Primary or secondary?
By the Guy on the 13th Floor
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Illustration by J.P. Thimot.
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Anyway, the real potential for drama comes during the election that few actually vote in: the primary. Primaries are great for bringing out the political goofballs, and this year was no exception. There was, for instance, the guy who ran against State Senator Dale Volker. Who was this guy? Nobody knows. The Buffalo News didn’t cover the race at all, so Volker blew the no-name (OK, his name is Leonard Roberto) out of the water, right? Actually, Volker won the Erie County portion of the district fifty-two percent to forty-eight percent. Keep in mind the News hates Dale Volker. He’s the kind of Albany guy the paper rails against. Yet not one story about the race appeared in the paper. Why shake things up?
OK, so the guy who ran against Volker may not be a goofball at all. Who knows? We don’t even know his name. But if we turn our heads to the left we have more than enough of our primary night entertainment …
… like Gerhardt Yaskow. Yaskow is a perennial Buffalo candidate. His unsuccessful effort last year to run for the county legislature has come to be known in political circles as the Yaskow Fiascow. Much to the surprise of the 13th Floor, the Democrats who work here walked into the voting booth only to confront Gerhardt’s name on the primary ballot again, this time against Assemblyman Sam Hoyt. But neither of them were running for the Assembly. This time they were running for the State Democratic Committee, a race in which only Democrats can vote. That in itself is not goofy. The goofiness factor kicked in the day after the primary, when the Niagara County bureau on the 13th Floor faxed over to us a photograph of Yaskow hugging a distraught Gary Parenti following their mutual night of losing. OK, we’ll come back to this.
But now we’ve brought up Gary Parenti, and he requires some explanation for readers who don’t live in Niagara County. Parenti is a former Buffalo-based staff member of Manhattan Assemblyman Sheldon Silver. He later moved on to work for Byron Brown. And while those jobs were temporary, he is a lifetime henchman of former Erie County Democratic Party Chairman Steve Pigeon. Notice a pattern here? Buffalo? Erie County? You got it—not Niagara County.
Anyway, this year Parenti decided to run against Niagara County Assemblywoman Francine DelMonte. Managed by Pigeon and financially supported by Pigeon’s associates, Parenti launched the kind of blistering negative campaign against DelMonte that hasn’t been seen since Sumner Redstone laid the smackdown on Tom Cruise. His main campaign themes? DelMonte is too close with Silver and Byron Brown. The tactic seemed to be working, too, until he recruited a crowd of supporters to crash a DelMonte picnic at which his former boss, Brown, was endorsing DelMonte. He later claimed to know nothing about it, and mailed out thousands of letters to that effect. (Of course he was actually photographed there campaigning.) On primary day, he actually sent out a squad of minions to intimidate voters into voting for him, and they clashed with New York City firefighters who were sent up by Silver to protect his favored candidate. DelMonte won. All of this actually happened.
Which brings us back to the picture. What was Gerhardt Yaskow of Buffalo, a candidate running in Buffalo, doing at Parenti headquarters in Niagara County on primary night? I mean, in addition to hugging Parenti? The answer, of course, is Steve Pigeon.
But Pigeon wasn’t entirely unsuccessful on primary night. He was also backing Antoine Thompson, who ousted Marc Coppola from the State Senate. Pigeon wasn’t a visible presence for Thompson, but like Parenti, Thompson also had the backing of Pigeon’s usual suspects. He and Parenti endorsed each other. But more importantly, Pigeon was apparently responsible for the candidacy of Al Coppola, Marc’s wacky cousin.
When it comes to perennial candidates, Al Coppola is king. He has lost more primaries for more offices than there are offices to lose. Beck wrote his song thinking about Al. In an election featuring the likes of Yaskow and Mark Green, Al Coppola tops them all. Everyone knows Al was in the race to siphon votes away from his cousin, thus ensuing a Thompson win. What’s the evidence his campaign was faked? To begin with, when he chose to file his legally required financial disclosure statements, he reported having less money on hand than I have in my pockets. And at the moment I’m typing this in my underwear (sorry for the image). But in the closing days of the campaign, Al Coppola sent out tens of thousands of dollars in weird mailings.
The mailings, which were on slick paper and in full color, were designed to do something other than electing Al Coppola. The pictures of him were pixilated and blurry, apparently having been crudely downloaded from his website, which until long after the campaign began had not been changed since he ran for mayor last year. (Eventually the word mayor was changed to senator, and City Hall to Albany. But nothing else was changed.)
The message of the mailings? Well, one featured these words, blown up in huge letters: “Things were sure different when Alfred T. Coppola served as our City Councilman and State Senator. They were better. MUCH BETTER!” Nobody could possibly believe this. If they did, it wouldn’t necessarily follow that Al had anything to do with it. The words might as well have been, “Pie is good. We all love pie. Especially pumpkin pie. Boy, I sure do like pumpkins.” The point was simply to remind some little old North Buffalo ladies that the presence of Al Coppola’s name next to Marc’s on the ballot was not a typo. And, hey, it worked! We now have Senator Thompson. And if you call City Hall, don’t be surprised to hear Al Coppola pick up the phone in his new capacity as … some employee on the city payroll. Just a guess.
You just can’t get this kind of entertainment in a general election.
The Guy on the 13th Floor is bitter because he lost a primary race for Independence Party state committee. Can you believe there are such things? Independence Party state committee primaries? I mean, how would you feel if you ran for such an obscure post and lost? I’ll tell you, it is NO FUN.
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