Staten Island: Donovan will run, but can he hide?
With the announcement that the Staten Island Republican Party will back Dan Donovan as their nominee for the empty seat in New York’s 11th Congressional District, it is all but certain the Richmond County District Attorney will stand in the special election to fill the U.S. House seat vacated earlier this month by admitted felon Michael Grimm.
And this is giving national GOP leaders headaches.
It is not that the National Republican Campaign Committee (the NRCC — the congressional organization responsible for helping elect Republicans to the House of Representatives) is worried Donovan will lose — the district, which encompasses all of Staten Island and a sliver of Brooklyn, is heavily Republican, and has ostensibly been under GOP control all but two of the last 22 years. Rather, they are worried what happens if he wins — or at least what happens during the coming campaign.
For his part, Donovan says he hopes his current job performance doesn’t become an issue.
Donovan, you see, is the DA who just last month announced his grand jury did not return an indictment on Daniel Pantaleo, the New York police officer responsible for the chokehold death of 43-year-old Staten Island resident Eric Garner. The decision not to indict Pantaleo, who is white, in the death of Garner, who was black, sparked weeks of public protests in New York City and across the country, as well as numerous smaller demonstrations referencing Garner’s last words, “I can’t breathe.”
"I would hope that they would respect the fact that there was a man who died, a mother who lost her son and there's a wife who lost her husband and some children who lost their dad," Donovan said, without a hint of irony, on a radio talk show Sunday.
National implications
GOP observers do not share Donovan’s preemptive hope, it seems, so they would rather that, when Gov. Andrew Cuomo sets the date for the election, district party leaders see their way clear to back someone else.
“I think we would have a complete and utter circus on our hands,” said David Catalfamo, a former top aide to former Republican New York Gov. George Pataki, in an interview with Politico. “[Donovan’s] candidacy would ultimately nationalize the race, which is what Republicans in the city, state and country do not need.”
Not when the national party is looking at a Presidential-year election where they not only want to woo non-white voters to their national candidate, but where they have to defend twice as many Senate seats as Democrats. A race where Donovan is forced to remind voters that the system again deferred to police in the death of an unarmed African-American might actually help the DA win this district, but, coming on top of moves to roll back civil rights-era voter access laws and fights over immigration and minimum wage, it doesn’t help promote the idea of a big-tent GOP.
But, honestly, asking whether the Garner decision will be an issue in the special election is a question with little suspense.
Yes. It will be an issue. Local Republicans and National Democrats likely want it to be.
The tougher question here, both to ask and answer, is sort of the inverse.
Ask not if the Garner grand jury will be an issue in the coming election; ask if the coming election was an issue in the Garner grand jury.
Political animal
Already known as a political animal during the time before he worked as head prosecutor — Donovan served under several Staten Island borough presidents, “working to get Republican candidates elected,” according to a pro-Donovan source in the Daily News — Donovan’s political ambitions have now been laid a tad more bare. When Donovan revealed his interest in replacing Grimm in the House, he said he had delayed his announcement until after the city had mourned the deaths of two police officers murdered in December by a man who referenced Garner’s death in posts on social media.
But, by a time well before that, it appeared to most politically savvy Staten Islanders that there might be a special election in the 11th CD’s near future.
Prosecutors filed a 20-count indictment of Rep. Grimm in April of last year, and though Grimm coasted to re-election over a sub-par Democratic challenger, it seemed pretty clear federal prosecutors weren’t going to just let this one go. Grimm was either going to trial or going to cop a plea, and either way, he was going to be an albatross around congressional Republicans’ necks, and hard-pressed to effectively represent his district. It wasn’t really a question of if Grimm would go, just a question of how and when.
This was already, no doubt, abundantly clear to Donovan when he convened the grand jury in the Garner case in August, and wasn’t a thought likely to subside as the grand jury proceedings and Grimm’s high-profile election-cum-legal battle played out almost simultaneously.
Where you stand
Staten Island is a borough distinctly different from the rest of New York City. The adult population is almost 70 percent non-Hispanic white, compared with a greater NYC that is majority minority. Polls in the wake of Garner’s death showed Staten Islanders to be overwhelmingly supportive of the police (75 percent approve of the job police do, compared with 52 percent of all New Yorkers), and only 41 percent of residents believed charges should be brought against Officer Pantaleo, compared with 64 percent of New Yorkers, overall.
There is an old saying in government circles: Where you stand is where you sit, and where you sit is where you stand. Its meaning, if not already evident, is that someone’s positions on issues and policy (where you stand) are influenced by what office or station he or she occupies (where you sit). And, conversely, what job a person has or department he or she hails from will almost certainly influence thinking on the issues. As folks in the diplomatic core will remark, it is not a big stretch to extend this axiom to geographical location.
If you are Donovan, and you are standing before a grand jury drawn from this particular Staten Island population, and you are maybe, just maybe, somewhere in your mind harboring ambition to try your luck with the Staten Island electorate, how do you later clear away any suspicion that politics might have influenced the care and feeding of the Garner proceeding?
To be fair, it is hard to prove a negative — but it will be impossible not to consider the Garner-Pantaleo case during the run-up to the special election. Donovan, who has said he will not take leave from his DA job during the 2015 campaign, wants voters to essentially ignore some of his past work while he seeks future employment — but was Donovan as good at compartmentalizing last year?
Error
Sorry, your comment was not saved due to a technical problem. Please try again later or using a different browser.