My suggestion to the new organizers of public access TV in our area is that they mix it up. There are a lot of interesting people out there with a lot of interesting things to say and show. Government alone will not make it must-see TV.
There’s also this. When cable TV first came in with its potential for televising public meetings live, the aldermen were all agog at the prospect of “being on TV” once a month. Alderman-at-large Bob Gallo, Kingston’s only father of two mayors, advised caution.
“If people see us on TV every month,” he warned, “none of us will ever get re-elected.”
It’s funny how some things come full circle.
Reinforcing success
We know newly minted Democratic state Sen. Cecilia Tkaczyk has every intention of establishing a district office somewhere in Kingston, She makes the pledge at least once a week. But why is it taking so long? She was officially elected in mid-January, and we’re now approaching mid-March.
No doubt the senator wishes she’d had an office up and running a month ago like Congressman Chris Gibson did, but the state Senate leadership, like any other bureaucracy, has its operating procedures. “We don’t know where to send our [Senate-related] constituency inquiries,” an official told me over the weekend.
A generation ago, Dick Schermerhorn, an entrenched Republican senator under multiple criminal indictments, got knocked off by Art Gray, a no-name undertaker from Port Jervis. “He won’t get a spoonful of blacktop,” the sore loser predicted on election night.
Gray didn’t even get a district office approved by the Republican-controlled Senate until nine months into his first year. For better or worse, the product of those hardball tactics was Senator-for-Life Bill Larkin, elected in 1990.
These days, the state Senate is controlled by a coalition of minority Republicans and a five-member Democratic cabal from the big city and environs. Ostensibly, Republicans rule, which might explain why Democrat Tkaczyk isn’t getting much blacktop these days.
There’s also the fact that Republicans invested over a million bucks in this district, only to see presumably sure-thing George Amedore lose to Tkaczyk by just 19 votes. Amedore, I’m told by sources in the northern end of the district, is sounding very much like a candidate for 2014 these days.
If the Democrats decide they have a stake in this district, they will move quickly to reinforce success — Tkaczyk’s hair’s-breadth election — by pumping money and PR into a district nobody expected them to carry a year ago.
