A Widow’s Fight

Carolyn McCarthy had been anguishing for weeks over whether to challenge a Republican congressman here in the heart of the most effective GOP machine in the country when an offer came for her to meet with President Clinton.

The president, she was told, wanted to persuade her to get into the race.

But McCarthy, a Long Island homemaker whose life was warped by tragedy, politely declined the invitation to the White House.

She needed to make up her own mind. Later she told a friend, “My God, the president wants to talk to me and I said no. Where am I? Is this a movie or my real life?”

McCarthy’s ordinary suburban existence hasn’t been quite the same since Dec. 7, 1993, the day her husband, Dennis, and their only child, Kevin, were caught in the cross-fire of the Long Island Rail Road massacre.

At 6:10 p.m. that day Colin Ferguson, a 35-year-old pathologically bigoted man from Brooklyn, rose from his seat as the commuter train approached a station not far from the McCarthys’ tiny clapboard house on Nancy Street, and began firing a 9-millimeter Ruger semiautomatic pistol, methodically shooting passengers, left to right, right to left. Within three minutes, Dennis McCarthy was dead, slumped over the lap of son Kevin. Each had a bullet in his head. In all, five died and 19, including Kevin, were wounded.

“That day changed my life forever,” Carolyn McCarthy told reporters last May when she announced that, yes, she would run against GOP incumbent Daniel Frisa in New York’s Fourth Congressional District. His vote to repeal a ban on the kind of ammunition clip used by Ferguson had been more persuasive than anything the president could have said.

“It’s a life I know I can never go back to,” she told reporters standing on a platform near her oversized garden. “But one thing I do know is I want to make sure that no family has to go through what we went through ever again.”

And now the widowed McCarthy--mother and nurse turned gun control advocate, lifelong Republican turned Democratic candidate--and the tall, charming freshman Congressman Frisa--who distinguished himself in Washington by the money he raised from special interests and the friends he made among conservative GOP leaders--are in one of the highest profile congressional races of 1996. Both national parties are vowing to pour money and resources into this contest.

To the Democrats, McCarthy has all the advantages of being an outsider but with name recognition not only within her own district but as far as Washington because of her lobbying for the assault-weapons ban. The Democrats would also like to make McCarthy a symbol of moderate Republicans’ disenchantment with House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s anti-government, shut-it-down movement and particularly of how Republican women part with the conservatives on issues such as gun control, abortion and the environment. And the Democrats are betting Frisa, who voted 93.5% of the time with the leadership, may be further right than his district on such issues.

“We’ve got a good shot at Frisa,” said a Democratic Party official in Washington who asked not to be quoted by name. “He’s had bad votes on clean water and clean air; he voted to cut student loans and cut Medicare in a way that hurts New York. For middle-class folk, it’s a tough record to defend in November.”

But McCarthy has yet to completely embrace the Democrats. Although the ballot will list her as a Democrat, she has refused to give up her GOP registration. During an interview in her living room, eerily within earshot of trains whistling through the Mineola station, she rarely mentioned Frisa. Her opponent seemed to be Gingrich and what he has done to “my party.”

“What I’m working for is not to have another vote for Newt,” she said.

But Republicans insist the Long Island race will prove the potency of what the Gingrich leadership has been agitating for in Washington these past two years: to cut spending, to lower taxes, to make government manageable.

“People in Nassau County ultimately are interested in taxes and in their pocketbooks, and Frisa gets that,” said Joseph Mondello, leader of the legendary Nassau County Republican Party that people feel compelled to join if they want to get their street fixed, their kid a summer job or a cabana on the beach.

Mondello admitted that he has no reason to support Frisa since he foiled the party twice by challenging a GOP incumbent. But support Frisa he will.

“He’s worked hard enough,” Mondello said. “Voters may feel sorry for Carolyn McCarthy and what she’s been through . . . but that’s not all there is.”

*

Yet for McCarthy “what she’s been through”--the horror of her husband’s death; the pain of watching their 28-year-son cope with brain damage, a paralyzed arm, fingers that don’t quite work; and the politicization that transformed her into the Sarah Brady of the 1990s--seemed to culminate on March 22 when the House voted to repeal the ban on 19 varieties of assault-type weapons.

“I just broke down,” McCarthy said.

She had spent two years, out three and four nights a week traversing Long Island and New York State, crusading first to get the ban and then fighting the repeal. She was even somewhat hopeful it would stick. After all, nationally it was reported that there had been an 18% drop in crimes traced to weapons that fire many rounds quickly. McCarthy felt confident, she said, that at least locally her congressmen understood what was at stake.

But among the majority, in the 239-173 vote for repeal, was Dan Frisa, who according to published reports had accepted $9,900 from the National Rifle Assn. McCarthy was stunned that a man who represents the district that probably saw the worse assault-weapon crime in the nation in the 1990s could vote the way he had.

After the vote, when a local reporter asked her if she was upset enough to challenge Frisa, she blurted out: “Yeah, I got my Irish up, I’ll do it.”

Over the next few months she searched her soul and searched the parties, deciding whether she belonged deeper in the abyss that has become electoral politics. She met with Mondello and Sen. Al D’Amato, also a Nassau Republican, trying to cajole them into letting her do unto Frisa as he had done to the GOP incumbent two years ago. But while each was warm and protective, she said, they wouldn’t abandon their man Frisa. (“There are always people you disagree with, but you stay with the organization,” Mondello said.)

McCarthy also met with a slew of Democrats, including former Gov. Mario Cuomo, whom she had helped in 1994 by appearing in a 60-second commercial praising his support of an assault-weapons ban.

Primarily, Cuomo advised her not to be pressured into running; he also warned her: “They’re going to pee on your shoes if you run. They’re going to treat you with a lack of integrity.” But he also encouraged her and has been generous with advice and fund-raising tips.

“Carolyn is stronger politically than either the Democrats or Republicans because she’s neither,” Cuomo said. “She is where Americans are. They’ll all call themselves something but they would prefer to tell you what they don’t like about either party.”

*

At the same time McCarthy was making up her mind about her future, Frisa seemed to be changing his about his past.

Although he voted for the repeal like 66 of the 73 freshmen, Frisa suddenly revealed a novel rationalization for his vote: It was too soft, he insisted, offering up the Safe Streets Act of 1996, a tougher, all-or-nothing ban. This certainly surprised people who distinctly remember Frisa in a televised debate during the 1994 campaign carping that the ban went too far.

“I don’t think further restrictions on the ownership of firearms by licensed individuals, law-abiding people, is going to solve anything,” Frisa told the TV audience.

Despite the urging of party leaders, Frisa avoided repeated requests for interviews for this story; his staff also did not respond when asked to provide an explanation of his change of heart on the ban and of his record in Congress.

While both Mondello and Rep. Bill Paxon, the powerful upstate New York Republican who is a close friend of Frisa’s, made themselves available for interviews to support him, neither had an explanation for his gun vote.

“All I can say is one vote does not an election make,” Paxon said.

Frisa’s one vote, however, unquestionably drew out this opponent. But McCarthy wouldn’t have taken on an entrenched opponent if she didn’t think he was vulnerable--and if she wasn’t driven in other ways.

“I lost 10 pounds making the decision to run,” she said. “It took more out of me than Kevin’s illness. . . . But in the end my decision was all about: Can I do a good job for my district? Can I be an example to others who might be reluctant to get into politics?”

McCarthy grew up in the house on Nancy Street where she raised her own son and still lives. Mostly she took care of her family and worked as a licensed practical nurse. She and her husband, who worked for a Manhattan insurance company, were great outdoorsmen, using their middle-class house as a base for skiing, fishing and golfing.

That house has been turned into a campaign headquarters with strangers--potential volunteers--wandering in and out. Now her dining room table, still covered with a flowered cloth, is strewn with faxes and telephone messages. And while Kevin is finally back to work--after months of rehabilitation--the house is again filled with “children”--20-year-olds in shorts and T-shirts and law-school haircuts stuffing envelopes and calling to get her speaking invitations.

In the middle of it all is McCarthy, talking on the phone, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail and blue eyes narrowed as she tries to charm campaign donations from total strangers. In her white T-shirt and beige shorts and white sneakers, she looks less the candidate and more a mother hen among her chicks. For despite her status as a political novice, she has yet to become a marionette.

When a campaign aide tries to get her to finish up an interview after 45 minutes so she can start fund-raising on the phone, she cuts him off--and shows she is a quick study of politics.

“Don’t you remember that [previous newspaper] article about me raised all those $25 and $35 donations through the mail? I’ll be finished when I’m ready.”

McCarthy is both plain-spoken and outspoken--or, as Cuomo put it: “She’s in your face if you disagree with her and in your face if you agree with her.”

When a man on the other end of a fund-raising call starts inquiring about an aspect of Medicaid that she clearly knows nothing about, she frankly admits it. It is these gaps that Frisa’s forces will clearly emphasize in the coming months.

But McCarthy, at 52, insisted that her life experience as a parent, a nurse, a woman who has negotiated the health care and educational systems for her son has grounded her and with common sense and hard work she’ll be a determined learner in Washington.

“I’ll listen to different points of view but make up my own mind,” she added, sneaking away from dialing-for-dollars for a minute to have a cigarette in the sunshine of her small backyard.

*

Dan Frisa’s background couldn’t be more different.

A committeeman in the Nassau Republican Party at 18, he had a brief career in sales before he was elected to the New York Assembly, where he sat next to governor-to-be George Pataki. He served for eight years at a time when Republicans were in the minority and their routine was to cast votes with the party leadership and turn around for the trip back to the district. On those long drives between Albany and Long Island, Frisa was known to listen to political motivational tapes of Newt Gingrich.

In 1992, Frisa broke with Mondello’s Nassau machine and challenged its congressional candidate, David Levy. Frisa lost that round but stepped forward almost undetected for a rematch in 1994. Showing a flair for marketing, he was able to quietly penetrate the district with oversized red-and-white postcards, promoting himself as the ultimate outsider and lulling the Nassau machine into complacency. Frisa beat Levy by 54 votes and neatly overran a Democrat opponent who outspent him by $200,000.

Once in Washington, Frisa’s Albany pal Paxon, now head of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, had him appointed to the Commerce Committee, perhaps the best assignment for raising campaign money. And Frisa, among the freshman who swept into office pledging to change how Congress worked, showed some things never change. In his first year, he received $269,881 from political action committees, third highest in his freshman class of 73.

Mike Collins, GOP spokesman for the Commerce Committee, said Frisa worked hard on reform bills and made many friends.

“This is the busiest committee and he is a respected member of it and he’s a real nice guy with a sense of humor. He’s polite to the staff and he hasn’t gotten Potomac fever.”

Even a Democratic aide to the committee complimented Frisa for being “a nice guy,” but added: “He’s not a 100-watt bulb.”

Closer to home, Newsday this spring rated him the worst member of Long Island’s five-man delegation and labeled him a “PAC pig and a party animal” for being last to leave lobbyists’ receptions.

Even the Baldwin Citizen, part of a chain of nine community newspapers that had endorsed Frisa in 1994, took him to task both for his vote to repeal the assault-weapons ban and for having forgotten the folks “back home.”

“He doesn’t return phone calls or letters from his constituents. Neither does his staff,” said editor Patricia Horwell. “The irony is he went off and did the same thing he said he wouldn’t do.”

But before the community newspaper decides to completely abandon Frisa for McCarthy, she has to show that she’s more than just a sainted widow who in the course of dealing with tragedy never showed bitterness but only resolve, Horwell said.

“I know her strengths,” Horwell said. “She just has to show she has the strength to get beat up in Congress the way she has been beat up in life.”