Voters in Queens
are used to Tony Avella the rebel, the rabble-rouser, the gleeful, swiping,
sniping firebrand.
But are they
ready for the new Tony Avella, the conciliatory and circumspect, the cautious
and calculating politician?
That appears to
be what they are getting as Avella, the former mayoral candidate and enfant
terrible of the New York City Council works his was back into the good graces
of the Queens Democratic Party he once scorned and is reaching out to the very
same elected officials he publicly lambasted over the past eight years.
“Tony is trying
to delicately get his way back into the good graces of people he’s been pissing
all over for the past few years,” said one Queens Democrat.
In between
glad-handing at the Senate Democrats’ reception following Gov. David Paterson’s
State of the State address in early January, Avella explained that he was in a
deliberate effort to shore up every pocket of support, “talking to the players
that would be involved in a race as important as this, and just making sure
that we can have a united front—which we can.”
Gone are the
angry dismissals of political deal making, as is the distance Avella had put
between himself and the Queens County Democrats, whose support he expects
despite their endorsement of Bill Thompson in the Democratic mayoral primary.
“This will be a
united effort, where a lot of people will be on board who couldn’t be in the
mayoral race, because Thompson had the bulk of the Democratic support,” Avella
said. “But this race will be totally different.”
Take, for
example, his position on the gubernatorial nominee.
Asked at the
first mayoral debate whether he would support Paterson for the Democratic
nomination this fall, Avella said no, and later compared the governor to a
“deer in the headlights.”
Asked after the
State of the State whom he wants to see as the nominee, he would only say, “I
think whoever serves the city and the state best.”
In a race
against incumbent State Sen. Frank Padavan, a race Democrats tried to recruit
Avella for in both ’06 and ’08, not only would the former city councilman have
the benefit of running in a district where he outperformed Thompson in the
primary, but he comes with an anti-tax, anti-government record in a year that
seems sure to be defined at least in part by voters’ exhaustion with both.
Plus, Democratic voters in the district have put Democrats in every seat that
overlaps with Padavan’s except for the one Avella himself held until last month.
That has
Democrats predicting that Avella will have a significantly stronger showing
than Jim Gennaro, a lower-profile Council member who represented a much smaller
overlapping piece of the Senate district, but still forced Padavan into a
protracted court battle in 2008.
Queens County
Republican chair Phil Ragusa, however, dismissed the 2008 margin as nothing
more than a result of Barack Obama’s coattails.
“This is going
to be more of a traditional race,” Ragusa said, shrugging off a pattern in the past
few years of aging urban Republican senators—Roy Goodman, Nick Spano, Serph
Maltese—narrowly eking out wins in one election only to see their districts go
heavily Democratic in the next.
Ragusa lives in
both Padavan’s Senate district and Avella’s former Council district, and he ran
against Avella for Council in 2003, but he said that people in the district
have come to think of Padavan as the person to go to for constituent problems.
“Most people
said, ‘Gee, what is he doing?’” he said of Avella’s mayoral campaign. “They
didn’t think that it was a serious run. And I think he spent a lot of his time
in Manhattan.”
Ragusa said he
believed the neighborhood has soured on Avella.
“I think a lot
of people who were behind him in the past will not support him in this next
election,” he said.
Meanwhile,
Queens Democrats seem ready to forgive Avella’s harsh words against them if it
means another pick-up in the Senate.
“Tony’s
had good relationships with some of his colleagues before that, and Tony will
have good relationships with some of his colleagues after that,” said one
person familiar with Avella’s plans.
And
as for those that Avella has had bad relationships with, said the source, that
will ultimately play to his advantage, explaining, “he has certainly rubbed
some people the wrong way—but that’s also what led him to be the only Democrat
ever elected in that district.”
And
though neither Avella’s candidacy nor the Democratic Senate Campaign
Committee’s support of it have yet become official, Democrats are preparing to
prioritize the effort against Padavan.
“The
DSCC is going to fully invest in the race to replace Sen. Padavan, and we look
forward to working with and fully supporting whoever that candidate ends up
being,” said DSCC executive director Josh Cherwin.
But those who
have known Avella for the past decade say the prospect of him in the Senate
still makes them nervous. This is the person, after all who frequently found
himself one of the lone dissenting votes on the City Council, and who seemed to
revel in not playing along.
