The Fighting 29th

All about New York's 29th Congressional District

Randy Kuhl's new office hours made the Messenger-Post.  According to Brian Roth's story, the Kuhl meetings are all 30 minutes long.  This is another reduction.  Last year, his meetings in larger towns lasted for an hour.

The Iraq withdrawal plan backed by Eric Massa and other candidates is getting a lot of positive press.  Here's an example from the New Republic:

"A Responsible Plan" represents a welcome shift for the party not just in vision, but in substance. Admittedly, the immediate strategy that it outlines for Iraq is standard Democratic fare. It calls for a drawdown of American forces and a focus on a diplomatic and political solution. But while too many Democratic plans zero in on the troop drawdown, the "Responsible Plan"'s emphasis is on what Congress can reasonably achieve: namely, economic, political, and humanitarian steps necessary to manage the situation in Iraq as American forces leave.

In other Massa news, Massa is one of the top fundraisers at Act Blue, which is an online Democratic fundraising clearinghouse.  According to Massa's page, he's raised over a quarter million dollars from over 4,500 supporters.  I assume those numbers are for the cycle, but I'm guessing they indicate that the Massa campaign had a good first quarter.

Reader Elmer sends the Corning Leader article [pdf] announcing Randy Kuhl's Town Hall Office Hours.  Kuhl has changed the format of his town hall appearances to private meetings with constituents.  In the press release announcing the new set of meetings, Kuhl says that the reason for the change was that his office received complaints that the meetings were "too impersonal" and constituents felt that they "couldn't voice their opinions".

As anyone who's been paying attention knows, the real reason that Kuhl changed the meeting format was that some of the meetings had turned into raucous confrontations between Kuhl and dissatisfied constituents.   Kuhl had tried the technique of calling the meetings "listening opportunities" where he refused to answer questions from constituents, but that went over poorly.   So now meetings with Kuhl are by appointment only.

The Monroe County meetings I attended last year were packed.  If the meetings attract the same number of constituents this year, there's no chance that Kuhl will be able to meet with even a fraction of those who want to talk to him.  The Massa campaign has already alleged that the meetings are for core constituents only, but it really doesn't matter who Kuhl talks with for 5 or 10 minutes.  Kuhl's format change has transformed these meetings into a non-event.

I imagine the same groups who demonstrated inside the meetings last year will demonstrate outside this year, and my guess is that they'll still get some media time in the Rochester market, so I don't see how this change helps Kuhl politically. My experience was that a good number of constituents who showed up at these meetings with an honest interest in what Kuhl had to say, and no matter what you thought of Kuhl's positions, his willingness to answer some pretty tough questions would probably have garnered a vote or two among those in attendance.

Rochesterturning somehow got early news that I'm going to work for Gannett, specifically developing new web properties for the D&C.  Here's a little more information on the projects I'll be starting to revolutionize the use of the Internet in Monroe County:

• To compete with outlets like Craiglist, which provide a high-quality dating service, we will be launching a dating service for men,  RocSausageFest.com.  This site will be targeted at the 34-50 year-old male population, who are currently underrepresented on most dating sites.
  

• Our research shows that "non-family sites" seem to have a large following on the Internet.  To tap into this fresh, new dynamic, we will be launching RocPorn.com and the subsidiary RocPorn properties.  The first site in the group will be RocGrannyPorn.com, which will target the growing boomer retiree demographic.

• The startling success of RocPets.com has led us to the logical follow-on site:  RocFurry.com.  Later this year, we'll be sponsoring a Furry Con, and plan to be able to provide live coverage without going undercover.
  

The Watertown Daily Times has a long story about Randy Kuhl and the demise of moderate Republicans.  As the article points out, Kuhl is only "moderate" in comparison to the current crop of Republicans:  "with the ranks of so-called moderate Republicans in Congress thinning, Mr. Kuhl, who supports organized labor and lower taxes, is looking a lot more middle-of-the-road."

The story doesn't point out that Kuhl's labor support is mixed at best.  For example, he voted against the Employee Free Choice Act, which was the "big" labor bill last year.  But the general point of the article, which is that Republican moderates and the groups that support them are languishing, is absolutely correct.  Some of those groups have been diminished to almost nothing:

The Log Cabin Republicans PAC, which supports candidates supportive of gay and lesbian issues, has contributed just $1,000 to candidates so far this cycle, after giving $31,144 to 11 House candidates and one Senate candidate in 2006.

Project Vote Smart is a non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to informing voters.  They've recently updated their candidate information pages, including lists of what Vote Smart calls "key votes", which are an extremely useful resource.   Randy Kuhl's key votes are here.  Vote Smart also has a "political courage test" which records politicians' positions on key issues.  Kuhl has refused to answer those questions.

Jim Hopkins, the proprietor of Gannett Blog, has made a very careful study of the charitable contributions made by the Gannett Foundation.  One interesting discovery relevant to Rochester is that the Gannett Foundation gives around half of its donations to charities in the Rochester area.  Jim thinks, and I agree, that this is guilt money from Gannett, which is still feeling bad about moving their corporate HQ to the Washington, DC area and leaving us with the Democrat and Chronicle.

Those of you interested in the role of blogs in journalism should take a look at Jim's series on the Gannett Foundation.  By carefully reading required disclosures, he found that Gannett executives had a special program in the Gannett charities that allowed those execs to target donations to their favorite charities.  Of course, those executives took advantage of the program to donate to their alma maters.  For example, though the overall mission of the Foundation is to support charities in areas where Gannett has newspapers, the CEO chose to funnel contributions to his beloved University of Texas.  Gannett doesn't have any papers in Texas.

I have yet to receive a stimulus mailer from Randy Kuhl, and neither has Reader Rich.  Reasoning from this massive sample of two, it does raise the question of whether that mailer was targeted in some way. 

To continue this line of baseless speculation using anecdotal data, I noticed that the mailer posted at Rochesterturning was sent to someone in Victor.  Victor, which is a part of Ontario County, is a good target.  It's more conservative than Monroe, since it contains a mix of suburban and rural voters.  If I were Kuhl, I'd want to firm up my support there.

The Iraq exit strategy proposed by Eric Massa and other candidates and military experts received some mention in today's Washington Post and on MSNBC.  Money quote from the MSNBC story:

“This plan offers a path out of Iraq. This administration has built a parking lot to keep us there,” said Eric Massa, who is running in New York’s 29th district. Massa added that much of the American public falsely believes that their only choices are between cutting and running and staying forever.

Reader Elmer sends today's Corning Leader article [pdf] on the Kuhl mailer, in which Eric Massa criticizes Kuhl's mailers as well as the practice of spending money on mailers by members in either party.

The New York Times has an in-depth story on the National Republican Congressional Committee, and its leader, Tom Cole (OK-4).  The NRCC is facing trouble raising money from a disenchanted base (one donor returned a fundraising letter full of feces), and they're also facing a shift in the electorate.  I thought this take, by one of Cole's deputies, was spot-on:

You go back to the Reagan years, and even before that, and we always had a three-legged stool: anti-Communism, anti-abortion and tax and spend [...] The first leg dropped off when the Berlin Wall fell, and after 9/11 we’ve tried to do the same thing with terrorism, but it’s not as strong. The second leg, tax and spend, was pretty strong until George Bush. Then we had just one leg of the stool, which was social issues, and I think that you look at the makeup of the younger generation and there’s more of a libertarian view on social issues.

The whole article is worth a read, because it appears that the NRCC, which was a factor in the 2006 election in the 29th, is under-resourced and over-stretched for 2008.