Like Ted Cruz, Sean Eldridge Was Born In Canada And Like Cruz He Thinks He Can Be President

The first big New York Times coverage of Sean Eldridge's campaign for the Republican-held blue seat in the upper Hudson Valley/Catskills (NY-19) killed his race among actual progressives. This sentence went over especially badly for many: "Mr. Eldridge grew up in a middle-class community in Ohio, where both of his parents were doctors; they say he has a genuine understanding of people of modest means." Where I was from the kids with even just one parent who was a doctor were the richest members of the community-- not the ones who were of modest means. Eldridge's expensive, blue chip campaign is widely recognized as the worst-run, most embarrassing congressional campaign of 2014. He spent $6,333,592, more than double what he Republican opponent spent, and of that $4,255,000 (66%) was from his own bank account. (He spent an astounding $84.51 per vote he wound up with, nearly 4 times what his opponent spent.) Most of the rest came from his wealthy pals. Not much came from anyone of modest means.

He was recruited by Steve Israel for one reason-- the ability to self-fund, despite an obvious inability to win one of the most winnable seats the Republicans held. And Israel was happy to see Eldridge hire all the hack consultants that make the DCCC world spin round and round. One of Alex Isenstadt's first campaign reports on the 19th mentioned that Sean had turned the effort into a multimillion-dollar start-up.

It has unfolded in rapid-fire sequence. After Eldridge decided he wanted to run for office, he and Hughes in 2011 bought the first of two luxurious homes in the Hudson Valley region. Soon after, Eldridge set up a venture capital firm, Hudson River Ventures, that has provided millions in loans and equity lines to local companies. And now the first-time candidate, who’s running his first business, is touting the jobs he’s created in the blue-collar district.

“I know firsthand what it takes to support small businesses and create good jobs,” reads one pamphlet his campaign is plastering throughout the area.

...It’s difficult to size up the person behind the polished image Eldridge and his campaign are projecting to voters. He’s been running for more than half a year but remains mostly an enigma.

Congressional challengers typically seek maximum media exposure; Eldridge allows few chance encounters with the media. His campaign frequently posts pictures on his Facebook page of the candidate out and about in the district, but local reporters say they’re usually not made aware of his public schedule ahead of time. He declined to be interviewed by Politico, and the door to his campaign headquarters in Kingston was locked on a recent visit. No one answered a call on an intercom.

...Eldridge employs a team of prominent political consultants-- including media firm SKDKnickerbocker, polling outfit Global Strategy Group and veteran party operative Anne Lewis-- who carefully tend to his image. Through the end of last year [2013], he paid the three entities a total of $241,000, campaign records show.

Sean's campaign was entirely consultant dominated and they made a fortune off his grotesque loss. One, Jeff Pollock of Global Strategy Group, was used to track down the "spy" Sean insisted DWT had inside his campaign (who told us about the weekly bagels and lox deliveries from Steve Israel) by investigating Facebook patterns, although Sean confirmed the poor innocent suspect by seizing his cell phone and finding a friend of DWT on the call list! And Sean thinks-- or thought-- he was on a path to the presidency (of the United States); really. With all that money he was spending on consultants, he paid one of them to map out a long-term strategy to get him into the White House. Jamie Kirchick: "Chris Hughes and Sean Eldridge have always been entitled brats. And now the media has finally noticed."

In just the past two months, one half of this pair managed to single-handedly destroy a storied journalistic institution, while the other suffered a crushing electoral defeat in New York’s 19th Congressional District. Last week, the 31-year-old Hughes forced the resignations of both the editor and literary editor of the New Republic, whose 100th anniversary he presided over last month at a star-studded gala in Washington, D.C.

In protest of the magazine’s newly ensconced CEO’s plan to transform TNR into a “vertically integrated digital media company,” the majority of the magazine’s senior and contributing editors resigned.

Weeks before the implosion at TNR, 28-year-old Eldridge lost his congressional bid by a stunning 30 points, despite having outspent his opponent nearly 3-to-1 in a district President Obama won by 6 percentage points. The couple had purchased a $2 million home in the district expressly so that Eldridge could run there, their purchase of a $5 million mansion in the adjoining 18th having come to naught after that seat was won by another gay Democrat in 2012.

...A New York Times profile, meanwhile, set the scene at a Paris Review fundraiser hosted by the couple at Cipriani (the 42nd Street location, not the Wall Street one, where they celebrated their wedding with 400 of their closest friends). In it, a series of Manhattan literary and media bigwigs prostrated themselves before the two like nobles at a royal court.

“They are very generous with their money and time,” Richard Socarides, a former Clinton administration staffer and television pundit prattled. “They are young, rich, smart, and good-looking. It’s a pretty powerful combination.”

Powerful indeed. At their 4,000-square-foot, $5 million SoHo loft, Hughes and Eldridge hosted fundraisers for Nancy Pelosi and Andrew Cuomo, and raised money for worthy causes like gay marriage. All the while they racked up favorable coverage in the mainstream press, and even more sycophantic mentions in the gay press. In 2011, Hughes and Eldridge graced the cover of The Advocate’s “40 under 40” issue, and the following year Hughes came in at No. 28 on OUT’s “Power List.” Nearly every profile remarked upon the young men’s precocity. They possessed “wisdom beyond their years,” observed The Advocate. “The youngest old man any of us knows,” an unnamed friend of Atlantic Publisher David Bradley said of Hughes.

Earlier this year, former TNR staffer and Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank sent Hughes a fawning email in which he praised the young owner for “doing the Lord’s work” in purchasing the perpetually money-losing magazine, calling him a “21st-century Walter Lippman.”

...Eldridge’s path to fame is even more accidental. In 2010, he dropped out of law school to take up a job as communications director for a gay-rights organization, an appointment soon followed by his husband’s donation of a quarter-million dollars to the group. Nine months after Hughes told New York magazine, “He’s 26. He’s going to do all kinds of things in politics, but I don’t think there’s any rush,” to run for office, Eldridge announced his congressional candidacy.

Even by the already money-drenched standards of American politics, the Eldridge campaign was a jaw-dropping spectacle to behold. In preparation for a campaign, Eldridge established Hudson River Ventures, essentially a vote-buying apparatus masquerading as an economic-development project, to win over small-business owners and their employees. He then traipsed around the district dispensing “investments” ranging from $50,000 to $500,000 to local companies. The couple then bought a property in the town of Shokan, in New York’s 19th District, just months after Eldridge told the Times that it was their original mansion, in the 18th, where “we put down roots, where we want to have a family.”

Eldridge retained SKDKnickerbocker, a heavy-hitting Democratic political consulting firm, which also happened to be doing public-relations work for his investment fund. “Candidates who employ people in the districts they’re running in enjoy some advantages. What’s so unusual about this situation is that he’s being so transparent about it,” Paul Herrnson, executive director of the University of Connecticut’s Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, told Politico. Lacking any sense of irony, Eldridge made campaign-finance reform a signature plank.

To no one’s surprise except, perhaps, the pampered couple, Eldridge lost the race to the Republican incumbent 65 percent to 35 percent. In light of the massive amounts of money Hughes dumped into the race, it was one of the most humiliating defeats in the last election cycle. But Eldridge’s political ambition is not likely to be satiated. Several years ago, before he ever announced his candidacy, a source close to Eldridge told me that he had SKDKnickerbocker draw up a plan for him to become the first openly gay president of the United States (Eldridge was born in Canada and until recently held both Canadian and Israeli citizenship, which would make it difficult to overcome the Constitution’s natural-born citizenship clause). Expect the couple to find another mansion in a safe Democratic district where an aging representative is expected to retire.

One suspects that had this couple been heterosexual and conservative, the initial media attention would not have been quite so toadying. We would have no doubt been treated to endless stories about how a “rapacious” “right-wing” millionaire, who had done nothing to earn his fortune, set out to destroy one of liberalism’s great institutions all the while enabling his power-mad spouse to “buy” a seat in Congress. But everything about the Hughes-Eldridge pairing militated against such a portrayal. The prospect of a fresh-faced, conventionally liberal, gay couple hit every media sweet spot.

Hughes and Eldridge are not “role models for a future generation of… gay people,” as The Advocate absurdly stated. They are little more than entitled brats who, like most fabulously wealthy arrivistes who attain their fortunes through sheer luck rather than hard work, are used to getting everything they want, when they want it, and throw temper tantrums when they don’t.

In their elitism and sense of entitlement, they represent much of what liberals are supposed to despise. Most in the media and gay community were perfectly willing to ignore this imposture when the couple was throwing their money at the right causes and dispensing jobs to their journalist and political consultant friends. Hughes and Eldridge were beneficiaries of a corrupt and compliant media and political establishment that grasped at their filthy lucre. Only now that the fairy tale has come crashing down-- a magazine destroyed, a devastating political loss suffered-- is the herd willing to admit the obvious.