The following appears in the November 20-26, 2009 issue of the Long Island Business News:

As Ed Mangano’s recount lead widens in the Nassau County executive race, incumbent Tom Suozzi has been busy spinning that his electoral demise is not his fault but rather that of angry, misinformed voters who punished him for taxes and policies that were not under his purview. “I’ve pretty much been a leader of the property tax revolt,” he told the Times, “and now I’m maybe a victim of it.”

To promote his “I am a victim” strategy, Suozzi in a post-election Newsday op-ed called for Nassau schools, which are currently run by 56 independent elected school district boards, to be controlled by the county executive. Suozzi’s rationale: Since he gets flack for onerous school taxes, he might as well have oversight responsibility just like New York City Mayor Bloomberg.

Suozzi’s “Hail Mary pass” proposal, tailored to address his electoral shortcomings, is deeply flawed and his comparison to Mayor Bloomberg and New York City is absurd.

When Michael Bloomberg took office in January 2002 he inherited a failing school system that was controlled by a seven-member Board of Education of which only two were his appointees. There was also a top-heavy educational bureaucracy that was not only riddled with corruption and cronyism but had failed to set or monitor performance standards.

And yet, the mayor had no choice but to fund this floundering system out of his operating budget. In other words, while the mayor had the responsibility to annually come up with billions of dollars to pay education bills, he did not have the corresponding oversight rights to determine if the money was being spent properly or wisely. Even Albany potentates, who are generally under the thumb of teachers’ unions, realized this was unjust and agreed to give Bloomberg mayoral control.

Nassau County’s executive, on the other hand, has never had any responsibilities over education. Unlike New York City, the county does not spend a dime on schools; hence it has no valid claim for control.

There are other flaws in Suozzi’s plan. Since each school district has its own budget, teachers’ contracts and bonded debt, in addition to receiving Albany’s blessings to get a final OK, district taxpayers would have to vote for unification; bondholders would have to approve debt consolidation covenants; and teachers would have to agree to replace individual contracts with a countywide one. The chances of all this happening: zero.

Citizens are very protective of their school districts. They are not going to give up their say on how their taxes will be spent on their neighborhood schools to some county bureaucrat. Bondholders, particularly those who hold highly rated school district debt, are not going to exchange their bonds for lower-rated county ones. As for teachers, they would rather negotiate with the devil they know.

Suozzi’s plan, like his political career, is about himself. His favorite word, the personal pronoun “I,” was used 18 times in his Nov. 8 Newsday op-ed. If he was so passionate about school consolidation plans, why didn’t he put out a thoughtful position paper during the campaign rather than days after his statewide ambitions evaporated as he sat on $2 million saved for his next statewide campaign? Suozzi must be mature enough to realize that Nassau voters punished him not because of school taxes, but because he was an absentee landlord who has conjured small-bore, short-term tricks to paper over the county’s fiscal and economic woes. The voters sent a message that they want a full-time county executive, not a part-timer in search of another office.

When all the votes are counted, if Suozzi goes down, he’ll be a victim all right – a victim of his narcissism.

This article I wrote appears in the New York Post on September 21, 2009.

This article I wrote appears in Newsday on June 18, 2009.

This article I wrote appeared in the New York Post on May 4, 2009.

This article I wrote appears in the New York Post on April 13, 2009.

This article I wrote appears in the New York Post on March 3, 2009.

This article I wrote appears in the New York Post on January 30, 2009.

This article I wrote appears in Philadelphia’s The Bulletin on November 24, 2008.

This article I wrote appears in the New York Post on September 18, 2008.

This article I wrote appeared on The Catholic Thing website on September 17, 2008.

This article appears on The Catholic Thing website on August 20, 2008.

This article I wrote appeared on The Catholic Thing website on August 6, 2008.

This article I wrote appears on The Catholic Thing website on July 23, 2008.

This article I wrote appears in the New York Post on July 20, 2008.

This article I wrote appears in the New York Post on July 9, 2008.

This article I wrote appears on The Catholic Thing website.

This article I wrote appears in the New York Post on May 27, 2008.

This article I wrote appeared in the New York Post on May 16, 2008.

This article I wrote appeared in the New York Post on May 13, 2008.

On April 28, 2008, Human Events.com interviewed George Marlin on the impact of the Catholic voter.

This article I wrote appears in the New York Post today, April 24, 2008.

This article I wrote appeared in the New York Post on Friday, April 18, 2008.

Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen on Easter:

The law He gave was clear:  life is a struggle; unless there is a Cross in our lives, there will never be an empty tomb; unless there is the crown of thorns, there will never be the halo of light; unless there is a Good Friday, there will never be an Easter Sunday.

George J. Marlin is the Editor of The Quotable Fulton Sheen (Doubleday).

I was very grateful for the positive reactions to my March 2, 2008 essay “William F. Buckley Jr. – My Political Godfather.”

I was surprised, however, that so many people had forgotten or were unaware that Bill Buckley had a significant presence on New York’s political stage.

To understand why New York conservatives revered him, please read the following Buckley comments on local pols:

On Governor George Pataki:

It was recorded in the New York Times, [in 1994], that on one occasion, as an undergraduate at Yale, George Pataki voted against the resolution I had presented to the Political Union as a visiting speaker… Some people say that George Pataki has gone back to the errors he displayed as a 19 year old in the Yale Political Union.  The state debt is hugely increased, some wonder if the State Government has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dennis Rivera’s municipal union.  National Review wonders, in a forthcoming editorial, whether the only abortion law Governor Pataki would oppose would be one that threatened the rights of gays and lesbians.

On Governor Mario Cuomo:

Mario Cuomo, Governor of New York, seems to be saying that there is so much anti-Italian prejudice in America he has no choice but to contend with it by running for president and getting elected.  Oh, yes, and if he runs for president and isn’t elected, why, that means he was right the whole time, there’s a huge anti-Italian prejudice out there.

If Mr. Cuomo runs for president, I shall pray that he will be defeated, but in doing so I shall conceal from Providence the knowledge that he is an Italian-American.  God’s anti-Italianism, as we know, has reached such limits that he had to go all the way to Poland to find a pope.

On Governor Nelson Rockefeller:

Governor Rockefeller … has long since developed the knack or transforming expedience into an act of transcendent principle….

Bobby Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller are having a row, ostensibly over the plight of New York’s mentally retarded, a loose definition of which would include everyone in New York who voted for Bobby Kennedy or Nelson Rockefeller.

On Governor Averell Harriman:

…Averell Harriman, who can accomplish less in more time than anybody in America.

On Governor Thomas E. Dewey:

…the most analytical campaign statement he made [in the 1948 presidential race], as far as we can remember, was, “Ladies and gentlemen, the future lies before us.”

On Arthur Goldberg (1970 Democratic candidate for Governor):

What on earth Messrs. Goldberg and [Jacob] Javits would find to argue about in a political defies the imagination:  one might as well have a debate between the two Smith Brothers on the matter of cough drops.

On Senator Robert F. Kennedy:

The movement of Bobby towards the left is now so plain that it is likely to be noted in the next issue of the World Almanac, under “Left, move towards. 1. Robert F. Kennedy.”

On Senator Robert F. Kennedy: Why He Wouldn’t Appear on Buckley’s “Firing Line”:

Why does baloney reject the grinder!

On Senator Jacob Javits:

…Senator Javits is a splendid symbol of the diminution in the prestige of the ultra-liberal Republicans.  And his anguish is especially acute in the light of his having so recently lost his heart to himself as Vice President in 1968.  Indeed, Sen. Javits had told an interviewer earlier in the week that frankly, he believes himself “entitled to national consideration.”  Why?  Because he has been – brace yourself – the Republican Party’s chief “ideologist” over the past twenty years (if indeed he were, he would be entitled to be tarred and feathered on national TV).

On Senator James Buckley:

Jim wrote me a couple of years ago, when it had been suggested to him that he should run for the Senate, to say with his instinctive modesty, “I can’t imagine why I’d be useful to the public, still less why the public should want me.”  I liked that then, and I like it still more now, in the light of the overwhelming evidence, given by New Yorkers, that they do want him to speak for them, on so many of the problems, so very vexing, that are coming up.  We used to tease Jim that he was never available for any family function on Saturday because Saturdays are when people tend to get married, and Jim was always away at weddings, usually as best man, sometimes as usher.  His friends felt, instinctively, that they wanted him around at critical periods in their lives.  I think that the voters of New York feel the same way about Jim, wanting him in the Senate at this critical period in our lives.

On Mayor John V. Lindsay:

The trouble with John Lindsay, fundamentally, is that he cannot think rigorously.  The next trouble is that when he does think, he thinks in harrowingly penetrable liberal clichés.  The third trouble is his genius for saying the inappropriate thing.

The differences between Mr. [Abraham] Beame and Mr. Lindsay are biological, not political.

I had working for me, I repeat, an invaluable advantage, namely that I did not expect to win the election, and so could afford to violate the taboos.  Lindsay and Beame had taboos’ mother to observe:  Beame could not afford to criticize Boss Powell or Boss Steingut; Lindsay could not afford to criticize Boss Rose or Boss Dubinsky.  Neither would breathe a word of criticism against John Kennedy, or Mrs. Roosevelt, or Herbert Lehman, or Lyndon Johnson, the welfare state, the press, the voting population, labor unions, universal suffrage, or the Statue of Liberty.  That left them precious little to criticize except inexperience (Lindsay’s), fatigue (Beame’s) – and of course (all together, boys), me, Goldwater, and the nineteenth century.

On Mayor Edward Koch:

Koch has always been careful with me, though absolutely ready to argue:  he is uncomfortable with demagogy perhaps because he knows that just as he can spot it in others, so can I in him.  Our personal relationship goes back many years to when, as a congressman, he wrote and asked me to testify on behalf of a bill he was backing to set up a federal commission to investigate the marijuana problem.  The bill had practically no sponsors when first Koch introduced it. “Then,” Koch had told me happily, as we walked toward the committee room, “half of my colleagues realized that any federal measure imposing prison for first-time marijuana users would put all of their own children in jail!”

On Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr.:

The relationship between corruption and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. would appear to be something like the relationship between typhoid and Typhoid Mary.

On Mayor Rudy Giuliani:

…Rudy Giuliani is to the Republican Party what John Lindsay was to the Republican Party 28 years ago, a liberal in drag. 

George Marlin would crush either Dinkins or Giuliani in public debate, which is exactly why Giuliani refuses to debate with him.  The excuse is that Marlin has only 1 or 2 percent in the polls.  Your servant ran for mayor of New York in 1965 as a Conservative and got 13 percent of the vote because my views were given some ventilation.  The failure to report the views of George Marlin is an act of democratic defeatism:  his are the analyses that could revive a sick city.

For me and scores of young New York conservatives in the 1960s, William F. Buckley Jr. was more than a journalist, novelist and TV personality; he was the man who fired us up to fight for our principles in the political trenches in our neighborhoods.  To Buckley’s 1965 mayoral campaign slogan, “Do you have the guts to listen?” our answer was a resounding, “Yes!”

That New York City mayoral race pitted Bill Buckley, candidate of the 3-year-old Conservative Party, against Republican-Liberal John V. Lindsay and Democrat Abraham Beame. I was one of the teenage “Street-Corner Conservatives” who handed out Buckley fliers at subway stations, bus stops and outside churches.  I was even hassled at the corner of Main Street and Roosevelt Avenue in Flushing, Queens by Sid Davidoff (who later served as Lindsay’s deputy mayor and went onto become the city’s leading lobbyists) for distributing Buckley literature at a Lindsay rally.

The campaign was incredibly exciting.  And thanks to a city-wide newspaper strike, the television debates, where Buckley could excel, became the prime media forum.

It’s fair to say that Buckley trounced his opponents in the numerous debates.  Lindsay, with his chiseled good looks and sonorous voice, may have sounded great when he was fully scripted, but in the debate format, which emphasized spontaneous wit and a real command of facts, he came across as dull-witted.  The four-foot-eleven accountant, Abe Beame, looked and sounded like an IRS agent discussing an income-tax audit.

Buckley was able to articulate views that professional politicians dared not express because those opinions might upset the racial, religious, or ethnic balance of their support.  Bill Buckley’s positions in the campaign hit a nerve with the neighborhood blue-collar ethnic voters, who felt themselves the victims of high taxes, rising crime and failing schools.  In Buckley, they found more than a spokesman.  They found a hero.  And polls began to reflect his popularity.  The first Herald Tribune poll published on October 7 had Beame at 45.6%, Lindsay, 35.6%, Buckley, 10.2%, with 8.6% undecided.

Mike Long, who was then chairman of Brooklyn’s Cypress Hills Conservative Club (and would later become state chairman), remembered how Buckley electrified the conservative base.  New clubs began to spring up all over Brooklyn and thousands volunteered to give out literature.  At a rally held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Buckley spoke to a crowd that overflowed into the street.  Long, who was sitting in the audience that night, recalls how the crowd went wild at the end of the rally when Buckley said, “Now back to the wars.”

“Applause, cheering, and howls went on for minutes,” Long says.  “The thousands who left the Academy of Music were so wound up they were ready to go conquer the world.”

On election night, Buckley received 341,226 votes, 13.4% of the total.  While Lindsay won the election with a plurality (45.3%) there was plenty of good news for Buckley supporters.  For the first time, the Conservative Party had outpolled the Liberal Party in the City of New York.  In the ethnic neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx, Buckley racked up 25% of the German vote, 26% of eastern Europeans, 22% of the Irish and 17% of the Italians.

The Manhattan political establishment was shocked by Buckley’s popularity in the outer boroughs.  In Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Buckley received 36.5% of the vote.  In Ridgewood, Queens, 38%; Hollis, Queens, 38%; Fox Hills-Tottenville, Staten Island, 30% and Parkchester, Bronx, 29%.

Bill Buckley’s mayoral candidacy refuted the prevailing view in liberal circles that the conservative movement consisted of nothing more than a bunch of crackpots.  He proved that the Conservative Party mattered in the electoral politics of the most left-wing city in the nation and helped regain respectability for the conservative movement nationwide.

Bill Buckley laid the groundwork for the 1970 election of his brother James, on the Conservative Party Line, to the U.S. Senate seat once held by Robert F. Kennedy.  He galvanized the neighborhood ethnic voters who provided Ronald Reagan’s Empire State margins of victory in 1980 and 1984.  Buckley was the political godfather to a generation of New York conservative political activists.  I was one of them, and I cherished his friendship and was very proud when Buckley endorsed my 1993 Conservative Party candidacy for mayor of New York City.

Speaking two weeks after the 1965 election at the National Review 10th Anniversary dinner, Barry Goldwater best described Buckley’s 1965 run for office:  “Running as a Conservative in New York City must be an interesting experience.  You’re not really a candidate.  You are a political Kamikaze…. But Bill Buckley ran a great race.  I understand at one point, Bobby Kennedy was so worried, he put Staten Island in his wife’s name.”  Buckley, he said, was the “man who lost the election but won the campaign.”

William F. Buckley Jr. – Requiescat In Pace.