries - so much so that she was roundly criticized in an editorial in The New York Times two years ago for playing blatant apologetics for his anti-Semitic blather.  Second, Fields was recently one of a half-dozen chairmen for a fund-raising dinner in honor of and to benefit Louis Farrakahn, the man who still calls Judaism a "gutter religion." Third, Fields openly voted against the Yankel Rosenbaum resolution last year in the City Council.  This was a resolution condemning the acquittal of Lemrick Nelson for Rosenbaum's death and expressing sympathy for Rosenbaum's family.

I am proud to say that none of our literature used this information in any disparaging way and at no time did we campaign personally in a negative manner.

Next on the list came her overall voting record.  During the last council session, Fields had a 98.9 percent "yes" voting record having voted affirmative on 783 of 788 votes.  One of "no" votes was on the Rosenbaum issue. This kind of voting is reminiscent of Community Party Politburo politics - typical in Beijing and Pyongyang, but should not be the case in the Big Apple.  My opponent is just typical of Council practices in general, where fully 90 percent of all votes are unanimous - this in a city of 7.5 million people! Machine politics and Tammany Halls are still very much alive and well in 1993.

Among the issues I felt strongly about was that of "sunshine", or openness.  We need a municipal C-SPAN channel in New York that will air all City Council sessions in their entirety as C-SPAN does for both houses of the Congress.  Additionally, all committee sessions should be aired. Presently, most council sessions take place behind a gauze curtain of anonymity where people don't know what their local legislature is up to.  I have urged that WNYC-TV Channel 31 (Channel 3 on Cable) be transformed from a quasi-PBS and leased-time channel into one that will let the sunshine in on what our government is doing.

The Homeless Crisis and crime were also high on my list.  The Upper West Side north of 96th Street contains a plethora of welfare hotels, homeless shelters, SROs, mental health facilities and such.  More than 15,000 of the homeless, mentally-ill and substance abusers were dumped into this area over the past four years, far out of proportion to other areas in Manhattan.  This has created a veneer of Calcutta on the streets and witnessed an explosion of crime.

I have called for enforcement of the city's Fair Share provisions that mandate that these kinds of problems and facilities be absorbed equally by different parts of the city and that no one neighborhood should bear the brunt of such a problem.

I issued a comprehensive plan to attack homelessness - a human tragedy of immense proportions.  It is a disgrace that the nation's most affluent city has people dying on the streets every night.  Fully 50 percent of the homeless single men have TB - many have AIDs, many (overlapping) are mentally-ill and are substance abusers.  We must recognize this as a health crisis and tackle it accordingly. The city spends $500 million per year on homelessness yet the problem keeps getting worse and worse.

On crime we've seen almost 50,000 fewer street level drugs arrests over the past few years and 6,000 violent incidents in our schools.  There were 1.5 million felonies committed last year with car theft becoming so common that the police online recover 15 percent of all stolen vehicles.

We have a city budget so out of whack that we've become the most highly taxed citizens in the continental U.S.  The budget is up to $32 billion - $6 billion more than the end of the Koch years and we have absolutely nothing to show for this spending.  To give you some perspective, the entire budget for the state government of New Jersey is $16 billion - half that of New York and the people there were fuming over the cost of government.  New Jersey has the same number of people as New York City. The state of Florida has a state budget of $35 billion and Florida has no state or city income taxes! New York has the fourth largest government budget in the nation.  We have more city employees than does the entire state government of California. Compare our 250,000-plus municipal workers with New Jersey's 65,000. This kind of spending is only possible because of unambiguous City Council approvals of the mayor's budget.

The multiple city and state income tax hikes, in the midst of a recession propelled us into a full-blown depression with over 350,000 jobs lost in town over the past four years.  Interestingly, over 20 percent of the job losses were suffered by Jews because of the elimination of white collar positions, this according to the City University study. Jobs are fleeing at a rate of 6,000 per month.  The city unemployment rate is now 10.8 percent, up from 8.7 percent in September, whereas in New Jersey the rate is only 6.5 percent. The youth unemployment rate is over 40 percent. I can't tell you how many friends of mine work in Secaucus and Jersey City, Westchester, Long Island and Connecticut.  

I have called for reductions in city income taxes back to the levels of the Koch years and elimination of unique and oppressive taxes such as the Unincorporated Business Tax, the Commercial Rent Tax, the Subchapter S Corporation Tax, scaling back the higher taxes on co-ops and condos versus one family homes (four times higher) and our Hotel Guest Tax.

The public schools are a mess where $7 billion gets spent a year and only half of those funds actually gets spent on the children.  Teachers are underpaid, school buildings are literally falling apart and our kids use 20-year-old textbooks. Our public hospitals are a mess where people die daily because of poor management and poor care.  Garbage recycling is not really happening, although everyone is bundling and separating their garbage. According to the New York Public Interest Research Group only 5 percent of all solid waste is currently being recycled!  Most of our pre-sorted waste is being dumped into landfills and out-of-sea. This is a giant fraud on the citizens of our city. These are but a few of the major crises confronting New Yorkers that I wanted to do something about.

Many said, "Well, the incumbent takes many of your positions, so what's the difference?" The difference was and is that agreeing that homelessness is terrible, that crime is rampant, that the Commercial Rent Tax is onerous is fine and dandy, but hey, lady, you've been in the City Council for 4 years now, how come you've not introduced any bills to deal with these issues? How come you have one of the lowest records of new legislation development?  How come you have one of the poorest attendance records to council sessions? Actions speak and as I told people while on the stump, had I been elected you would have seen a blizzard, a barrage, a blitzkreig of new bills and proposed laws - a literal bombardment of initiatives. Unlike the incumbent, I would have had district offices in all parts of the district - not just in Harlem. Proof of this was my heavy campaigning in Harlem, and Field's virtual non-appearance either during the past few years or during the campaign in the Upper West Side or Morningside Heights.

Some people ask me, "Are you down because you lost?" My response is twofold:  First, I'm proud that we fought the flight and flew the flag and helped Rudy get elected and through Rudy many of the things that we want to see will hopefully materialize.  Second, I tell them a tale that goes as follows:

If sometimes you get discouraged, consider this fellow: He dropped out of grade; ran a country store; went broke; took 15 years to pay off his bills; took a wife; unhappy marriage; ran for the House; lost twice; ran for the Senate; delivered a speech that became a classic.  Audience at the time was indifferent. Attacked daily by the press and despised by half the country. Despite all this, imagine how many people all over the world have been inspired by this awkward, rumpled, brooding man who signed his name simply - A. Lincoln.

Howard Barbanel is happy to have experienced running for public office and is grateful to everyone who supported his candidacy.