The Nassau County GOP Machine Blows a Gasket
As long as we're making of list of people who are not running for president
next year, I think we can safely add the names of all the Nassau County
Republicans who got ousted from office this week. I've been thinking how
amazing it is, after nearly a century of Republican rule here on Long Island,
that the voters finally got fed up enough to buck the system. These Republicans
were so well entrenched that they made Mayor Richard Daley's machine in Chicago
look amateurish. What finally did them in was making a financial muck of the
county's budget, getting the county's bond rating downgraded, and proposing a
big county tax increase this year.
I've always thought that the history of the ascent--and now perhaps,
fall--of the Nassau GOP would make a wonderful nonfiction book. Fraught with
intrigue, double-crossings, party leaders who went to jail, demands that loyal
followers tithe 1 percent of their salary to the system. I saw this quote this
week in the Long Island newspaper, Newsday , in which a GOP loyalist was
boasting publicly about how well organized a "machine" the Republican Party was
in getting out the vote.
I remember, when I used to cover county politics for Newsday , how
frustrating it was to run up against that implacable wall of united party
loyalty. The Republicans used to hold these "informal" private meetings where
all the issues would be decided in a conference room. Then they would emerge to
take a "public" vote at meetings, often with little or no discussion of even
the most complicated topic. If anyone attending the public meeting raised a
question about this procedure, the Republicans would react in shock--and
belligerence--at the idea of being challenged.
The Republican machine in Nassau is a real throwback politically to the way
things used to be done routinely; the fact that it's survived so long is
amazing. It's like the political equivalent of one of those tribes of wholly
isolated people that explorers stumble on from time to time in the jungle. Over
the years, as the world around the Nassau Republicans changed and got more
sophisticated and subtle, the GOP just hunkered down protecting a philosophy of
backroom business as usual.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the county executive, a
Republican named Gulotta, who is widely credited with the budget fracas, comes
up for election next. He's enjoyed a comfortable decade or more in office.
