NY STATE FOCUS: Help a fellow blogger run for office

This is also from last week (though this time I am excerpting) because this is a good guy well worth our support.

My Dear Friends,

I am running for the office of Town Supervisor in the town of Stephentown, Rensselaer County, NY.

It's all Howard Dean's fault.



Here we are three and a half years later and we are preparing to turn control of ostensibly solid republican Stephentown over to Democrats. Good things start with just those first few steps.

We have a blog web site for the Stephentown Democratic Committee (contributions gratefully accepted).

And I've just created a candidate page over at DFA-Link.

Shortly after Gov. Dean ended his Presidential campaign we hosted him for a speech in Albany, NY. During this speech he urged, as he always did, that we each look around us and see how we could get involved. Run for office yourself, he said. Or, join your local democratic committee. Or, work on behalf of a local candidate.

For me the opening was obvious. There was no Democratic Committee in my town and hadn't been in about 8 years. So I spoke with a few folks I knew in town that felt as I did and we formed a committee. Our first task was to win the town for John Kerry in 2004.

86.4% of Democrats turned out to vote in 2004. 78.8% of the entire town showed up to vote. George Bush won this very Republican town but only by a total of 38 votes, 692-654, when it was all totaled up.

In 2003 the republicans ran unopposed in town elections with votes totals ranging from 343-0 to 411-0.

In 2005 we held our local town and county elections. We ran 2 young men for Town Council and both won by almost a 2 to 1 margin...

We also elected a man named Bob Jacon, a Dean supporter, to a newly created County Judgeship. This position had been created at the behest of State Senate Majority Leader and County Boss, Joe Bruno, so he could shuffle his hand-picked, incompetent, District Attorney into it. We beat him in the town and the rest of the county...

This year we are running a slate of 4 candidates for Town Offices:



Terry Sykes for Highway Superintendent



Bill Jennings for Town Council



Scott McEwan for Town Council



and me, Andrew C. White, for Town Supervisor.




The Supervisors seat is an open one as 16 year incumbent Mike Angley is retiring. First term Councilman, Tom Sherman, is running on the Republican line against me for Supervisor. Incumbent Councilman Larry Eckhardt will be joined by Independence Party member Mark Prescott for Town Council. Incumbent Highway Superintendent Neil Gardner is also running for re-election... for now at least...

Stephentown is considered a Republican bastion. A small rural hilltown with about 1750 voters. There are just under 700 Republicans, just over 400 Democrats, a smattering of third party members, and about 460 unaffiliated voters. Ever since we started working this town in 2004 those unaffiliated voters have shown where their real interests are by voting Democratic at all levels of government.

In fact a small but significant number of Republicans in town have been consistently voting Democratic as the Republican party has moved further and further away from the values that it once held.

Stephentown (pdf map) is in the southeast corner of Rensselaer County, the home of the highest ranking Republican left in New York, Uncle Joe Bruno. Rensselaer County has a roughly 50-50 split of Democratic and Republican voters but is dominated by Republicans at the town, city, county, and state levels of government due to Joe Bruno's control of the purse strings and his minions manipulation and control of third parties (and, on occasion, some demorats as well).

We are on the verge of taking the most Republican of towns out from under Uncle Joe thereby setting the stage for the end of Uncle Joe's career and obstruction of Gov. Eliot Spitzer and reform minded Democratic State Senators from actually working on solving the dysfunction of New York State government.

At the same time we strengthen the hold of newly elected Democratic Representative Kirsten Gillibrand on her district.

It's all local.

Locally, what this campaign is really all about, is modern day republicanism writ small. Cronyism, closed government for the benefit of a few rather than all citizens in town. As seen in the article linked above there appears to be some serious issues of possible illegal activity, corruption, fraud, unpermitted mining, cronyism, no-bid contracts, etc in the Highway Department. The State Attorney General's office has just accepted a plea deal with one player and appears to be poised to charge the incumbent Highway Superintendent. The Town Council has previously looked the other way until various parts started to become public. Attempts by the new Democratic members to reign in the abuses have been shunted to the side and they have been locked out of the decision making process...

This is what it is all about. We can do it here. And if we can do it here. You can do it whereever you are.