Randy Credico for Senate 2010

The yak is all about Congressional races and the scrap for governor, as well as the junior US Senator’s position. Still flying, for the most part, below the radar: Senior U.S.Sen. Charles Schumer’s  bid for a third term. Comedian Randy Credico (left at rear in photo) has come forward to challenge him on the Democratic line. He’s also seeking the Libertarian nod, having been an advocate of drug decriminalization as a former addict.

Among several unusual statements in a wide-ranging conversation last week, Credico called Schumer a Copperhead Democrat and vowed a hunger strike if he doesn’t get to debate the senator. He once showed up at the Capitol in Albany dressed as Diogenes in search of an hontest man.

“I’m glad I don’t have to face me” in the race, he said. “I wouldn’t want to have to face me.”

Martin Chicon, from Washington Heights, let it be known last week he’s seeking the Republican nomination, proposing a number of unusual tax-elimination measures.  GOP leader Ed Cox has promised a substantive candidacy against Schumer.

There’s also a Web site to draft TV commentator Larry Kudlow, also a rehabilitated addict. 

John Faso, the former Assembly Republican leader, argued Schumer is vulnerable, though Faso isn’t a candidate. Schumer’s spokesman declined to comment.

How often do you get two US Senate races on a single ballot? The reason you do this year is that Kirsten Gillibrand was appointed in the interim to replace Sen. Hillary Clinton last year until this year’s special election for her seat could be held. Schumer is running on the ordinary cycle — he won election in 1998 and 2004.

By Wayne Barrett in Featured, Wayne Barrett

Thursday, Jan. 21 2010 @ 1:19PM

​On the heels of Scott Brown’s big win, Larry Kudlow, the CNBC rudderless anchor, is apparently considering a senate run against New York’s Chuck Schumer, pushed by GOP and Tea Party allies and admirers.

It would make Schumer the only incumbent known to be facing two reformed cokeheads in the same year, since Randy Credico, a longtime leader in the fight against the Rockefeller drug laws, is already running in the Democratic primary. Credico’s drug-laced trajectory as a comic — from the Johnny Carson show to Rocky Sullivan’s bar — has already been turned into the film Sixty Spins Around the Sun. Credico, a lefty whose media friends range from Albany’s Post powerhouse Fred Dicker to me, is challenging Schumer as a waterboy for Wall Street, while Kudlow wants to carry wine for them.

Former deputy budget director in the Reagan years and economic guru to Oxycontin addict Rush Limbaugh, Kudlow acknowledged in a 1994 New York Times confession that he took a medical leave as chief economist for Bear Stearns (remember it?) to go “into drug rehab” and that he “lived in fear of sliding backward.” He was hooked on blow, the Times confidently reported, though Kudlow declined to name the only drug he once preferred to a tax cut.

Kudlow was nominated in 2009 by his free market cronies to run against Chris Dodd, but took a pass, just as he wound up passing years ago on the suggestion that he take on Pat Moynihan. State lines and epochs are no bar to his ambition, and he is now saying that he is “honored” by the Draft Kudlow grassroots movement launched by friends of his from his old days at onetime Buffalo congressman Jack Kemp’s side.

An unrepentant superstar champion of what the Senior George Bush referred to “the voodoo economics” of spend-and-slash-taxes, Kudlow does so much radio and TV that he can’t be held responsible for a thing he says, like endorsing bailouts when Junior Bush does them and banging them when Obama does. Bernie Sanders went on his show in 2008 to call him a socialist for supporting the Bush bailout and now he calls bailouts “socialism lite” himself.
The coke is gone, but the head is still spinning.

Research Assistance: Alana Horowitz and Cat Contiguglia

WASHINGTON — Sen. Chuck Schumer apologized today after word got out that he called a flight attendant a “bitch” for ordering him to follow the rules and turn off his cellphone before takeoff.

And his political protégé, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, initially provided him with public cover.

Schumer’s outburst was overheard aboard a US Airways flight from LaGuardia Airport to Washington on Sunday.

Schumer and his seatmate, Gillibrand, were chatting on their cellphones when the plane’s captain told passengers to turn them off.

But the two Democratic senators ignored the order and kept talking — prompting a flight attendant to ask them to follow Federal Aviation Administration rules, according to a House Republican aide who was seated nearby.

Schumer asked if he could finish his call. The attendant said “no” because the plane was waiting for him to finish so it could take off. The state’s senior senator ended his call, but then launched into an argument with her, claiming he was entitled to continue his chat until the cabin door was closed.

“She said she doesn’t make the rules, she just followed them,” the aide said, according to Politco.com.

“Bitch!” Schumer remarked to Gillibrand after the attendant walked away.

Gillibrand’s office initially gave Schumer cover, telling Politico.com that the senior senator was “polite” and that “he turned off his phone when asked to.”

Republicans seized on the slip to slam Schumer, circulating copies of news stories about the “bword” rouhaha.

Once word spread that Schumer had been less than friendly, Gillibrand’s office offered a second statement.

Her aide, Glen Caplin, said: “Chuck did the right thing by apologizing.”

He criticized Republicans for “trying to score cheap political points” from the incident.

After the flare-up was reported, Schumer said he was sorry.

“The senator made an off-thecuff comment under his breath after the flight attendant walked away. He shouldn’t have made it, he regrets it and he has apologized for it,” Schumer spokesman Brian Fallon said.

The attendant accepted his apology, Schumer’s office said. Schumer went back to Washington from La Guardia on US Airways yesterday. A flight attendant said he behaved himself.

“He was quiet. He wasn’t on his cellphone or anything,” she said. But other flight personnel said Schumer has a reputation.

“He’s not nice,” said a flight attendant who has served the senator before.

By Wayne Barrett in Featured, Wayne Barrett

Thursday, Jan. 14 2010 @ 6:21PM

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See UPDATE after the jump

“Harold Ford is a great candidate who knows how to handle himself,” Chuck Schumer said in 2005. “We’re very hopeful about his candidacy.” Maybe a bit less hopeful today.

The fine line between irony and hypocrisy is crossed every day in politics. But in 2005 and 2006, the heavy artillery that our own Senator Schumer is now firing at Harold Ford was trained on Rosalind Kurita, a three-term Democratic state senator from Tennessee then running against Ford. Schumer was the chair of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee at the time and, though it was his job to try to get Democrats elected in general elections, he decided that DSCC had to throw its resources and power into primaries, handpicking candidates he thought could win in November. So, as Kurita put it, DSCC wouldn’t even list her name on its website as a candidate for the seat.

Kurita was running to Ford’s left, accusing him of sounding like a Republican half the time, declaring that with him, “you get a little bit of this and a little bit of that,” not a bad attack ad now for Kirsten Gillibrand, except that it might also be her motto.

A nurse and mother of three, married to an Asian American, a champion of Roe vs. Wade, a leading opponent of an English-only driver’s license initiative, and a fierce opponent of the credit-card-company-dictated bankruptcy bill that Ford voted for, Kurita was waging an uphill battle against Ford.

She complained bitterly that groups whose support she expected — like from Emily’s List, which exists to fund women candidates with progressive views — were instead stonewalling her, ostensibly on Schumer’s behalf. When Kurita quit a year and a half after she started her campaign, ceding the race to Ford, news accounts attributed it to her “hampered fundraising.” Bob Corker, the Republican candidate who wound up beating Ford in November, used Schumer as a punching bag, accusing him and other liberal Democrats like Hillary Clinton of making “a pact with the Ford political machine to hijack this race.”

While Schumer’s bet on Ford was a loser, his nationwide intrusion in state races, forcing the designation of his own slate of candidates, delivered the senate majority to Democrats in 2006. After another triumphant year in 2008, he stepped down as the DSCC chair.
Kurita was so embittered by the experience that she became the Pedro Espada of Tennessee, voting in 2007 with the Republicans to oust the longtime Democratic leader of the state senate and taking the second highest job in the newly GOP-run chamber for herself. Though she still managed to narrowly win a Democratic primary for her seat in 2008, the party organization stripped her of the nomination and she lost as a write-in that November.

Voice messages at her home and at the offices of her husband, who is a Tennessee doctor, weren’t returned. Jerry Skurnick, the veteran political consultant, pointed out that I omitted any reference in yesterday’s blog item to Bob Abrams’ loss to Al D’Amato in 1992, which followed a rough Democratic primary. I wrote that “no Democrat in modern times has lost a New York senate seat after a divisive primary,” and that is certainly true, since Abrams didn’t have a senate seat to lose. Geraldine Ferraro, who lost to Abrams in the primary, lent credence to the notion that he’d engaged in anti-Italian slurs against her, and that helped Republican Al D’Amato hold onto his seat that November. That’s quite a different set of circumstances than what we face now, when the untested and unelected incumbent Gillibrand, is trying to hold onto her seat without competition.

Research Assistance: Sarah M. Gates, Scott Greenberg, Alana Horowitz, Simon McCormack, T.J. Raphael

UPDATE: I called Rosalind Kurita, her husband’s office and Senator Schumer this morning, well before this blog was posted. I made it clear what I wanted to talk about and no one would answer questions. Nothing like posting a blog to provoke answers.

Kurita wanted to correct my suggestion that her switch to the Republicans in the Tennessee state senate was a result of her bitterness over the way she was treated in the race against Ford. She explained that the Republicans had the majority in the senate “for two years” and that two Republicans had voted with the Democrats to keep a Democratic leader in charge. She insists that her decision to support majority rule “had nothing to do with any bitterness,” but was instead a question of fairness, though she acknowledged that she lived with minority rule until after she was forced from the U.S. Senate primary. She also wanted me to know that her doctor husband is not an Asian American, though she conceded that he had been so described in Tennessee news accounts and that people thought he was.

A source associated with the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, which is no longer chaired by Schumer, said that any actions the committee took in Tennessee to push Kurita out of the race were done “at the request of Harold Ford.” I have to fault myself for the point the DSCC source effectively made. My blog makes it sound like only Schumer was playing both sides of this question, ginning up prochoice leaders in New York to go after Ford, though in 2006, he was killing a prochoice candidate in favor of Ford. That’s just one way the senator’s done an about-face.

But irony is a double-edged sword. Ford insists he won’t be “bullied” by Boss Schumer out of the race now, but he enlisted the boss to bully Kurita out of another race three short years ago. I said that better in yesterday’s blog. I told Kurita that DSCC sources were telling me that her executioner in 2006 is today’s victim, Harold Ford, and tried to get her to comment. I got heavy breathing on the other end of the phone. All she’d actually say though was she “would have loved to have had a level playing field” in the senate race.

Then she added one carefully phrased comment, with Kirsten Gillibrand clearly in her mind: “I hope we will have as many women in the U.S. Senate as possible. I certainly don’t want to see somebody lose.” When I added with a smile, “you can’t believe how much money Emily’s List is raising for her,” Kurita replied: “You’re cruel.”

Timing is everything in stand-up comedy, and it helps in politics as well. This spring—as a cabal of shady state senators were preparing to hijack the entire legislature with shakedown demands—comedian/political agitator Randy Credico showed up in the Albany State Capitol building wearing a white robe, a fake, wispy white beard, and a rubber face mask depicting a bald guy with a big schnozz. Politicians and lobbyists gawked. “I am Diogenes,” barked Credico as he stalked the halls. “I search for an honest man!” The Athenian philosopher who walked the streets with a lantern searching for integrity reportedly had a hard time of it—and so did Credico. He opened the door to a Senate meeting, asked his question, and was promptly booted from the room. But he is used to such disses. His comedy shtick includes dead-on imitations of everyone from Al D’Amato to Al Sharpton. In between stand-up routines around town (including a regular stint at the Lenny Bruce Comedy Lounge and the aptly named Yippie Museum Café on Bleecker Street), the 54-year-old comic enjoys driving politicians to distraction. His high point came when he organized “New York Mothers of the Disappeared”—mothers of kids serving 20 years or more for nonviolent drug convictions—to go to Albany to push for reforms of the draconian Rockefeller drug laws. His current target is U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer. Who does he think he is? Al Franken?

Here’s a copy of the full-page ad running in today’s El Diario in which Randy Credico takes aim at his Democratic primary target, US Sen. Chuck Schumer.

The ad is fairly straightforward, basically seeking to portray the veteran Brooklyn pol as better friend to Wall Street than to Latino voters. It’s about as left-leaning as you can get, which isn’t surprising, coming from a drug law reform advocate and comedian.

Credico also recently debuted a new, more official-looking campaign Web site. He’s holding a fundraiser (comedy-themed, of course) at the Gotham Comedy Club this Thursday night that will be headlined by Will Durst, Marian Grodin, and Scott Blakeman, among others.

So far, Credico is the only person to come forward to challenge Schumer, and his campaign has been treated as something of (no pun intended) a joke by most political observers.

But Credico has repeatedly insisted to me that he is very serious about his campaign, and has recently been in contact with the Libertarians to discuss perhaps running on their line (which would require a petition-gathering effort, as they lack ballot status).

Schumer himself has yet to acknowledge the existence of Credico’s campaign.

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