Exporting a passion for the election

Never has the New York experience been so central to a presidential election, and never have New Yorkers felt so sidelined. It’s one thing to be sidelined by your politics -- like Los Angeles, this city is always to the left of the country. But it’s another to be marginalized while everyone is talking about you.

It’s like being the guest of honor at a party you’re not invited to attend.

What happened at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, has shaped this campaign, but it won’t be decided anywhere near here. Rather, it’ll probably all come down to turnout at two churches in a place like Ohio -- one white and evangelical, the other black and Baptist.

But why should the candidates or the campaigns bother with us? The race here has been over for a while. A poll last week showed Kerry/Edwards ahead of Bush/Cheney among likely voters by 37 percentage points in the city and 18 points statewide.

So it’s no surprise that Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) spent a whopping $2,000 on political ads in New York’s expensive media market. That’s significantly less than many New Yorkers spend on their monthly co-op fees.

The Kerry-Edwards campaign did raise $28 million in this city, which is significantly more than all but a few New Yorkers pay for their co-ops. President Bush coughed up a mighty $11,000 for ads that aired here around the time of the Republican convention while his campaign plucked $9 million from this city, mostly from Wall Street wallets.

“Candidates come here for the dough,” says Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic political strategist. “Then they come back for more dough and for the relationships and the salons, and sometimes they come for the Council on Foreign Relations and for the exclusive clubs or to see people in power. But always it’s the dough. They don’t come here to do real politics.”

Sheinkopf is a former cop who got into politics because he loves the tumult. He’s worked on about 600 campaigns. This time, he says, New Yorkers are either really upset about Bush “or they ain’t talkin’ about the campaign that much. There are no gradations, no minimalist arguments. It’s either ‘Bush has to go’ or no discussion. Which is kind of strange for this place.”

We’re having coffee at an outdoor table on Union Square; Sheinkopf purposely picked this spot because it recalls New York when it was at the center of national politics. This is where the great radicalism of the 20th century began, where unions rallied and presidential candidates came, even if they knew they’d get heckled.

Crowds still gather on occasion, like in the days after Sept. 11 and when the anti-Bush demonstrations spilled onto the square during the GOP convention. But New York, with its 2 million registered Democrats, now only maintains its relevance because of the “dough” and because “it’s the hair shirt in the new form of populism, which is more cultural and more religious-based than economic and social,” says Sheinkopf.

Even he is sitting out the campaigning in this election, and it’s clearly a restless time for the man who ran ads for Bill Clinton’s reelection bid in 1996.

Feeling powerless

The fact is, people who think they live in the center of the world hate being immaterial. Just like they couldn’t stand that they were powerless from stopping the men who put those airplanes into those buildings and killed almost 3,000 people on Sept. 11, they can’t stand that some cheese churner in Wisconsin is going to determine their fate.

“No New Yorker,” says Sheinkopf, “can ever tolerate that someone else could decide their destiny.”

Which explains the wave of what I call “electoral tourism” this year. Like lawyers who go to London to litigate because libel laws are favorable there, New Yorkers who don’t feel politically relevant in their own state are going somewhere they can be. They’ve been getting on planes to Florida and taking buses

to anywhere the Democratic

National Committee directs them.

Chris Colligan, a school nurse and Democratic political activist since she was 12, has boarded a bus outside Grand Central

every Saturday at 7:45 a.m. for two months and gone two hours into the battleground state of Pennsylvania to campaign for Kerry/Edwards. She pays $25 to volunteer. She never knows where she’s going on what she has come to call the “John Kerry

Victory Bus/Fall Foliage Tour.”

She just ends up where the bus drops her off.

“Thank God for cellphones,” she says with a hearty laugh. “Or I’d still be somewhere in Bucks County!” As she campaigns door to door, she tells people right off that she’s from New York, and “because I’m from New York, this election means so much to me.

“There’s not a lot I can do at home,” she tells Pennsylvanians, “so I want to be on the ground getting Sen. Kerry’s message across.”

Colligan, who could see the World Trade Center from her high-rise apartment complex called Stuyvesant Town on East 15th Street, makes the point that while the Bush campaign is talking about Sept. 11, she knows firsthand what happened that day and that “first responders, firefighters and cops didn’t have the money for new equipment and training to protect themselves. We hold the Republicans responsible for what happened then and for what’s happening now.”

A sense of caring

Colligan, with her Kerry talking points and script in hand, never worries that she’ll seem like a carpetbagger foisting her values where they don’t belong. “I think people say, “Gee, these New Yorkers must really care.’ I feel I’ve convinced people.”

This election tourism has become quite fashionable in Democratic circles in which people have maxed out on what they can afford to give to campaigns. So they’re expending their energy, many recapturing the rapture from their youth in the politically active 1960s.

A well-known publishing scion has turned his country house in Bucks County into a cushy “crash pad” for political weekend warriors. Three friends, women in their 50s, took a road trip, sharing the drive to Columbus, Ohio, where they worked the phone banks for Kerry. A two-career lawyer couple hauled their three children to Florida for the long Columbus Day weekend to campaign for Kerry. They also went to Disney World.

And on Sunday, 2,000 lawyers with their Blackberrys in tow flew to Florida to poll watch.

But this exporting of political values isn’t exclusive to Democrats.

Last week, Gov. George E. Pataki was in New Hampshire, Delaware, North Carolina and Florida stumping for Bush, and two former New York mayors, one a Republican and one a Democrat, were kibitzing in a buddy-radio ad for the Florida media market about why it’s important to keep the president in the White House.

Democrat Edward I. Koch and Republican Rudolph W. Giuliani say they “often disagree,” but they’re both backing Bush because he can win the war on terrorism. Giuliani says that while Bush is willing to stick with difficult positions even as public opinion shifts, Kerry is a man who changes his position often.

Koch chimes in, “President Bush will go after the terrorists and the countries that harbor them. That’s why, for the first time in my life, I’m voting for a Republican for president. I’m voting for George W. Bush. And I hope you will too.” The ad is apparently aimed at ex-New Yorkers and Jewish voters in Florida.

It did not air in New York.