The Difference Between the Parties

In 2003 I was a freshly minted attorney straight out of law school returning to my hometown. No one had ran against the incumbent Republican Congressman in my district in the previous election cycle, and I thought that was bad for our democracy. At the time I was an avid Dean supporter and had spent a lot of time helping to run meetups for the campaign in my rural hometown.

At the time, I thought that the Internet meant it could be possible for an upstart grass roots campaign to take on the well funded incumbent Republican and have at the very least a shot at becoming competitive. Did I think that an underdog campaign could win? I honestly didn’t know, but I didn’t think it would hurt to try.

I talked with one of my favorite high school teachers who had been the mayor of his hometown. He was the not uncommon liberal New York Republican. His advice when I asked if I should run as an independent given the registration advantage for Republicans was to run as a Democrat, since I was already registered that way, and he introduced me to a member of the local Democratic committee. Both my Republican former teacher and the committee member he introduced me to were also Dean supporters. Neither of them had been a fan of the Iraq War.

My interest in running for Congress as a Democrat was greeted by the local party committee people with the enthusiasm of a lead balloon. I was encouraged to run for the county legislature at the time. By the time I had gathered three-quarters of the petition signatures needed to run for the office I had been asked to run for, but not particularly been interested in, I was informed that a local Democratic mayor had decided he would run for the position. My petitioning campaign had been an effort to force his hand. I was asked to bow out, and did happily because I hadn’t been too excited about a part-time job that would make it more difficult for me to secure a day job as a young attorney with a mountain of student loan debt to deal with at the time.

In subsequent years better funded candidates did run for Congress, and my thoughts and ideas on using the Internet as a vital part of the organizing strategy for what at the time was an eleven county Congressional district were quickly dismissed or ignored. Both campaigns lost their bids for Congress, and then a special election happened. The local Congressman was made the Secretary of the Army by the Democratic President of the United States, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent a large fortune electing the newly minted corporate Democrat Bill Owens to Congress. Owens went to the House in November of 2009 and became the deciding vote on the Affordable Care Act. He stood for election twice more before retiring in 2014.

In 2011 I was disillusioned by the Democratic Party. President Obama had ignored what his base of supporters had been demanding on economic issues, and the Democratic Party as a whole appeared equally owned by the moneyed interests on Wall Street as the Republican Party. When Wall Street and a trade policy that benefits Wall Street at the expense of Main Street had been the problem, the Democratic Party was siding with Wall Street. In late September of 2011, I headed to Occupy K Street in Washington, DC for a day, before spending several days camped out at Liberty Plaza and Occupy Wall Street in New York City. At that time I was hopeful that the burgeoning movement would grow into the revolution it appeared to be calling for, at least that is what it seemed to be demanding to me.

The Justice Department and Mayor Bloomberg quickly coordinated efforts to shut down what had clearly been the most effective protest movement in nearly fifty years in America. In a matter of weeks Occupy Wall Street had transformed the political conversation that was happening in America. The 99% versus the 1% dominated talking points, and has continued to dominate the political discussion in the years since in a way that no prior political movement had dominated the discussion.

In 2012 I cast my ballot for Jill Stein of the Green Party for President, and Vice President Joe Biden with a write in ballot. I did that because I could not vote for President Obama again. He had lied to me and failed as a President as far as I was concerned. I am a Syracuse University alum; however, and my sense of loyalty couldn’t allow me to vote against a fellow alum who was the sitting Vice President. At the time I was fully aware that my protest vote would be meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but like Senator Bernie Sanders, I was disappointed that President Obama did not have a primary opponent in 2012. Occupy Wall Street seemed to me to demand a primary challenge.

I have been a supporter of Senator Sanders since well before he announced his candidacy for the Presidency. I cheered when he dueled to essentially a tie in Iowa. I cheered louder when he won in New Hampshire, and at this point in time, I still intend to vote for him in the New York primary because he is involved in a fight for the heart and soul of a Democratic Party that began in 1992. The first champion of that fight has since abandoned the cause and sold out to the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, just as Governor Dean did when he became a health industry lobbyist. The first champion of that fight was my choice for Democratic Party Presidential nominee in 1992 when I was only 16 years old, and that candidate was Governor Jerry Brown.

In 1992, Governor Brown had self-imposed a campaign contribution limit of $100 on his campaign. He imposed this limit before the Internet as we know it existed. He imposed that limit at a time when it made it exceedingly hard to raise money to run for the Presidency. Campaign finance reform has been the dominant issue of American politics for the last 24 years, and the side opposed to serious reform has been winning without fail in every election since Jerry Brown lost to Bill Clinton in 1992.

On March 15, 2016, when Senator Sanders failed to achieve victory in any of the primary states he was competing in that night, it became clear to me, that the Senator was unlikely to become the nominee of the Democratic Party. There is still a path he could travel that might lead him to the nomination and the Presidency, but it will require everything working out perfectly for him over the next several months. It is a long shot at best.

On that night, I decided that regardless of the outcome of the Senator’s attempt to win back the soul of the Democratic Party for ordinary working class Americans, I was going to continue to work for the revolution. Luckily for me, so much had changed once again in my Congressional District between 2012 when Bill Owens won re-election for the final time, and today, so I had an immediate place to begin working.

In 2014, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee or DCCC briefly funded a challenge for the seat in New York’s 21st Congressional District. The Party was supporting Aaron Woolf, the filmmaker behind the documentary “King Corn,” who moved to the district from Brooklyn in an effort to win for the Democrats. Woolf spent a considerable amount of his own money and a lot of corporate money in an effort to win the seat, but lost by more than 30,000 votes to upstart Republican Elise Stefanik, a staffer from Paul Ryan’s office who had worked in the Bush White House. Stefanik who was only 29 years old at the time, was the daughter of a wood products factory owner. She listed her parent’s vacation home in the ski resort areas of the eastern Adirondacks as her home address to run for the seat.

There was also a third-party candidate who was challenging for the seat. Unlike the Republican and Democratic candidate he was not a millionaire. He was a baker who owned a small bread shop in the district. He was a working class member of the Green Party who ran a truly grass roots campaign. The Republicans and Democrats each spent in excess of $2 million on the election. The Republican candidate received 95,000 votes. The Democratic candidate received 59,000 votes, and the Green Party candidate Matt Funiciello received nearly 20,000 votes after spending less than $40,000, mostly received from small donors to the campaign.

Funiciello announced at the end of his campaign in 2014 that he would run again, and he is currently running as the Green Party candidate. The Democratic Party had asked him to run with the support of the DCCC, but he refused to do so because he would not accept corporate backing. He had principles, and they are the kind of principles which had played quite well for more than 26 years in the Congressional District across the lake which neighbors New York’s 21st. That’s right, NY’s 21st Congressional District neighbors Vermont, where Bernie Sanders was for a very long time the lone independent in Congress.

The people in New York’s Adirondack Mountains are very similar to the citizens of Vermont. We tend to think for ourselves, and even amongst the Republicans we are far more frequently fans of the Party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, than the Party of Ronald Reagan. In 2012, the Republican candidate who lost to Bill Owens garnered 123,000 votes, while Owens garnered 126,000 votes.

The Green Party, and its candidate Matt Funiciello are not being backed by Wall Street attorneys or Virginia based defense contractors. The same cannot be said of Mike Derrick, the DCCC’s selected candidate for the House. Republican Elise Stefanik’s contributors include Wall Street lawyers and Washington lobbyists, as well as private investment firms. The Republican and Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in New York’s 21st Congressional District are both being bought by the the exact same kinds of people. Matt Funiciello has the crazy notion that a member of Congress should actually not be for sale, but rather should be a representative of his constituents.

How do I know that? Because I spent an hour on the telephone talking with him today. I had contacted Matt through his campaign website a week or so ago and offered to volunteer to help the campaign. I had sent he and his campaign manager a detailed outline of what I think the campaign needs to work on and how I think the campaign should go about building support both online, and in the real world. Unlike the reception my ideas for how to build a grass roots organization for a Congressional campaign had been greeted by the Democratic Party, utter disdain, Matt and his campaign manager were both highly receptive to my ideas. We ended the call hopeful, that we would be able to put some of those ideas into action very soon.

I will be doing some work to help the Funiciello campaign build support in the District in the coming months. Unlike the Democratic candidate who seems intent on accepting endorsements from the national executive commitees of unions, while hosting expensive fundraisers with Wall Street lobbyists, or the Republican candidate who never really lived in the district and intends to continue fundraising in Washington to win an air war on television this fall, Matt intends to win the district the old fashioned way, by working to earn citizens votes. Its refreshing to be a member of a party that is actually working to advance ideas that will help ordinary people.

While New York law prevents me from officially becoming a member of the Green Party until after an intervening general election, I think it is safe to say that the Sanders Revolution has made one thing perfectly clear to me. If we want a revolution, the Democratic Party certainly isn’t going to help with that kind of change, at least not without a whole lot of kicking and screaming and saying no. Because I have hope for real change, I guess it would be hard to say that I am a Democrat anymore.