In CD1, a debatable absence

Daily Point

Debate debate

The usual order of things in New York politics is that the newcomer is eager to get on a debate stage with their opponent, while the veteran doesn’t mind staying aloof and denying a platform to the upstart.

There’s no incumbent for the GOP primary in CD1, the seat being vacated by Lee Zeldin, who is running for governor, but Suffolk political mainstay Nick LaLota and former Brookhaven Deputy Town Supervisor Anthony Figliola have shown up for two candidate showcases.

Michelle Bond, the newcomer who has spent the campaign criticizing “career politicians,” was not at either of those events, hosted by the League of Women Voters or Schnepps Media. With less than two weeks to go before primary day, it’s also not clear if she will be attending an Aug. 18 candidates day organized by the Centereach Civic Association.

Campaign spokesman Pat Ryan emailed The Point that Bond is “not opposed to debating.” He says the LWV event “was scheduled for a day that conflicted with an event Michelle couldn’t reschedule.”

As for the second, Ryan said the campaign’s “decision not to participate in the other seemed vindicated when, in the first 60 seconds of the Zoom ‘debate,’ a barking dog interrupted the proceeding and one of the moderators revealed that he didn’t even know which congressional district he was talking about.”

It may be that Bond is relying on other, prepackaged campaign efforts rather than the traditional but potentially explosive debate experience. She has been running TV ads including one released this week about her push “to get prices down, get that border wall up and get Nancy and Joe out of the way,” referring to Speaker Pelosi and President Biden.

And two super PACs — Stand for New York, whose federal filings list a P.O. box mailing address in Austin, Texas, and Crypto Innovation — have been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars boosting her run or bashing LaLota’s.

— Mark Chiusano @mjchiusano

Talking Point

Meet the candidates

Of the nine House races with primaries in New York City this month, just one of them overlaps with Long Island: CD3, which includes some 60,000 registered city Democrats.

The happy upshot of the small amount of the district dipping into Queens is that Long Islanders can make use of a very voter-friendly meet-the-candidates guide from NYC Votes, an initiative of the New York City Campaign Finance Board.

The guide includes “Top 3” issues for all the candidates, which surprisingly results in some interesting divergences. Reema Rasool, Melanie D’Arrigo, and Robert Zimmerman all list “climate,” while Jon Kaiman doesn’t. (There is no entry from Josh Lafazan, who “has not submitted a profile,” according to the guide.)

Rasool and D’Arrigo nod to health care, with Rasool namechecking “Universal Medicare for all”; and both Zimmerman and Kaiman list voting rights.

Kaiman is the only candidate to mention “public safety” or labor, the latter of which he included in a threefold entry, which cleverly expanded his range of answers. He was also the only candidate to get “choice” into the equation, surprising given how much these and other Democratic candidates have talked about protecting abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe in June.

This is possibly explained by the fact that the deadline to submit answers was the end of June, according to a CFB spokesman, and many candidates sent in their profiles much earlier.

The guide also has some biographical information and an introductory quote from each candidate that helps them make their case — Kaiman says “These are times when experience matters” — or even insert a unique policy focus into the conversation.

Rasool, for example, wants a Green New Deal but also “a Blue New Deal for our oceans.”

Check out the guide here. 

— Mark Chiusano @mjchiusano

Pencil Point

Looking the other way

For more cartoons, visit www.newsday.com/nationalcartoons

Reference Point

Inflationary pains decades later

We feel you, frantic cartoon character from Newsday’s editorial page on Aug. 14, 1947.

Nearly 75 years to the day after the above cartoon ran, the prices of rent, food and clothes are again skyrocketing like they did back then due to post-World War II inflation.

Here, the cartoon consumer is anxiously pressing the down elevator button as prices ride up. The drawing ran alongside an editorial headlined “The Vanishing Soup Bone” that opens by berating former President Herbert Hoover, saying his campaign promised to put a chicken in every American soup, but instead left the “national stomach” with just a watery vegetable mix. The board blames the Big Depression followed by war rationing and then a skyward spiral in costs.

“Any housewife who flinches as she hears the butcher quote his fancy prices, any businessman who watches the steady upward march in the price of the materials he uses, anybody at all who has to make last year’s paycheck meet this year’s prices knows.”

Deja vu right?

Back in 1947, the U.S. attorney general set out to find a culprit spurring the inflation, and the editorial quipped that he would undoubtedly find that business, labor, and government all were contributing to it. It played out that when World War II rationing restrictions were lifted, Americans went on a spending spree and when that slowed it caused an 11-month mild recession.

A stark difference between now and that era is that the post-war unemployment rate hit 7.9% from former soldiers left seeking jobs, while unemployment today is just 3.5%. And that today’s harried consumer is probably not chain-smoking cigarettes for relief like in the cartoon.

Nevertheless, the inflationary pains that bind are very real.

— Amanda Fiscina @adfiscina