Razzle Dazzle

He Didn't Know His Place

By RICHARD STEIER

On the afternoon of the Sept. 12 Democratic primary, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi was standing on a Crown Heights street explaining why he supported Carl Andrews in the four-way race for Congress in the 11th District.

"He's been close to the Crown Heights Jewish community for a while; the perception is he's brought home the bacon - Kosher, of course," said the rabbi, who spoke conditioned on anonymity.

He said one faction of the Orthodox community was backing City Councilman David Yassky for the seat being vacated by Major Owens, but added, "Yassky's a relative newcomer."

Asked whether some in his community, which for decades has experienced tension with its black neighbors, might rally around Mr. Yassky because he had been the subject of race-based attacks by supporters of his opponents, the rabbi responded, "He married a goy."

Viewed As An Intruder

The remark, which was another way of saying, "He's not one of us," seemed par for the course in the campaign. From the time that he moved a few blocks from his old home in order to become a resident of the 11th Congressional District, Mr. Yassky had been targeted as The Other in a race in which he was the only white candidate.

The Chief-Leader/Eric Weiss OUTSIDER TO THE END: David Yassky, here talking to a voter in Crown Heights on Primary Day, was dogged throughout the campaign by accusations that he was cynically banking on benefiting from a split of the black vote among his three opponents in a Congressional District that has been represented by African-Americans for the past 38 years.

Mr. Yassky got an up-close taste of it from one woman he approached later that day, standing on Crown St. between P.S. 161 and the Lubavitch Beth Rivkah School. As he introduced himself, she glared at him and moved quickly past, prompting him to remark, "I probably can't count on her vote."

The anger in her eyes suggested she was among those who believed he had no business in the contest for a congressional seat that had been held by blacks since Shirley Chisolm was elected in 1968.

Three months earlier, Brooklyn City Council Member Albert Vann sent a memo addressed to "Black Elected Officials, City, State and Federal," that warned of the "peril of losing a 'Voting Rights' district ... as a result of the well-financed candidacy of Council Member David Yassky, a white individual."

Representative Owens, whose son Chris was among those seeking to succeed him, branded Mr. Yassky "a colonizer." And just before the primary, a newsletter called the Clarke Chronicle, which Daily News political columnist Ben Smith traced back to a former aide to Yvette Clarke named Michael Roberts, blasted the New York Times for endorsing "the only white candidate in the race," charging that the paper "clearly wants to perpetuate the plantation system in Brooklyn by helping to elect a 'neo-massa.'''

There was no way of knowing whether the race-baiting influenced the outcome of the election, in which City Councilwoman Clarke, after trailing Mr. Yassky slightly with more than half the ballots tallied, surged late to defeat him by five points, with State Senator Andrews and the younger Owens finishing behind him.

Veteran political consultant George Arzt was disinclined to believe that Mr. Yassky was done in by matters other than the dynamics of the district itself and the individuals running.

A Different Calculus

"The strongest candidate, even though she didn't have money, was Yvette," he said the morning after the primary. "People make the mistake of looking at that race as a white against three blacks. It was one Caribbean [Ms. Clarke], two blacks and one white. The Caribbean group came out in force, and she got some black votes as well. And she got a strong women's vote."

Mr. Arzt continued, "She also has a contagious personality. That's not something you could say about Yassky, who is somewhat dour, or Carl or Chris Owens."

It's certainly true that Mr. Yassky is more studious and less outgoing than most politicians, as if not quite comfortable with the part of the job that involves dealing with the public and the media. Asked on the afternoon of the primary whether anything about the contest had surprised him, he responded that "it's hard to get the media to cover some kind of substantive debate, other than the politics of it."

He was asked about an appearance he had made with Mayor Bloomberg in the district - which stretches from Midwood through Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights and into Park Slope and Cobble Hill - a week earlier. They were announcing the installation of security cameras in a housing project, and the heckling Mr. Yassky got from some of those present culminated with someone throwing part of a chocolate glazed donut in his direction.

"I'm a little idiosyncratic about stuff," Councilman Yassky responded. "I think voters want a message about why to vote for a guy, and that appearance fit in well with our message that this was a building that needed security cameras."

WFP Threatened Break

He seemed ruffled when a WNBC-TV reporter told him that a spokesman for the Working Families Party had said that if he won the primary, it would give its line in the November election to one of the other candidates. Two days later, WFP Executive Director Dan Cantor denied such a decision had been made, although he acknowledged that it was being considered prior to Ms. Clarke's victory.

Asked whether race was the reason the WFP was ready to shun a Councilman it had previously backed and who, by his own admission, "had a solid record," Mr. Cantor responded, "Race never doesn't enter into American politics. But there's no way people would have been talking about doing this just because Yassky is white. For lots of our leaders, he was by far the most conservative of the candidates. He was bad on trade, he was bad on support for workers organizing." But the mere fact that race was part of the calculation for a party whose mission is to push the Democratic Party in a more-progressive, pro-labor direction is revealing, and disturbing.

A Selective Standard

Unlike the WFP, most of Mr. Yassky's critics didn't bother to examine his positions on the issues. The notion of him as a carpetbagger, coming from just outside the district, is laughable, considering that many of those people who leveled the charge supported Hillary Clinton when she first left Washington to move to Chappaqua, and would have supported the late Bobby Kennedy when he left Massachusetts to become a Senator from New York.

There was undoubtedly political calculation in his decision to run in a district where the three other candidates figured to split the majority black vote. But that is politics, where being an opportunist is no more a vice than being fond of publicity. Illinois or Arkansas would have seemed more natural places for Ms. Clinton to run for Senate, since she grew up in one and lived most of her adult life in the other before coming to Washington, but she ran in the state where she believed she had the best chance of winning and flourishing.

At the time Ms. Chisolm was first elected to Congress 38 years ago, New York had 19 Congressional seats, and for years the only minority member of its delegation had been Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Today, there are just 13 seats in the city's delegation, but six of them are held by blacks or Latinos, and so the notion that the 11th CD should by rights remain a "black" seat has little besides ethnic turf-protecting to sustain it.

Clarke's Inconsistency

There's no way of knowing whether Ms. Clarke was aware of the newsletter put out by her former aide, with its racially charged language. She did not issue any statements criticizing it, however, once Mr. Smith's blog publicized it on the day before the primary. Given how outspoken she has been about the need to move the city's firefighting force toward greater diversity, consistency would seem to demand that she renounce any attempt to argue that a particular job should remain the province of the group that has long held it.

The day after the election, the City Council had its regularly scheduled meeting, bringing both Ms. Clarke and Mr. Yassky to City Hall. While she accepted congratulations from her colleagues, he was left talking about why he might have lost.

"I think we ran as good a campaign as you could run," he said. "On the big things I have no regrets."

In the Council Chambers, he sits next to Mr. Vann, who first entered New Yorkers' consciousness four decades ago as the leader of a black Teachers' group that squared off against the United Federation of Teachers over community control of the schools in Brooklyn's Ocean Hill-Brownsville district, the issue that prompted the extended UFT strike in 1968. (This year, Mr. Vann, who had moderated his rhetoric over time, joined the UFT in endorsing Mr. Andrews.)

Worlds Apart

For most of the hour-long meeting, Mr. Vann leaned back in his chair on the left side, while Mr. Yassky leaned forward to his right, placing them as far apart as possible given the seating arrangements.

Asked afterwards about their relationship since Mr. Vann's June call to arms against him, Mr. Yassky replied, "In politics, you can disagree with people but still work with them the next day. If you can't, this is probably the wrong profession for you."

He said he hadn't given any further thought to his political future, other than to refocus on issues he has championed in the Council and emphasized during the campaign. "I think we need to aggressively expand our efforts to help small businesses extend health care to their employees," Mr. Yassky said, adding that further progress in areas like gun control and affordable housing were his other priorities.

There were activists and even reporters who thought he had made himself a marked man with a limited political future by running in the 11th CD and being competitive enough to have actually had a shot at winning. That Mr. Yassky, rather than those who made his race a negative rallying point, could be seen as the person guilty of crossing the line is a sad commentary on the state of politics in a city where tolerance and diversity are supposed to be coin of the realm.