NEW YORK CONGRESSIONAL VICTORIES COULD BRING THE DEMOCRATS 6 SEATS-- THOUGH I DON'T SEE WHY 7 OR 8 ISN'T AS REALISTIC

Last night someone sent me a note saying I should try being nice to Hillary because (obviously alluding to this article) she is going to help the Democrats recapture the House of Representatives in November by helping sweep 6 rubber-stamp Republicans out of office in New York. OK, this is how nice I can be to Hillary: she's better than a Republican. I can't be nicer than that without flirting with obfuscation.

Although Democrats hold 20 of the 29 seats currently, I am happy that someone thinks they stand a chance to pick up half a dozen GOP-held seats in the state, possibly taking seats currently occupied by rubber-stamp hacks John Sweeney, Sherwood Boehlert, Randy Kuhl, Tom Reynolds, James Walsh, and Sue Kelly. It should be 7. It isn't 7 because one of the slimy Democratic insiders helping to plot Hillary's run for the White House was too busy making vicious war against grassroots and progressive Democrats to have noticed that arguably the most vulnerable of all the rubber-stamp Republicans in New York State-- the last Republican congressman on Long Island-- had no challenger. Isn't that part of the chairman of the DCCC's job? I mean, instead of knifing good solid Democrats like Christine Cegelis, Dave Lutrin, Paul Hackett and dozens of others in the backs, shouldn't Rahm Emanuel have been making sure-- recruiting, which all his lame apologists say he's so good at-- - that Peter King would have a challenger prepared for the Democratic tsunami? The filing deadline isn't until mid-July so let's hope that someone jumps in on this race. Last year's two "most likely," State Representative Davis Bishop and Nassau County Legislator Dave Mejias have both demurred.

Normally Democrats are more likely to not run someone in a deep red district filled with KKK members and brainwashed religionist fanatics waiting for the End of Times. I grew up in NY-03 and this is not that kind of a district. It is a classically moderate suburban district, the kind where Democrats have been making gigantic headway in recent years, particularly in 2005 when Democrats swept these kinds of areas in New Jersey and Virginia. This mostly Nassau County district includes Long Beach, Levittown, Lindenhurst, Glen Cove, Hicksville. Despite the Republican registration advantage, it's anything but a GOP lock. In 2004 King's Democratic challenger, Blair Mathies, had no discernible help from the DCCC or the local Democratic Party but garnered around 60,000 votes. King won with 63% while Bush was beating Kerry 52% to 47%. (The Republican voter registration edge has eroded lately but was still a hefty 63,000 in 2005.)

Right now it looks like Dave Denenberg, a somewhat tainted Nassau County legislator whose own conviction on an election misdemeanor will probably keep him from effectively nailing Peter King on his ties to the pervasive Republican Culture of Corruption in DC, will be the best the Democrats' can come up with. If you click on that link you'll have to take my word that he's a Democrat since not only does it not say so on the site, but when you click on the heading "Political Party," it is conspicuously blank, although if you look closely you may see a small jackass' head on the upper left corner of the page.

Or maybe it could have been 8, since NY-13 has a 60,000 Democratic voter registration advantage and the rubber-stamp incumbent, Vito Fossella, could be defeated by a strong, well-financed, straight-talking Democrat. The putative challenger, Steve Harrison, has no website, no campaign I have seen any evidence of, and appears to be hoping that anti-Republican sentiment grows so strong that anyone who is not a Republican will be swept into office. I was on a conference call a couple weeks ago with the architects of that abysmal strategy-- although neither as extreme as Harrison appears to be-- and listening to them (Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer) made me understand why Democrats have gone from the majority party to a party that can't believe in itself enough to grasp the diamond crown when it's being handed to them on a silver solid gold platter. Fossella is pure rubber stamp and completely involved with all the sleaze and garbage represented by Tom DeLay, Roy Blunt and John Boehner, but unless a Democrat is out there making the case, Fossella will walk into his 6th miserable term of misrepresenting Staten Island and a slice of Brooklyn.

So thanks Hill (and, of course, Spitzer) for doing your best to serve your own interests and in the process turning out lots of Democrats who may vote for Dems further down the ticket. Are there any actual leaders in the New York Democratic Party though?

(I'll get to the good news-- the Democrats who look like their own efforts against Republicans in some upstate districts-- over the next couple of weeks.)