The Fighting 29th

All about New York's 29th Congressional District

The League of Women Voters is a non-partisan, "good government" organization that sponsors debates and lobbies to make sure the voting process is fair.  That usually means that their events are tedious and hyper-informative, over-scrupulously fair and mind-numbingly dull.  Last night's debate in Bath was all of these things and more -- it displayed the best and worst of the League and the candidates.

As I walked into the vestibule of the ancient church where the debate was held, I saw a table full of League members sifting through questions provided by the audience. An old lady was squinting at one through thick glasses, muttering "stem cells, that seems controversial".  Needless to say, a question on stem cells wasn't asked at the debate.   Well, it turns out that her notion of controversial, like her overall circulatory system, was a bit anemic, as will soon be apparent.

The debate was prefaced by a half-hour "meet the candidates" for local Assemblyman Jim Bacalles and Senator George Winner.  They were running unopposed, and hold Randy Kuhl's old seats in the legislature.  Later, Kuhl mentioned later that he usually ran unopposed also.  That's a powerful statement about Southern Tier (if not New York State) politics - contested races are rare and a legislative seat is a lifelong sinecure.  I'll have more to say about this part of the event in another post.

After the non-debate by the two shoo-ins, the real debate began.  The format was 5 minute openers and closers, and three minute responses to the audience-supplied and league-edited questions.

I think Massa's opener was a bit influenced by the surroundings, because in addition to his usual bio, he mentioned that he's a lifelong Roman Catholic.  He ended his statement by saying that Washington doesn't care and Albany has all but abandoned the 29th.  Kuhl, who was born "just around the corner", laid on the local-boy charm, and remarked to the Massa-heavy crowd that he didn't seem to be convincing anyone to take off their Massa buttons and don Kuhl's.  He ended by saying he went to DC to solve problems and make a difference.

The League got the first question: they're concerned about the midnight sessions in Congress where representatives have been pressured to vote.

Kuhl's response was that he'd only seen it happen a couple of times, he's generally against it, his experience in the legislature showed that it was a bad idea, and he'd be for reform. Massa pointed out that the 109th Congress has met even fewer times than the "Do-Nothing" 80th Congress made famous in the 1948 election.  He used the Schaivo case as an example of how the issue was priorities, not procedures, likening changing procedures to "rearranging the deck chairs on a ship headed for an iceberg."  Finally, "It shouldn't be so hard for citizens to understand what their elected officials do."

Question two was immigration.  Massa began with a comment that a son of this town should listen better to what people in the area are saying, and then read a letter from the head of the Farm Bureau who was lamenting how tough the immigration bill is on farmers.  Massa was for a three-part approach:  Secure borders, deal with the immigrants already here by deporting some and keeping those who could take jobs US residents don't want (like farm jobs), and deal with the reasons that immigrants leave their home countries.  Kuhl's plan is similar to Massa's, but it hit the enforcement note harder, and didn't specifically mention an exemption for agricultural workers.  He used the question to point out that he's visited all of the towns in the district twice, and that immigration was the only issue that he's heard about consistently in the last two years.  He also mentioned the "virtual fence" legislation recently passed by Congress as evidence of a start in the process of reform.

The third question was how the energy bill affected the district.  Kuhl's answer was "very positively".  His answer focused on the alternative energy portions of the bill, especially the ethanol provision, which will create 8 million barrels a year, and bring some ethanol plants to New York.  Massa pointed out that 8 million barrels is not much, and that the energy bill was a "special interests bill" that was created in a non-transparent manner by the Vice-President to serve oil interests.  He also said that alternative energy is no silver bullet, but the seriousness of the administration's commitment to alternative energy can be judged by their desire to drill in ANWR.  "We can't drill our way to energy independence."

The next question dealt with the detainee bill, and here's where the fireworks began.  The phrasing of the question pointed out that the President could name a US citizen an "enemy combatant" and imprison them.

Massa went first, and he began by saying that the bill was a "forward assault" on everything he defended during his career in the Navy.  He quoted Mike McGrath, a Navy vet who was imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam, who told Massa to fight against the bill.  Then he pointed to SEAR training he received in the Navy.  This training is designed to help captured airmen resist torture, and it includes some mild torture.  Massa said his experience showed that "it doesn't take much to get people to say anything they want to say."  In his view, the challenge isn't just to fight the war on terror, but to bequeath to our children a nation which has preserved the values of our founding.

Kuhl's response was that the war on terror has "threatened us as we've never been threatened before".  He explained how the Hamdan decision had required a new procedure for dealing with terrorists, that the initial bill from the President was not accepted by his "friend and supporter" John McCain, so it was altered to preserve the Geneva Convention requirements.  The resulting bill, he said, provides "untold freedoms and rights of appeal to prisoners who are trying to kill all of you!"  Immediately after he said that, some audience member made a remark and he looked in that person's direction and paused a moment.  Then, he ended by saying he went to Washington to "protect all of you", not to be a rubber stamp.

The Massa campaign has posted a heavily edited video of the debate, the first part of which includes the "kill all of you" remark.  The dirty look after that remark is Kuhl's response to whatever the person in the audience said.  Unfortunately, the whole combination makes him look a little wild-eyed and dangerous, even though this was probably one of two times in the entire debate where Kuhl raised his voice.  Update:  link fixed, thanks RochesterTurning.

Continue to Bathos Number Two for  Health Care, Wages, Iraq and the question that made it through the blue-haired gauntlet.