COLUMN: Playing politics, New York style

From Michael Pereira's, "Vox's," Fall '98 From Michael Pereira's, "Vox's," Fall '98I worked in Brooklyn last summer and read the newspaper on the train. The headlines at that time involved many of the opening volleys of events that are still unfolding: Milosevic harassing ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, Cigargate and the retrieval of Jewish money locked in Swiss banks by Nazis since World War Two. I was pleased to learn that the survivors' cause had been taken up by a prominent senator, but I raised an eyebrow at what seemed at first like a misalliance. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. "Senator Pothole," as he is lovingly called by friends and foes alike, is an expert opportunist and a kind of demagogue, inasmuch as jaded New Yorkers will fall for demagoguery. He's no literary theorist, in the tradition of Bill Clinton, but he gets the point across. In his 18 dutiful years as a United States senator, he has proven time and again his unrelenting opposition to abortion and his firm stance against federal aid to education. Though he doesn't boast about it, D'Amato stands firmly against the Brady law, the assault weapons ban and motions to put trigger locks on guns. He's published, too. The author of Power, Politics and Pasta (smiling on the cover next to his mama and a bowl of her special sauce) imagines himself as an essential link in a chain of important Italian-American politicians from New York: Fiorello La Guardia, D'Amato and the man D'Amato might call his protege, the Yankee fan known as Rudy Guilliani. D'Amato worked his way up, from high school gyms in Nassau County to the Senate floor of our nation's capital. It was a lot of rubber turkeys in between, but that's the price of public service. All along he's had an uncanny instinct for the negative, as Bob Herbert called it in The New York Times, an ability to trivialize tragedy or to elevate the inconsequential to high priority. Whatever works -- the man's not afraid to get his hands dirty. All the more tragic, then, is D'Amato's most recent appropriation of the Holocaust in the Senate race with Charles "Chuck" Schumer, a Brooklyn Democrat. There's been no shortage of mud slung between these two gentlemen in the past couple months. Only recently, though, has the tenor of insults moved from the usual ad hominems to a version of coded race-baiting. D'Amato's main charge against Schumer is bad attendance. Schumer, he says, has missed Congressional roll calls on Holocaust issues, one concerning the retrieval of those Swiss bank deposits and another allowing the use of the Capital Rotunda for a commemoration. The latter passed 406-0 (even without Schumer's participation), yet D'Amato uses it to illustrate Schumer's apostasy. In D'Amato's own words: "[Schumer] missed the vote to make the Capital Rotunda available for a magnificent Holocaust commemoration ceremony. That's the difference. I've been there. I understand that you've got to be there." His strategy is like asking your middle school teacher for a good grade just because your classmate is absent for the day. Schumer has countered by accusing D'Amato of "politicizing" the Holocaust after a news conference held Sunday at the Holocaust Memorial Wall across from the United Nations in New York. Representative Jerrold Nadler, a Manhattan Democrat, joined Schumer in his condemnation. By way of response, D'Amato suggested a new nickname for the representative -- "Jerry Waddler," a not-so-subtle allusion to Nadler's substantial weight. The D'Amato camp has accused Schumer of willful manipulation of the language, turning the political into the pejoratively ethno-religious. According to Robert Bellafiore, the D'Amato campaign spokesperson, Schumer's people did not deny that the term "Brooklyn Liberal" might be religious code words. Note: they did not suggest or promote the leap of linguistic faith, but merely did not deny it. For D'Amato, that constituted a manipulation of his words and intentions, even if that was in fact what he meant. He told Schumer as much in a letter which began, "Dear Chuck." Was this a window into D'Amato's heart of controversy, infrequently but grossly exposed to the public, such as in the infamous episode in 1995 when he went on the radio and used a mock Japanese accent to ridicule Judge Lance Ito of O.J. Simpson infame? Or was it, as apologist Koch said, "no big deal"? D'Amato was, as Koch reminds us, "in a private meeting, which is off the record, with friends. And he's responding in part to the fact that Schumer has called him a liar." Most probably it's a combination of both. D'Amato's of the generation where Jews and Italians lived side by side without much money in places like Brooklyn. If a few Yiddishisms enter into his speech, it might just be evidence of a cultural cross-pollination, of time spent around old Jewish New Yorkers (a last bastion of the dying Yiddish language) defending their rights and their history. If unbounded avarice motivates Senator Pothole to the occasional Good Work, then so much the better. The substance of his mudslinging is implausible and therefore inconsequential. Nobody believes that Schumer doesn't care about the Holocaust -- he and his wife both lost family -- and nobody believes that D'Amato is motivated by noble emotions. He's a creepy little man, an obvious Machiavellian who would do just about anything in pursuit of his three dominating passions: power, politics and pasta.