Tea Partiers Forget to be Violent, Prejudiced Loons

They’re rather subdued for alleged militants.  A large contingent of small-government aficionados assembled to greet the Tea Party Express in Buffalo on Monday as a means of opposing government’s expanding tendencies both nationally and locally.  They were also supposed to display how sexist/racist/homophobic they are, although, whoops, nobody present acted how Janeane Garofalo thinks they do.  I refuse to allow the possibility that she is wrong cross my mind.

That said, I didn’t survey the crowd to see if there were clandestine bigots present who are also in Carl Paladino’s address book, although it would of course be silly to freak out about an entire movement because one of their preferred candidates negligently passed along crudely and/or disgustingly unfunny e-mails.  Foes can enjoy sifting through the gubernatorial hopeful’s sent mail, although they’ve apparently found no occasions where he wished for a political rival’s death.  That would be beyond over the line.

But ignoring the traditional media’s portrayal has become second nature for this group.  On that note, it’s amusing that the protest took place within sight of The Buffalo News building.  While I’m uncertain if any unassigned staffers walked over, failure to do so just means they missed the awesomeness that was hearing Victoria Jackson’s songs about her take on Obamacare and whether she thinks Obama is a communist. The answers are 1) she doesn’t care for it, and 2) yes.  Her rhetorical intemperance was overcome by her still-evident adorableness.

The other speakers served lots of delicious red meat.  It’s always fun to boo Harry Reid, Democraticare, and local shame Louise Slaughter.  But everyone did so without shrieking, resorting to cuss words, smashing property, maintaining the president is a Nazi, or any other unseemly behavior.  Nobody in the well-behaved gathering slurred ethnicities or planned an armed insurrection, either, as every single person forgot to exploit stereotypes for some baffling reason.

Instead, everyone seemed to just want options.  The number of attendees served as a reminder of how infuriating it is that there wasn’t at least a choice for Buffalo’s mayoral race, which is especially galling considering how City Hall fritters away cash like the type of lottery winner who’s also been on Cheaters.

Of course, Buffalo’s leaders are just aping the state’s profligate manner.  As that melodramatic kid in the all-time favorite Partnership for a Drug-Free America ad would explain, “You, all right?  I learned it by watching you!”

Thankfully, people such as speaker Leonard Roberto, who announced during brief remarks his intention to run against Brian Higgins, are out to provide voters with indispensable options.  We can all enjoy the prospect of being able to choose more than the same person as either a candidate of the Democratic or Working Families party.

On a related note, the reason for the protest was embodied by its location.  The area around the Commercial Slip has largely sat desolate for decades; there’s finally some progress after endless governmental spending and planning, although it’s almost seemingly come despite bureaucratic efforts.

Alternately, reducing the tax burden and opening the area to pioneering entrepreneurs would have brought commerce and a high volume of foot traffic to the site by now.  As it stands, the retail activity is largely limited to selling rattlesnake flags at protests which, compelling or not, will only take place intermittently.  I did what I could to contribute economically.

As for the rest of the city, the virtually limitless potential is sadly contrasted by the prevalent stagnancy.  By chance, decades of federal, state, county, and city scheming have provoked economic rot.  The left can sputter all they want over the stupid e-mails Paladino forwarded.  It’s actually helpful in exposing how they can’t differentiate between a dubious sense of humor and actual racism.

Paladino’s foes can pretend his carelessness or questionable take on comedy serves a genuine distraction.  In a way, it does: it’s an attempt by big-government fanatics to try to change the subject away from how their failed policies have created economic devastation. 

Those who came know where the real problems begin.  The press and the president’s dwindling band of supporters can pretend they’re dealing with scared, angry bigots.  But the scene adjacent to the Skyway demonstrated how demonstrators should behave.

Everyone was demanding, adamantly but respectfully, one thing: let us do it.  The people can’t be any worse at spending the money they earn than most politicians are at it.

Hello, Buffalo GOP, Where Are You?

As sad as it is that Byron Brown was effectively relected last night, it is just as sad that the mayoral race is over now, regardless of who won.

I’ve various comments on the radio that Buffalo voters “had a choice” for this election, but did they really? Sure, Buffalo Democrats had a choice (and, in my opinion, they made the wrong one,) but not Buffalo Republicans or Buffalo voters as a whole. And that is sad.

I come from Massachusetts, and I know very well the frustration of living in a place dominated by one-party. I have debated with party leaders (here and back in Massachusetts) over the merits of putting up a candidate in a futile race for the sake of having a Republican on the ballot. I can see the arguments from both perspectives: As a voter/activist, I want to see the party put up candidates, to give me someone on the ballot who supports the same things I do. As a party leader, I’d rather save my resources on winnable races.

I know that months ago, the Buffalo GOP seemed ready to put up a candidate for mayor. But, Rick Gattone’s candidacy was shortlived, and the Buffalo GOP didn’t give Matthew Ricchiazzi any support. And why not? With a young candidate on the ballot backed by a major party, at the very least the Buffalo GOP would have gotten enough press that voters would have been reminded that the Republican Party actually exists in the city. Races can’t be won if you don’t bother showing up at the starting line.

As a Democrat-stronghold, running a Republican candidate didn’t have to be about winning as much as it could have been about reminding the voters that there is a still a choice. By giving up a race before it even started, it sends a message that there are no options for the city of Buffalo… that the status quo is the best we can hope for.

So, the Buffalo GOP needs to start showing up at the starting line, and needs to do a better job of reminding voters not only that they have a choice, but of how Democrats have (with the consent of the majority) failed them repeatedly. A party without opposition isn’t accountable to anyone, not even the voters. Remember, Buffalo doesn’t have to be a dying city, but it will stay that way if the people running things know they will get reelected no matter what, that they are safe. When people like Byron Brown (or even Sam Hoyt) keep winning, they are being told that nothing, not even lack of morals or scandal, can knock them down because party loyalty gives them job security. Is that progress? Nope. But, the voters are the one’s making that mistake — but that’s a topic for another blog entry.

Of course, running candiates isn’t the only answer. The party is in tough shape. I’ve been to a few Buffalo GOP and Erie County Republican Party events in the past year. They remind me of GOP events I went to in Massachusetts: Everyone pretty much knows eachother because it is the same people showing up every time. I have nothing against active party members, but a new recruit is worth more than a $25 or a $50 check from the same person who reliably goes to all of the events. That’s not the way to grow the party.

The path to relevancy will be a tough one for the Buffalo GOP, but without showing signs of life the party might as be dead anyway.

What Has Brown Done for You?

Trying to compile a list of nice things to say about Mayor Byron Brown might be frustrating. But at least it’s full-time work, even if it involves spending many hours staring at a blank sheet. With the Democratic primary less than a week away, his re-election staff managed to come up with enough accomplishments to fill a half-minute election commercial, which can be seen on his campaign site.

The ad neglects to mention the continued help Brown has provided for one local resident, namely Leonard Stokes. Even factoring that omission, the claims made on Brown’s behalf are at best debatable. Sometimes, it’s a matter of the backward strategies he feels will better the city. For example, the commercial notes that,

To create jobs and improve our quality of life, we’ve got to make Buffalo safer.

Or, we could have a lightly-taxed municipality where it’s easy to create jobs, which would in turn improve quality of life and consequently make Buffalo safer. In this case, there’s no gratifying reason to do it the hard way. Regardless, Brown is selling the notion that he’s protecting us with the claim that he has

Added 126 more police in Buffalo

It’s pleasantly surprising that the mayor is at least trying to position himself as a law-and-order type. He could theoretically attract conservatives by highlighting his commitment to law enforcement; that’s one type of governmental spending with which they have no problem. It won’t happen, but he thought it was worth a shot. That said, Brown’s primary opponent claims that the number of officers added just means the city is barely keeping ahead of the retirement rate. Plus, it’s curious that the police union spent its endorsement on same foe. Shouldn’t they be pleased that Brown has hired more of them? Maybe they don’t like how he refuses to blame criminals for crime, as when the ad notes that there are

Now over 5,000 illegal guns off our streets

The mayor’s doesn’t get it: what’s important is how many illegal lawbreakers are off our streets. The threat to public security comes from those who do bad things with guns, not the guns themselves. Obesity isn’t caused by silverware. Besides, calling a gun “illegal” in New York State is barely stronger than acknowledging it exists. The ad maintains that

Crime (is) down seven percent

It might just be that there’s less good stuff to steal nowadays. The commercial also fails to point out that the city has seen 40 homicides in 2009 as of August 26, which is an unsettling if not quite shocking rate. Perhaps gun buyback programs weren’t the solution after all. Brown may or may not have improved city life in other ways, as with his

Plans to demolish thousands more vacant buildings to keep improving neighborhoods

There has to be more to improving neighborhoods than knocking down abandoned structures. In cities that enjoy even remote prosperity, empty buildings aren’t a problem, as they don’t stay empty for long. Buffalo’s trouble should be finding enough homes and commercial properties to accommodate new residents and entrepreneurs; instead, we just surrender and knock them down. Brown’s empty lots just mean slightly less blight.

Overall, the mayor’s television spot is almost as mystifying as his campaign logo, which features a buffalo that looks as if it’s been sliced in half by a samurai or skillful butcher. Most bizarrely, the partial carcass is reclining at an oddly upward angle. The animal could be looking forward. Or, it might be an expired creature that has been left propped up before it’s to be processed into bison burgers, with the head ready for mounting on a plaque destined for the wall of a gin mill or someone’s den. As with both his campaign and the city under his watch, it isn’t facing the right way.

The Buffalo Bean Interviews Matthew Ricchiazzi

The Buffalo Bean is pleased to present the following interview with Matthew Ricchiazzi, who is running for Mayor of Buffalo, NY:

THE BUFFALO BEAN: How is your campaign going so far? What kind of response are you getting?

MATTHEW RICCHIAZZI: My campaign is as grassroots as it gets: it’s me, a few volunteers and a few clipboards.  The response we’ve been getting so far has been overwhelming positive when we’ve been going door-to-door.  Everyone in Buffalo wants change.  They don’t want the region’s political discourse to focused on who in City Hall is most likely to be indicted; they’d much rather have a conversation about how we can create jobs and how we can more aggressively pursue economic development.

I want to build a city where you don’t have to move away to find a decent paying job; where your kids don’t have to move away to realize their full potential—anything short of that is failure.    But that requires that we start electing political leaders who know where we’re going and how to get us there.  This campaign isn’t about money; it’s not about patronage—which is easy, given that I don’t have money or any political connections.  This campaign is about ideas.  It’s about an Agenda to Change Buffalo, a roadmap for transformational change that be read at changebuffalo.org.

THE BUFFALO BEAN: How is your signature collecting going? How many have you collected so far?

MATTHEW RICCHIAZZI: I am a registered Republican, so initially I was seeking a Republican nomination for Mayor. I ended up falling a few dozen signatures short to get on that primary ballot, so I’m now pursuing an independent nominating petition, which would make me an unaffiliated candidate and requires 1,500 signatures. I have until August 14, and we’ve been averaging between 110 and 140 signatures per day, depending on how many volunteers I can muster on that particular day. We have a little over 900 right now, so I’m fairly confident we’ll meet the requirement with, perhaps, a few days to spare.

THE BUFFALO BEAN: Is the Buffalo Republican Party helping you at all?

MATTHEW RICCHIAZZI: Oh no, not at all. Clearly, the Party likes to play political games—I suppose that’s their role. They’re going to end up giving the Republican nomination to a Democrat, Mickey Kearns, so that he can remain on the ballot even if he loses his primary. I understand that the Republican Party needs to rebuild itself given the current predicament both in the City and nationally, but giving the nomination to a Democrat is a not-so-subtle attempt to play patronage politics on the part of Republican Party personalities that have essentially been shut out.

I take a very different view. We’re not going to be able to rebuild the Republican Party by becoming (and nominating) Democrats. We’ll rebuild the Party with new blood, new ideas, and a very different tone. We need to run aggressively against the institutionalized systems of patronage that plague our governmental institutions. We are victims of a one-party political machine that continues to run our City into the ground, even after decades of decline and hemorrhaging job losses. Now, more than ever, we need a radical new approach. And the approach shouldn’t be to nominate Democrats in exchange for patronage jobs. We certainly need a new Party Chairman that takes this task seriously. Our City is dying here. We’re in crisis mode, and we don’t have any more time to waste with Party hacks—in either Party.

THE BUFFALO BEAN: You’re a young guy, what makes you think you have the experience to be mayor of Buffalo?

MATTHEW RICCHIAZZI: I’m not running on experience, I’m running on skill sets. I have skill sets that Byron Brown and Mickey Kearns don’t have, and that are absolutely critical if we are going to address Buffalo’s extraordinary challenges in a meaningful way. Now, more than ever, we need an MBA Mayor who is also an urban planner—someone who’s worked in legislative affairs in DC, and as a community organizer in New York.

If we had an MBA Mayor, One Sunset would never have happened. We need a Mayor who can identify viable profit making opportunities and constantly link those opportunities with investors; but that requires a Mayor who can speak the language of structured finance and who is fluent in the analytics of firm decision making. There is a whole realm of economic development that isn’t even being engaged, because we need a Mayor who is sophisticated enough to have those conversations.

If we had a Mayor who was an Urban Planner, the concept of an elevated Route 5 would have been laughed out of the room and out of the realm of possibilities. The Wingate Hotel debacle never would have happened. Our new zoning code would certainly have been written by now. We wouldn’t have forgotten to include bike lanes in our reconstruction of Main Street. The fact that we have a Mayor who is neither an MBA nor an Urban Planner is costing us an extraordinary amount of money, time, and potential. We can’t afford to waste any more time with him.

The funny thing about experience: you can have decades of all the experience that has been killing us, without having any of the skill sets that we need. I admit that I have no experience sending your kids to other states to find work. Mayor Brown, on the other hand, has decades of experience offering mediocre leadership in dysfunctional governments where he has done nothing of consequence (nine years in the common council, three years in the State Senate, three years as Mayor). Mayor Brown has decades of precisely the experience that we can no longer afford. Only in Buffalo can you fail your way up the hierarchy like that.

THE BUFFALO BEAN: It has been four decades since the city of Buffalo has had a Republican mayor. What makes you think you are the candidate to break the trend?

MATTHEW RICCHIAZZI: I’m a very different kind of Republican. I think that we need to make government cheaper, smaller, and more flexible so that we can afford to be responsive, engaged, and catalytic when it comes to job creation and economic development. I’m a fiscally conservative, socially liberal, pragmatic objectivist. I want to understand our problems simply as they are, without the lens of ideological dogma or Party entrenchment. Progress need not be petty or partisan.

I think that my candidacy, and my Agenda to Change Buffalo, is very attractive to constituencies that aren’t typically Republican: students and young people who want a voice and a future in this City; young professionals who want jobs and opportunity; the LGBT community who wants a freer and more tolerant government; progressives who want competent and high quality urban planning; small business owners who crave a sophisticated approach to development; parents who understand that the quality of public education is the civil rights issue of our time; and homeowners who need us to eliminate the property tax’s investment penalty. My Agenda speaks to these constituencies.

THE BUFFALO BEAN: Between your age and your political party, what is the bigger obstacle to overcome?

MATTHEW RICCHIAZZI: That’s hard to say. Certainly, there exists a great deal of ageism that I’ve encountered going door to door. But there is also a great deal of anti-Republicanism, which I certainly understand given the performance of the National Republican Party over the last eight years. I’m a harsh of critic of the National Republican Party, and I think that President Bush squandered so much potential over his eight years as President. We need leaders like Jack Kemp, who was a policy innovator. He didn’t follow polls, he changed opinions through robust and respectful debate, and he articulated a vision for the Party that was forward-thinking, inclusive, diverse, tolerant, and respectful. Where did that caliber of Republican go?

THE BUFFALO BEAN: How is the media treating your candidacy?

MATTHEW RICCHIAZZI: I’m running, in large part, because my generation is absolutely irate that the current and previous generations of Buffalo Niagara’s leadership have squandered my generation’s future here. It pains me to say that we are a failed community—we cannot regenerate ourselves. If you want to find a decent paying job or to realize your full potential, you have to move someplace else. I love this City—like many people of my generation, we think Buffalo is an extraordinary place and we’d love to make our futures here. But we can’t, because a one party political machine has run this City into the ground for decades. My message is simple: don’t squander our future, don’t mitigate our promise or potential, don’t vote for more of the same. Vote for change.

Why the establishment media (aka, the Buffalo News) hasn’t covered my campaign is a mystery to me, but I’m not worried. The Buffalo News’ target demographic is very different than mine. They’re missing the story.

THE BUFFALO BEAN: What, as mayor, would be the top three things on your agenda?

MATTHEW RICCHIAZZI: First, we need to much more aggressively pursue economic development and job creation. We need to hire a professional economic development staff that markets development incentives to the world’s most promising, most innovative, most cutting edge companies, so that we can cultivate the industries of the future here. We need to establish a venture capital fund that the City can use to rapidly capitalize promising start ups in emerging industries. We need an aggressive land banking operation to correct the extraordinary housing disequilibrium in so many of our neighborhoods.

Second, we need to streamline the size and scope of the City government, so that we can dramatically reduce our operational spending in order to reduce the property tax levy in a meaningful way. We need to devolve some service delivery to not-for-profit intermediaries who don’t have the same union obligations that the City is burdened with. We need to implement automated systems throughout the City government to improve labor productivity and reduce our staffing needs. We need to regionalize some functions of municipal government to county-wide or regional entities that can take a more holistic view while eliminating redundant layers of government. And, because it makes sense for tax payers, we need to privatize our public works operations so that we can enjoy greater flexibility and lower fixed costs for those operations.

Third, we to establish a robust intergovernmental affairs operation in both Albany and Washington, where we need permanent offices and full time lobbyists who are constantly pushing for state and federal investment in our transportation and higher education infrastructure, in addition to securing the changes in State law that are required to build a more flexible and more responsive City government.

This interview was conducted via email July 22, 2009.

Gotta Love Those “Place-Holder” Candidates

While there has been more attention on Mickey Kearns’s futile effort to oust Byron Brown in the Democrat primary, those of us on the other side of the aisle have our own useless election to pay attention to. It is so useless in fact that Buffalo Republicans have selected a “place-holder” candidate, who way or may not be the candidate in November, while they wait for serious candidates who are contemplating running a losing battle.

Buffalo Republicans Wednesday voted to put businessman Rick Gattone’s name on designating petitions for mayor, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he will be their candidate in November.

Buffalo GOP Chairman Dennis V. Ryan said today his mayoral search is still very much in progress, and that Gattone’s name was inserted on petitions now on the street to “hold the line” while others considering the race make their decisions.

“To start the petition process, Rick was one of several people willing to put their name on petitions until we find a candidate,” Ryan said. “None were serious candidates.”

Ryan acknowledged the possibility that Gattone eventually could emerge as the Republican candidate, but said the party is still talking to other potential entries in the race.

Well, maybe the Republican option will be more attractive after another term of fail leadership from Byron Brown.