Cover Story	In The Aftermath by Geoff Kelly

At 9:25 Tuesday night at New York State Assemblyman Sam Hoyt’s campaign headquarters on Elmwood Avenue, one of Hoyt’s sharper operators, Jeremy Toth, quieted the crowd to make an announcement: Barbra Kavanaugh, Hoyt’s opponent in one of the dirtiest primary campaigns in the city’s recent memory, had lost her bid for a seat on the Democratic Party’s county committee.

Not the Assembly race itself, mind you, but the much smaller race in Niagara #7, an election district in which 132 votes had been cast for committee member. Kavanaugh had received just 23 of those votes, finishing last among the four candidates.

Hoyt’s supporters roared their approval. Kavanaugh, a former Common Councilmember running with the all the manpower of City Hall behind her and the financial support of billionaire Tom Golisano, had lost the most local of races to a retired schoolteacher and a handyman.

And the numbers coming in from the poll watchers were confirming this bellwether. Hoyt’s army of canvassers, committee people, and sundry supporters would consume at least hundred pounds of pizza and wings, a dozen liters of pop, and a quarter keg of beer before they could cheer Hoyt’s victory over Kavanaugh, 57 percent to 43 percent, in the Assembly race. But that initial bit of news—that Kavanaugh had failed even to win a seat on the county committee—set an ebullient tone for the evening.

In the clear-eyed morning, it turned out that Hoyt, too, had failed to win a committee seat in the election district he ran in. Taken together, those two facts serve as a summary of Tuesday’s primary voting in the city: Kavanaugh loses, Hoyt wins. Erie County Democratic Chairman Len Lenihan holds on to his job.

But the balance of power remains pretty much the same. On practical terms, neither side in this fight won significant gains. In symbolic terms, however, it’s another story.

Death by committee

The lobby at the Ellicott Square building began to empty around 11 o’clock. Hoyt already had spoken to his exuberant campaign staff, and was posing for pictures with them on the stairs to the mezzanine. State Senator Antoine Thompson, who handily won re-election, had followed Hoyt, exhorting Democrats to get to work for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Assemblyman Dennis Gabryszak, who had won a gaudy 72 percent to 28 percent victory over his primary challenger, brought the speechifying to a tepid close. The food was all gone, the beer was running low, and folks were coiling up power cables.

Lenihan, the Democratic Party’s county chairman, was all smiles. His man, Hoyt, had weathered his primary challenge from Barbra Kavanaugh, whose run was sponsored by Mayor Byron Brown and his chief political officer Steve Casey, and abetted by the slime tactics of former Democratic county chairman Steve Pigeon. That’s good news for Lenihan, whose chairmanship hung in the balance; if Hoyt lost, Casey and Brown would engineer Lenihan’s removal.

The better news for Lenihan is not as apparent as Hoyt’s headline-winning victory. That story is told in committee races run throughout the city. Brown and Casey had challenged nearly 100 committee seats in various city election districts, hoping to cut away support for Lenihan and Hoyt. They threw big names into these races: not only Kavanaugh herself, but top city commissioners and administrators. Nearly all of those big names lost.

The result was not merely the second great political failure of the Brown/Casey team, the first being last fall’s unsuccessful efforts to install Peter J. Savage III as the Niagara District Common Councilmember and to unseat Delaware District Councilmember Mike LoCurto using mayoral aide Jessica Maglietto. That failure was a misstep, an overreach: It turned out voters, no matter what they thought of Brown’s leadership, didn’t want to give him a rubberstamp Common Council.

This failure, on the other hand, was a rebuke of the mayor’s leadership, delivered by the Democratic Party’s core membership—those who vote in primaries and, specifically, for committee members.

Toth, the Hoyt strategist, expects that when all the math is done, neither the Hoyt faction nor the Brown faction will have registered significant gains.

“My overall impression is that from a countywide perspective the mayor is likely to have the same amount of influence as he ever had,” Toth said on Wednesday morning. “The victory for those who aren’t on the mayor’s side is that he shot all of his biggest guns at us and he gained no ground. The people I am aligned with were bracing for a big storm, and the storm came and went wiithout really changing anything.”

Jessica Maglietto, who runs CitiStat and who challenged LoCurto last fall, ran for committee in Delaware District #12. So did her mother, and both lost. Brown’s finance direector, Janet Penska, lost in Delaware #18. City engineer Peter Merlo lost in Delaware #19, where Hoyt allies Sam Magavern and Catherinen Creighton finished at the top. Assistant Corporation Counsel Tim Ball lost in Delaware #24. Another Assistant Corporation Counnsel, Cavette Chamber, lost in Masten #11. New city forester Jeff Brett lost in Delaware #25.

The city’s new chief economic development officer, Brian Reilly, freshly returned to Buffalo after years working in other cities, was made to knock on doors and distribute literature for the mayor’s sponsored candidates, folks he could hardly even know. He also ran for committee in Delaware #36, and lost to Lynne Williams of Senator Chuck Schumer’s office and Hoyt ally Marc Panepinto.

Brown’s communications director, Peter Cutler, lost his committee race to former deputy county executive and AV columnist Bruce Fisher, who swears he didn’t even know he was on the ballot until Tuesday afternoon.

And Deputy Mayor Steve Casey lost his committee race by one vote—to Jean Dickson, who lives just down the street from Casey and last summer suspected Casey of turning city inspectors loose on her because he disapproved of her front lawn garden. (You can read about that online in “The Garden Gnome,” Artvoice v6n39.)

The Brown/Casey camp won some seats as well, and the end result is indeed likely to be a wash. But the symbolic losses by candidates closely associated with City Hall outweigh City Hall’s gains. These losses don’t simply suggest that Casey’s and Kavanaugh’s and Cutler’s neighbors don’t support them. They suggest that the Democratic base doesn’t want them in control of the party.

Toth called Lenihan’s chairmanship “97 percent secure” in the aftermath of Tuesday’s voting. Most politicos seem to agre. Cheektowaga’s Democratic Party chairman, Frank Max, has been mounting a run at Lenihan, and his faction won some committee seats on Tuesday night—by one estimate, 65 to 70 percent of Cheektowaga’s committee votes are allied with Max after Tuesday night.

Max himself, however, lost his committee race, which makes a poor argument for his candidacy for county chairman.

Scorched earth

Most folks do not pay much attention to county committee races, nor for that matter do most folks know what committee people do. (They vote for the county chairman, for one thing, who controls the county party’s purse and its endorsement process. They endorse candidates in district-wide races, and they are the party’s foot soldiers in the camapign season.) What most people saw in this election was a series of slugfests: Jack Davis and Jon Powers wailing at one another in the race for the 26th Congressional District, leaving the door wide open for attorney Alice Kryzan to win the Democratic nomination. Michele Iannello throwing jabs at former heavyweight Joe Mesi, all but calling him a dumb jock.

The biggest mudpit of all was the Hoyt/Kavanaugh race. While Kavanaugh ran what she described as a parallel campign to Hoyt—“I’m the same on issues but don’t have the personal baggage and 16 years incumbency in the most dysfunctional state government in the country”—Pigeon used Golisano’s money to marshal his signature network of shady PACs and committees to out Hoyt’s infidelities with young women in Albany. Hoyt acknowledged the affairs after Buffalo’s strangest political anomaly Joe Illuzzi—the town gossip to whom politicians just can’t seem to stop giving money—published emails between Hoyt and one of the young women.

The existence of these emails is likely what caused Hoyt to bow out of the mayoral race in 2005, so whoever leaked them to Illuzzi wasn’t trying to save other interns from Hoyt’s lecherous grasp. If that were the motive, they’d have outed Hoyt far earlier.

The leaks were nominally strategic: Hoyt represents the biggest political power base within the city that is not allied with the mayor and his deputy, Steve Casey, and he is therefore considered a rival. Notwithstanding the fact that Hoyt withdrew from the mayoral race in 2005 in order to spare his family the revelations, and seemed therefore to have been removed as a rival, Brown and Casey have continued to attack and marginalize Hoyt on every front. That has included blocking projects within the city for which Hoyt has obtained funding. And now it’s included crippling an assemblyman who’s been a far more productive legislator in the last two years than he was previously. Assemply Speaker Sheldon Silver may feel compelled to censure Hoyt for his indiscretions, perhaps strip him of his seniority and his committee positions. Even if Hoyt deserves censure, that’s not good for Buffalo.

But the good of the city was not at the heart of the campaign against Hoyt. Kavanaugh never promised different polcies than Hoyt; in fact she explicitly promised the same policies. The reasons her candidacy attracted the support of Brown, Casey, and Pigeon (and by extension Golisano) were personal and political: Those three wanted to cut Hoyt down at the knees. Who cares if the end result was either a freshman legislator with no clout in Albany or a crippled one?

Poison politics

Politics in Buffalo are poisoned by personality, and too often our civic discourse unfolds in a tone befitting a grammar school playground. Asked if he could recall a lowlier, filthier campaign than Hoyt-Kavanaugh, former Tony Masiello aide and current HUD field office chief Steve Banko said he could not. The closest in his memory, he told me, was the three-way mayoral race between Jimmy Griffin, Arthur Eve, and Leslie Foschio, whom Banko supported. Banko said the Griffin campaign made much of Foschio’s first name— “What do you make of a guy named Leslie?”—to suggest he was effeminate, or gay, and so unsuitable for office.

That’s not the only reason Griffin won, but it helped.

Bruce Fisher, the former deputy county executive and current AV columnist, said he’s never witnessed or heard of a local political campaign as lowdown as this one. The only race to compare, he said, took place in Chicago, in which a mailer called Fisher’s candidate a rapist.

Current Buffalo Fiscal Stability Authority director and former Common Council president George Arthur agreed he’d never seen a campaign as personal and sleazy as the one run against Hoyt. He recalled the particularly hard-hitting campaign between Chester Kowal and Frank Sedita, peppered with charges of corruption and criminal investigations—but those charges were legitimate issues, Arthur recalled, and neither candidate dragged families into the limelight. It just wasn’t done. “Here they’re involving people’s families,” he said. “And before families had been off-limits.”

Pigeon and his kind are enabled, Arthur said, by modern political methodology, which favors glossy mailings of dubious provenance, email campaigns, TV and radio ads. These tools separate the accuser from the accused, feeeing the accuser to make ever more outrageous claims. In the days of Kowal and Sedita, Arthur explained, campaigning was a more personal affair: If you wanted to call your opponent a racist, a bigamist, or an adulterer, you had to do so to his face. Consequently, those sorts of smears were more rare.

“You should be man or woman enough to stand up and make your claims and not hide behind some phony name like Mothers and Fathers Looking for Answers,” Arthur said.

That’s the group, funded by Responsible New York, which released a series of advertisements that focused on Hoyt’s affairs with young women in the week before Tuesday’s primary. To date, Mothers and Fathers Looking for Answers has not registered with the New York State Board of Elections, but when they do, we’ll know who exactly they are and how much money they spent on the ads. Don’t be surprised to find a remarkable overlap between the names associated with Mothers and Fathers Looking for Answers, Responsible New York, and other Pigeon-related committees and PACs such as Citizens for Fiscal Integrity, People for Accountable Government, Renew New York, and others. These committees wash money in ways that contravene state law, routinely fail to file campaign disclosure reports, and either deliberately or heedlessly muck up the reports they do file. It’s a cesspool of money that supports the worst kind of politics, which continue to hamstring this community. Hoyt’s supporters argued early on that Responsible New York, under Pigeon’s captaincy, was guilty of coordinating directly with the Kavanaugh and Mesi camapigns—a felony under New York State’s election law. You can bet there will be a court case filed in the coming months alleging as much.

Banko, the regional HUD chief, thinks the Hoyt/Kavanaugh campaign crossed a line, and now that the line has beenc rossed, it’s going to get worse.

“Number one, for all our rueing the deterioration of our public discourse, it works,” Banko said. “Karl Rove has taught us that it works.”

Hoyt won. We all lost. And nothing much has changed.