NEW YORK – In the eyes of Tim Wu, there are two Kathy Hochuls: the pro-gun, anti-immigrant conservative who served as a Democratic member of Congress from Western New York, and the conservative who’s masquerading as a progressive gun control advocate and champion of immigrants in hopes of becoming Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s lieutenant governor.
But there are two Tim Wus, too.
There’s the Internet rock star who coined the term “net neutrality” and who’s regarded as one of the leading legal scholars of the online age.
And there’s the first-time candidate who, in an interview, couldn’t name one company at the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, who didn’t know that nanotechnology is upstate New York’s great economic hope and who couldn’t identify Fort Drum as the state’s largest military installation.
You might say these two very different candidates are duking it out in the race for lieutenant governor in New York State, but you would be wrong.
Wu – running mate to Zephyr Teachout, the progressive lawyer who is challenging Cuomo – is bashing Hochul’s brains in, while Hochul is shadowboxing with her opponent, refusing to even mention his name.
And that’s just one of many oddities in the first competitive Democratic primary for New York lieutenant governor in 16 years, which culminates Tuesday when, most likely, a small number of voters will trickle to the polls to decide between two very different pols.
It’s a race between a politician who sees herself partnering with Cuomo – and a free spirit who says that, if he’s elected, he could end up investigating the governor.
It’s a race between a woman who raves about having attended the Erie County Fair hundreds of times and a guy who enjoys “Burning Man,” a weeklong counterculture festival in the Nevada desert that culminates in the burning of a gigantic wooden stick figure.
And above all, the campaign appears to be a reflection of the divide between go-along, get-along upstate New York and New York City’s increasingly progressive, turn-left-or-get-off-the-highway political and media culture.
In other words, the line of battle in this race might as well be the Tappan Zee Bridge.
Given that there are far more Democrats below that bridge than above it, political pros here privately say it’s a battle that Wu has a chance to win.
Hochul’s shifting stances
Hochul’s troubles come clearest in a video that the Teachout-Wu campaign posted to its website last week: a minute-long takedown of her political career called “Kathy Hochul, Debating Herself.”
“Believe me, as someone who had a progressive record,” the 2014 Hochul says.
Then the 2012 Hochul boasts: “I’ve become very conservative in my voting record.”
“I’ve never backed down from our core Democratic values,” the 2014 Hochul says.
And then the 2012 Hochul reminds us: “I broke with the party many, many times.”
And on and on.
The video reflects larger issues that are not mentioned, most notably gun control, on which Hochul has, well, adjusted her position.
As a Democratic member of Congress representing the most Republican district in New York State in 2011 and 2012, Hochul supported legislation making it easier to carry guns over state lines and opening federal lands to hunting – and won the endorsement of the National Rifle Association.
But now she favors the SAFE Act, Cuomo’s signature gun control legislation.
Asked to explain, Hochul said: “Reasonable gun owners that I know would support background checks that have been proposed and getting certain guns off the streets,” which is what the SAFE Act does. “But there are extremists who will say that, if you support the SAFE Act, you don’t support the Second Amendment. I don’t buy that.”
Hochul’s explanation doesn’t sit well with Tom King, president of the New York Rifle and Pistol Association Political Victory Fund.
“We usually grade incumbents based upon their actions in office. Using that criteria, Hochul would have earned an ‘A’,” King said. But given her turnabout, King said: “If it makes her happy, we’ll give Hochul an ‘F’ rating and tell everyone to support Tim Wu instead” – even though Wu is a strong gun control advocate.
Hochul finds herself with some explaining to do, as well, on immigration and health care.
In 2007, while serving as Erie County clerk, she led a fight against driver’s licenses for undocumented aliens. But now she embraces Cuomo’s pro-immigration agenda.
And while serving in Congress, she took several votes to limit parts of the Affordable Care Act. In one public appearance in 2012, she mistakenly said that she voted to repeal the health law entirely.
Adding it all up, Hochul said: “I believe that I did what I was elected to do in Congress, and that was represent my district, and I’m proud of that. But within that context, there were core Democratic principles that I did not waver from. It would have been a lot easier for me to not have been 100 percent pro-choice in that district, or to not be for marriage equality. And I had many opportunities to vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and I never did.”
Wu looks at Hochul, though, and sees a conservative in disguise.
“She’s trying to misrepresent herself here,” Wu said.
Carrying that message across New York City and to its many left-leaning media outlets, Wu has managed to turn a grossly underfunded campaign into a serious challenge.
Yet he’s traveled far less in upstate New York, and in an interview in his family’s comfortable apartment in the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea last week, it showed.
Quiz is revealing
Told that The Buffalo News wanted to ask him 10 questions about upstate New York, Wu replied: “Oh, dear. Oh, dear.”
Wu could not answer six of the first eight questions – at which point an aide cut off the questioning.
“I think we’ve already flunked this test,” Wu said.
Did he ever.
He couldn’t identify HarborCenter, Buffalo Sabres owner Terry Pegula’s signature downtown development project. He couldn’t identify Barry Snyder, the Seneca Nation of Indians leader who’s gone toe to toe with governor after governor on taxation and gambling issues. And he couldn’t describe the “garbage plate,” Rochester’s everything-but-the-statins mess of a signature dish.
In contrast, Hochul correctly answered seven of 10 detailed questions posed to her about downstate New York and the tech industry, Wu’s specialty.
Told of Wu’s performance on the quiz, Michael V. Haselswerdt, a political scientist at Canisius College, was aghast.
“Not only doesn’t he know; he obviously doesn’t care,” Haselswerdt said.
Wu’s lack of detailed knowledge of upstate New York did not, however, stop him from criticizing the “Buffalo Billion,” Cuomo’s infusion of state aid to pump up the local economy, which Wu said might not be big enough or managed properly.
“My No. 1 concern with Buffalo Billion is that it has the perception of being in some sense the governor’s largesse, the governor’s helping of selected companies,” Wu said. “I don’t think I have studied it carefully enough to say this was a mistake or that was. But I think there is a perception that the process for selecting projects is not as impartial as it could be.”
Hochul, in contrast, is a loyal supporter of Cuomo’s economic development effort.
“I can look out the window of my home in Buffalo and see the physical transition, but also the intangible psychological impact it’s had,” she said. “It’s unbelievable. I could not have anticipated the fruits of the governor’s effort being borne out so quickly.”
The candidates’ contrasting views on the Buffalo Billion only hint at their radically different politics, which come clear both when they describe their visions for the role of lieutenant governor as well as when they hit the campaign trail.
Hochul sees herself taking on some top issues as assignments from the governor, such as his women’s equality agenda, while overseeing his regional economic development councils and taking on some issues of personal interest, such as veterans affairs.
“The governor called me and said: ‘Kathy, will you be my partner?’ ” she told voters in Brooklyn. “I thought about it for about two seconds, and I said yes. This is where I belong.”
In contrast, when asked if he saw the lieutenant governor as a partner with the governor, Wu said: “No, not really. I think we could share ceremonial duties, if need be, but no. But I see it as not being a partnership.”
As lieutenant governor, Wu wants to serve as the state’s “public advocate,” shining a light on problems that other state officials would rather ignore. For example, Wu said he might focus on the Time Warner-Comcast merger and its effect on consumers – or public corruption.
After Cuomo shut down his Moreland Commission investigation of public wrongdoing when investigators appeared to be looking at figures close to the governor, “I was sort of surprised that there weren’t state-level hearings or inquiries,” Wu said.
So the lieutenant governor could end up investigating the governor?
“That’s true,” Wu said.
In other words, then, Hochul is the classic insider while Wu is the classic outsider.
Disparate campaign styles
Hochul’s campaign days are packed with visits to senior centers and subway stops, where she never stops smiling and never stops shaking hands. At her side often are key political figures from the state or city, such as former Gov. David Paterson and Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
By doing so, Hochul said she’s managed to build relationships with downstate constituencies that didn’t know her well when the campaign started.
“Those relationships are going to be very strong, and it’s going to be seen in turnout on primary day,” she said.
Wu, meanwhile, sticks heavily to news conferences and interviews with left-leaning media outlets, though he’s campaigned extensively in the city’s Asian neighborhoods and on the Internet, where he’s turned his social media followers into campaigners.
“To all supporters: JOB #1 today & weekend is getting the word out – people need to hear about the campaign. Promise you’ll tell 5 friends!” Wu tweeted Friday to his 9,983 followers – which is more than four times as many as Hochul has.
Hochul and Wu may be very different now, but they started in similar places.
They’re both children of strivers. Hochul’s father began his adult life in a trailer and ended up as CEO of Computer Task Group, one of Buffalo’s first big tech companies, while her mother was a Southtowns community activist who served as her daughter’s inspiration.
Wu, meanwhile, is the son of two accomplished medical researchers, one from Taiwan and the other from England, who were working in Washington, D.C., when their son was born.
Some of their childhood experiences were similar, too. Hochul, now 56, recalls loving “Commander Tom” on WKBW when she was a child. And Wu, who is now 42, moved to Toronto with his family when he was young and recalled that his favorite station growing up was Buffalo’s Channel 29 “because it played the most cartoons.”
Soon, though, their lives diverged. Hochul was a political animal from the start, working in Erie County politics as a teenager and serving as a student leader at Syracuse University. Wu, meanwhile, developed a teenage fascination with computers and the law that propelled him through McGill University and Harvard Law School.
Hochul got a law degree at Catholic University and served as a congressional aide before returning to Hamburg to raise a family. Only later did she start a real political career that peaked with her upset win in a May 2011 congressional race in the conservative district linking the Buffalo and Rochester suburbs.
In Washington, she briefly became a rising Democratic star, only to lose her 2012 re-election bid to former Erie County Executive Chris Collins after the district lines were redrawn to make it even more Republican.
But she left with plenty of friends in Washington.
“To know Kathy Hochul is to like Kathy Hochul,” Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, second-ranking Democrat, said during her tenure there.
Wu, meanwhile, traveled from a clerkship under U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer to a stint in Silicon Valley to a law professorship at Columbia.
His greatest fame, though, came through his coining of the term “net neutrality” – the idea that the Internet should remain free and open and that service providers should not favor particular content or customers – and the publication of his 2010 book “The Master Switch.”
The book won rave reviews, with progressive hero Arianna Huffington calling it “a must-read for all Americans who want to remain the ones deciding what they can read, watch and listen to.”
Given their very different personal histories, perhaps it’s not surprising that Hochul and Wu come off as very different personalities as well.
Hochul is invariably warm, striving to portray herself as the middle-class, middle-America mom that she is.
For example, she noted that she recently tried fried cookie dough at the Erie County Fair, one of her favorite annual events.
When she and her husband moved back to Hamburg to raise a family, “I made sure our new home was walking distance to the fair,” she said. “Needless to say, I love the fair.”
Wu, meanwhile, is a friendly intellectual juggernaut who, when provoked, speaks as passionately about keeping the Bills in Buffalo as he does about his concern about the concentration of private economic power.
He’s also clearly a product, in part of Silicon Valley. Precampaign photos of Wu show a shaggy-maned fellow who would not be out of place at “Burning Man,” where 60,000 or so people gather annually for a survivalist celebration of art and self-expression where no money is exchanged,
“It’s out of this world,” said Wu, who has attended Burning Man several times.
Harsh downstate media
Judging by the reception the two candidates are receiving from the New York City media and progressive interest groups, though, it seems that Hochul is a visitor from another world.
Witness what happened when Hochul stood on the steps of New York’s City Hall the other day, gamely explaining why she opposed driver’s licenses for undocumented aliens while serving as Erie County clerk.
“To me, it was a narrow issue of national security,” Hochul said. “I felt I could not give a government-sanctioned form of identification to anyone who walked in the door. I understand now there’s a different sentiment here. And I’m open-minded ... There are ways to work through this. But I want you to know: you call me anti-immigrant at your own peril. That is not true.”
But hearing Hochul’s explanation, one New York reporter muttered afterward: “That was bad. That was really bad. She’s better than she was a few weeks ago, but she’s still really bad.”
That seems to be the growing impression of Hochul in the New York City media. Most notably, the New York Times endorsed Wu in an editorial that called Hochul “a conservative woman from upstate New York.”
By one objective measure, though, Hochul is no conservative. National Journal, a respected news source in Washington, regularly rates lawmakers’ voting records on both conservative and liberal scales – and the publication gave Hochul a 60 percent liberal rating and a 40 percent conservative rating.
The downstate media’s disrespect for the upstate candidate didn’t end there.
Teachout and Wu appeared on “Democracy Now!”, a liberal television show, late last week, where the two hosts insisted upon calling Hochul “Hockle” and one of them, Juan Gonzales, blithely and inaccurately said: “Kathy Hochul is actually most known for opposition, when she was a congressperson, to driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants.” (Hochul – pronounced “Ho-kull” – actually focused on that issue years earlier.)
All of this is pretty jarring to people who know Hochul well.
“When you’re elected by people in a congressional district, you have to represent their point of view,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-Manhattan. “But now Kathy is evolving as a politician. She’s taking a longer view. But what you’re always going to see with Kathy is leadership. She’s inherently qualified for this position, and she has a heart of gold.”
Like her or not, though, Hochul is finding herself abandoned by some of her longtime allies. The state chapter of the National Organization for Women, which argues that Cuomo’s alliance with Senate Republicans stifled his work on women’s issues, is supporting Teachout-Wu. The Sierra Club, which endorsed Hochul’s 2012 congressional campaign and said she had a perfect congressional record on clean water issues, is backing Wu, too.
“This is a different election,” said Jim Lane, secretary of the Sierra Club’s Atlantic chapter, which is angry that Cuomo has not flat-out banned fracking as Teachout and Wu would.
It sure is.
After all, only two years ago in more conservative upstate New York, Chris Collins – Hochul’s congressional opponent at the time – labeled Hochul “a liberal Democrat.”
And now, in liberal New York City, Wu is saying: “She has shown over and over again that she is far too conservative, and I think disqualifying for the state, this Democratic Party.”
Not that any of this seems to bother Hochul.
“I’m in the battle of my life, folks,” she told voters at a senior center in Brooklyn last week, smiling all the while. “I’m being challenged because people don’t like how I represented my old district, but I fought hard for them; I represented them. And I am so looking forward representing the entire state of New York, and with Andrew Cuomo, I’ll fight for every one of you.”
email: jzremski@buffnews.com
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