The Fighting 29th

All about New York's 29th Congressional District

If this morning's town meeting in Henrietta is an indicator, Randy Kuhl should lay in a supply of whatever over-the-counter medicine is indicated for immense pains in the ass. A lot of heat, and little light, was generated during the 80 or so minutes he spent on one of the first stops of his yearly 145-town listening tour.

The main topic on constituents' minds was Iraq. Of the twenty or so questions asked, well over half had to do with the war. One MoveOn.org representative delivered 150 letters to Kuhl from other 29th residents. Others held up signs with slogans like "You Backed Bush's Lie, Our Children Die". Singing of "Give Peace a Chance" wasn't evident, though grumbling and the threat of spontaneous outbreak of chants were omnipresent.

Kuhl calls these meetings "opportunities to listen." He says he's there to hear what his constituents have to say, not to argue or debate. At times, the full house at Henrietta Town Hall chafed visibly under that stricture, demanding that Kuhl justify his vote on the Iraq resolution. Kuhl stuck to his guns, saying that constituents who wanted to hear his explanations could correspond with him or schedule one-on-one meetings with him.

In coming posts, I'll deal with some of the specific issues raised at the meeting, but for now I'd like to comment on tactics.

Kuhl's treatment of these meetings as "one way" communication is an interesting gambit. For some of the more inflammatory questions, he flatly refused to respond to the questioner. Though he sometimes sounded like an Adlerian therapist ("How does that make you feel?"), the technique was pretty effective. After the first question on Iraq, Kuhl asked the speaker what that person thought should be done. The response was much less impassioned or certain than that person's earlier condemnation of the war. Kuhl caught this person flat-footed, because it is easy to complain about the war but it's harder to articulate an exit strategy.

I haven't attended any of Kuhl's other town hall meetings, but I have attended those of other Members, and Kuhl's refusal to answer questions is overly restrictive and sometimes verged on downright silly. In his defense, town hall meetings like these can easily devolve into debates that go nowhere, so a lot of structure is needed to make them effective. Nevertheless, Kuhl's holding the reins way too too tight. There needs to be a little give-and-take, or these meetings will become a charade. It's telling that Kuhl didn't even follow his own rule, since he answered some questions on less controversial topics, such as whether he co-sponsored a bill or his opinion on supporting VA hospitals.

What's lacking from Kuhl's listen-only position is a good alternative for constituents who want a more in-depth explanation of his views. Kuhl's stated alternative -- write me or meet with me and I'll tell you -- doesn't scale very well. He needs to come up with a better alternative to explain his votes on key legislation. It could be something as simple as a few more press releases or a couple of position papers posted to his website. If he did that before the next set of meetings, he could at least point to those instead of stonewalling.

Though it was probably little appreciated by some in the audience, Kuhl kept his good humor. He wasn't flustered and he wasn't rude, in sharp contrast to those who used the occasion to indulge in a little hamfisted political theater. I don't know if the people holding up protest signs were MoveOn members (I suspect they were), but no matter: they were a rude distraction that subtracted from the quality of the event.

The question I have for any MoveOn members who might be reading this blog is simple: Are you out for self-gratification, or do you want to win over Kuhl/undecided voters? If it's the latter, which I often doubt, then your tactics aren't getting the job done. Delivering letters en masse and holding up hand-lettered signs for the TV camera (that's right, just one, and it was only RNews) have little or no impact on the 3,000 voters you need to swing, or the thousands of non-voters you need to get to the polls. Those people aren't at town hall meetings, and they probably aren't paying attention to the anemic media coverage of these meetings. But they are looking for a reasoned, calmly-stated position on Iraq that doesn't talk about killing our children or involve hand-lettered, asinine slogans. That's not because the death of young people in this war isn't a worthy topic, but rather that it's all too well-known, and dwelling on it doesn't advance the conversation.

Of the behavior and discourse I saw at that meeting, by far the most intelligent and reasonable was that provided by Randy Kuhl and some of the participants who weren't obviously part of the MoveOn delegation. Some of the least persuasive and poorly phrased was provided by the stirred-up and righteous MoveOn group. When Kuhl did engage the MoveOn group, their responses were weak. I'm going to devote a future post on just one of the balls that was dropped, but there were many.

Also, the grumbling and cheap shots from the audience were distracting and sometimes offensive. For example, when a young man from Henrietta stood up and announced that he's joining the service with plans to go to Iraq, one of the people near me muttered "yeah, to die". If your righteousness burns in your heart with the glow of a thousand suns, so strongly that you aren't able to shut up for the short moment it takes for a brave young man say his piece, then you are no different from the "wingnuts" that you choose to hate. You are a zealot, and zealots do nothing but damage the political discourse, no matter which side they're on.

The 29th has been damaged enough by the completely tone-deaf politics of MoveOn. Part of the reason that Eric Massa lost the last election was the lazy, sloppy and expensive MoveOn ad that allowed Kuhl to put him on the defensive. The sloppiness of that ad was symptomatic of the general feeling I got this morning from the MoveOn group: We're so fucking right that we don't need to do our homework.

Well, guess what? Kuhl does his and he outfoxed you today.

Eric Massa has announced that he's officially forming an exploratory committee for a 2008 run.

Update:The Star-Gazette has expanded their story, and WETM reports that Massa's official announcement will come next Sunday.

H R 800 allows a workplace to become unionized without an election if a majority of workers sign up for the union. Though Randy Kuhl was initially one of the co-sponsors of this bill in the previous Congress, he withdrew his support six days after the election, sending a clear message to unions who endorsed his opponent. Today, Kuhl amplified that message by voting against the bill.

Kuhl was one of the few Republicans from the region who voted against this bill. The list of the thirteen GOP members who joined with the Democratic majority reads like a Whos-Who of vulnerable Northeast Republicans.

This vote probably indicates that Kuhl has given up hope of winning over labor during this election cycle. The 2006 campaign demonstrated that labor will support a credible Democratic opponent despite Kuhl's generally labor-friendly record. Since Kuhl has nothing to gain by courting labor, and much of his base is hostile to unions, he chose to buck the trend among his regional colleagues and vote against the bill.

It looks like the 8-bed acute psychiatric unit at the VA Hospital in Canandaigua is going to be closed. The Democrat and Chronicle reports that it's a done deal, while the Messenger-Post says the final decision is due this week.

The VA hospital, which has long been under the threat of complete closure, became a political issue in the 2006 campaign. The announcement that it would remain open was timed suspiciously close to the election, and it was quickly followed by the news that the acute unit would probably shut down.

In the Messenger-Post article, Kuhl spits and sputters, saying "I completely disagree with the closure of the acute psychiatric unit and everything about the process the VA has taken to get there." Eric Massa also fulminates over the expected closing in a post on his 29united site. I think both are missing the big picture on medical care for Veterans.

Since many psychiatric emergencies are also medical emergencies, an 8-bed acute care psychiatric unit has great difficulty existing without a nearby medical hospital. The closing of this unit was probably a foregone conclusion, considering that the nearest VA medical facilities are in Buffalo or Syracuse. Of course, using the nearby FF Thompson hospital for acute medical care (except in dire emergencies) is verboten, because VA care can only be delivered through the VA system.

The underlying question, which Kuhl ignores and Massa only partially addresses, is why Vets must receive their care in a separate and usually inferior medical system. Why must a Veteran travel to Canandaigua, Syracuse or God-only-knows-where to get care, instead being treated at a civilian hospital or clinic?

I understand that some care given by the VA is specialized. But most of it is the same medical treatment given to civilians. If we really want to honor the service of Veterans, let's give them an insurance card that gives them access to every hospital, clinic, doctor and pharmacy in the United States. Then let's pick a few really good VA hospitals to serve as specialist centers to serve the unique needs of veterans, and close the rest.

I submit that the reasons why this suggestion won't be adopted, or even considered, is that the VA system exists to ration care for Vets and to serve the needs of interest groups and politicians.

By making care for Vets hard to access, the VA system serves fewer Veterans, thus effectively rationing treatment. Those who have insurance use more convenient local facilities. Only those with special needs, or without insurance, use the hospitals. If VA care were universally available to vets, costs would skyrocket.

By creating large, government-run facilities, the VA also gives politicians plums for their districts. VA hospitals are like military bases in that regard -- they're often situated in out-of-the-way locales (e.g., Canandaigua instead of Rochester) in order to give small towns an economic boost. They're also full of union jobs, and satisfying a union is always a good thing for a politician.

If politicians really wanted to make life better for Veterans, they'd consider a complete overhaul of the way medical care is delivered to them. Instead, we get a series of mini-dramas whenever one of the sacred cow hospitals is threatened.

Republicans who voted against the Iraq resolution were immediately targeted for primary challenges by commentators on the right. Randy Kuhl dodged that bullet by voting for the Iraq resolution, but the threat of a primary challenge or Conservative Party candidate in the general election is still real in the 29th.

Last month, Bob Lonsberry threatened Kuhl with a primary challenge over the immigration issue. Towards the end of the 2006 campaign, Kuhl moderated his immigration position after receiving complaints from area farmers. Lonsberry kept mum about this during the campaign, but he wasted no time in passing judgment after Kuhl was re-elected:

If [Kuhl] believes those things, then while he's got his head up there he might as well look around and see if he can find any polyps.

[...]

You've got it backwards, Randy.

And you need to turn it around.

Or we'll start campaigning for your primary opponent before the spring corn goes in.

Lonsberry's threat is real. In the 2004 general election, Conservative Mark Assini received 6% of the vote. If Assini had run in 2006, it's likely that Massa would have beaten Kuhl. A primary challenge that morphs into a general election run by a Conservative Party candidate in 2008 would probably spell the end of Randy Kuhl's legislative career.

Mark Assini retired from the Monroe County Legislature in 2005 and writes a weekly column. He's tanned, rested and ready if the base loses patience with Randy Kuhl.

What a difference a week makes. Tonight, the AP reports that Speaker Pelosi has publicly distanced herself from Jack Murtha's plan to put strict conditions on war funding.  Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a front-page story in which a number of Democrats expressed queasiness at the thought of limiting funding for the troops.

After the supposedly momentous vote on Iraq, it looks like the position taken by Randy Kuhl and other House Republicans, which equates defunding the war with abandoning the troops, has taken some of the air out of the Democrat's sails. This shouldn't be surprising, because any move to end the war in Iraq is far more politically dangerous than simply expressing disapproval. Leaving Iraq will require making hard choices and taking some responsibility for those choices, two things that Democrats haven't had to do for a few years.

As I've watched the fallout from the Iraq resolution, I've heard a couple of myths that I think need to be busted.

The first is that Kuhl is not representing his constituents when he made the Iraq vote. James Swarts of SUNY Geneseo put it this way:

The majority of Americans are against the war. It is Kuhl’s job to represent the people not be a representative to the executive branch.

Perhaps the majority of Americans are against the war, but in the 29th, the majority of voters re-elected a man whose views on the war have been in lockstep with the executive. More importantly, those voters did so after being presented a clear choice on the issue, since Kuhl's opponent made Iraq a centerpiece issue. Kuhl can reasonably argue that his position represents that of his constituents.

The second myth is that Kuhl would somehow save his political hide by moving to the center on this issue. James Walsh in NY-25 is living this myth by being one of the few Republicans who voted for the Iraq resolution. I can't see that Walsh is doing himself much good. As analyst Stuart Rothenberg points out, there's really no good way for Republicans to run away from Bush. His presidency is inextricably linked with the Republican party. That's bad news for both Kuhl and Walsh, no matter how each of them votes on the war.

Some of Walsh's supporters will take him to task for abandoning his party, and most of Walsh's detractors wouldn't vote for him no matter what position he took on the Iraq war. I think Kuhl grasps this simple fact and has chosen to stay loyal to his party. I can't see much political downside in his decision.

Last week was an active one for the 29th. I was on vacation, but when I returned, my inbox was full of news:

• Eric Massa may announce his candidacy next week.
• Randy Kuhl's Fairport offices were visited by a group of protesters, who delivered letters opposing the Iraq war. Rochesterturning has the video.
• Kuhl's office began updating the Town Hall Meeting list. A list of 2007 town hall meetings is also available at the Kuhlwatch site.

Randy Kuhl was one of four New York Representatives who chose not to participate in the debate over the resolution on Iraq. After the vote, Kuhl issued a statement explaining his vote. In the statement, he expresses strong support for the deployment of new troops in Baghdad, calling it "the best possible blueprint for victory".

In addition to endorsing the surge, Kuhl argues that a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq would lead to a disaster, and he also accuses the Democrats of using the Iraq resolution as a first step towards defunding the troops.

I don't think any deep analysis of Kuhl's position is necessary to see what's going on here. Kuhl has not changed his mind about Iraq, and he continues to cast his lot with that of his party and President. There is no shading or nuance that might indicate a reservation about his continued support of the Bush administration's Iraq policy.

Kuhl's hard line is apparent in his accusation that the "Democrat party" intends to "defund the troops, and deny them the best protection and back up available". That accusation is silly. No Member of Congress would propose or vote for such a measure, yet this is the main talking point of the Republican leadership of the House. As I noted earlier, the current Murtha proposal puts conditions on funding which would allow longer rest periods between deployments, and it also insists on proper equipment and training before troops are deployed. That's the polar opposite of denying protection and backup.

Kuhl's continued close alliance with the Bush administration -- including repetition of the rhetoric ("Democrat party") -- is interesting given that his 2006 race was a squeaker. Yet Kuhl isn't the only Republican in a tight district who's chosen to continue to toe the administration line. Of the 16 Republican Representatives who held their seats by 3 percent or less, only James Walsh (NY-25) voted against his party. This shows that the electoral calculus on the Iraq isn't as clear as some might think.

Though polls show that roughly two-thirds of Americans think the war was a mistake, that Bush has mishandled it, and that we shouldn't send more troops, the same two-thirds oppose funding cuts by Congress. This disconnect reflects something deep in the American character -- the thing we hate most about losing is the concrete acknowledgment of our failure. Our exit from Vietnam, which was a painful inching away instead of a clean break, reflects this tendency. Cutting funding for the Iraq war would be a clear, public and unmistakable acceptance of failure, and a large majority of the electorate is not yet ready to do that.

In the next few months, we'll see Democrats trying to grasp the nettle of our loss in Iraq. They'll do so in increments, introducing legislation like Murtha's that approach a withdrawal indirectly. During this time, Republicans will weigh each vote very carefully. They must appease a base that still wants a "victory", yet they can't appear to be out of touch with the majority of their constituents who disapprove of the war.

At some point in this intricate political dance, a few more Republicans will back away from supporting the Bush administration. Despite his unequivocal statement today, I wouldn't be surprised to see Kuhl change his mind before this legislative drama is over.

Randy Kuhl voted "no" on H CON RES 63, the Iraq resolution. Only 17 Republicans voted for the resolution, which is much less than the 30-60 that was being predicted earlier.

I'm away from C-SPAN, but to my knowledge, Kuhl did not speak on the floor before voting - I'll check the record tomorrow to be sure, and post some analysis then.

Hat tip to Rochesterturning, who got to this first.

Last night, the phone rang and a recorded voice invited me to participate in a telephone call with Randy Kuhl. After pressing a button, I was entered into a teleconference where Kuhl answered questions from constituents.

Kuhl calls these calls "Telephone Town Meetings". During the call, he takes questions from constituents who choose to ask them by pressing a key sequence on their phones. It sounded like the call lasted for about an hour (I wasn't able to listen to the whole thing), and that the callers where all from the same part of the 29th (southeast Monroe County).

The questions in the call were varied. One caller asked about Iraq. His question concerned why the resolutions being debated didn't talk about victory there. Saying that he didn't want to be partisan during the phone conference, Kuhl gave a pretty balanced answer. He rattled off the text of the current resolution, then noted that he wished that his party's resolution, which would have mentioned victory, could also be debated. Kuhl didn't say how he was going to vote today.

The rest of the questions concerned domestic policy and constituent service issues. One caller, a teacher, asked about "no child left behind" and lamented the lack of parental involvement in city schools. Kuhl drew on his background as a state legislator to explain the limits of federal involvement in education.

Another caller, a health-care analyst, got in a long, involved discussion with Kuhl over the fine points of the issues facing private insurers. Like most of the callers, this one was a bit nervous, and I couldn't quite understand the point he was trying to make.

One caller had a question about disability benefits available from the state, and Kuhl directed her to her local legislators. I'll bet he gets a lot of questions like that, since the phone call comes out of the blue and people might not catch exactly who's calling.

These telephone conferences are an effort to involve people in the process who normally wouldn't attend a town meeting. They occur during times when working people are home, and they don't require a big commitment of time or effort from the participants. They also play to Kuhl's strengths: He has a gentle, reasonable manner, and a broad knowledge of the nitty-gritty details of issues like education and health care.

Kuhl's good at constituent interaction, and it's not surprising that he's using technology to do more of it. The new five-day workweek in the House will make it more difficult for him to meet with residents of the 29th, and teleconferences allow him bridge the distance between DC and the district. I don't know if these calls are directly related to today's vote, but they're certainly part of his re-election strategy.