Lazio, Levy take battle to Brooklyn GOP dinner

The Battle for Republican Brooklyn quickly became the theme the other night, amid the whiff of clams oreganato in the El Caribe catering hall at the edge of the residential conclave of Mill Basin.

First, some perspective:

Democrats outnumber Republicans boroughwide by more than seven to one.

Republican George Pataki, who won the New York governorship three times, never drew more than 38 percent of the general election vote in Kings County.

Still, Brooklyn stands to count big in an internal GOP fight. Rick Lazio and Steve Levy are now locked in a kind of primary-before-the-primary, one that today seems unlikely to reach a resolution before the party's state convention in less than three weeks.

Under chairman Craig Eaton, a Lazio backer, the borough's GOP committee gets nearly 3.2 percent of the weighted vote at the convention. Small fractions are played as major prizes at this point. Lazio was speaking as an honoree at a party dinner - which Levy was eager to point out had been arranged in December, long before the nomination turned competitive.

Levy, accompanied by his wife, Colleen, rolled in on time and did some mingling. On hand were his key allies, state GOP chairman Ed Cox and state executive director Tom Basile. As elsewhere, they were looking to chip away where possible at Lazio's sources of support.

In the lobby, the recently ex-Democratic Levy told reporters that Lazio brings no funds, no plan, and no excitement to a contest against Democrat Andrew Cuomo. Levy spoke of hand-to-hand combat. As for Pataki and Rudy Giuliani, who back Lazio, Levy said they represented the party's old guard.

Cox has suggested separate votes at the June 1 parley - one for candidate preference, and the other, perhaps, to effectively authorize a September primary. But Lazio, taking his turn before reporters, voiced resistance. "We've got a lot riding on this," he said. "It's not about any individual candidacy. It's about how the Republican Party is viewed. . . . It's about the legacy of the party, it's about the legitimacy of the party."

Entrenched elected officials, however, get to use party solidarity, ideology and loyalty as expedient power tools. This was clear in the brief remarks by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, delivered during the event's cocktail hour in a noisy, half-seated, half-attentive room.

Bloomberg mentioned his recent hiring of Stephen Goldsmith, the former Republican Indianapolis mayor, as a deputy.

He chose not to mention just then his recent hiring of Democrat Howard Wolfson, whose job in 2000 was denouncing Lazio - as a spokesman for Hillary Clinton.

Bloomberg hailed Eaton, who helped him secure his own nomination last year, as "our leader."

He chose not to bring up what everyone there knew: that in 2007 he famously dropped his own GOP registration.

Six years earlier, Bloomberg switched from Democrat to Republican because it offered him the clearest route to the mayoralty.

County Conservative chairman Gerard Kassar, a Lazio supporter, said it was smart of Levy to show up but added it would be difficult to pick off delegates, given Lazio's backing from Eaton and from GOP state Sen. Martin Golden of Brooklyn.

Levy in February was widely quoted as saying: "I like to think of myself as postpartisan . . . the party banner is less important than the underlying principles on which you run."

Yet as this battle for Brooklyn shows, the major parties ever dominate the ballot - whether a candidate says he's postpartisan, nonpartisan, bipartisan, quasi-partisan, or pan-partisan. And everyone in the place seemed to know it.