Union's associate dean for undergraduate education tells about his run for office.
To passersby, Brad Lewis must have looked like a cool candidate on Election Day.
With his name on the ballot in the race for Schenectady City Council, Lewis spent part of the day at home mowing his lawn.
But don't assume that this was the act of an old political hand who could tell just from the number of voters whether the news would be good or bad. The lawnmowing was an effort to release tension, a bit of rest and relaxation before heading back into the political fray. It was, Lewis says, a pleasant diversion on what turned out to be a long, tiring, and emotional day.
That evening, Lewis went to the Price Chopper Community Room on the city's east side, where he was to join a few other candidates to watch as the votes were counted for the nineteenth election district. There, amid nervous candidates and people who for one reason or another wanted to know results right away, the bipartisan poll watchers called out the tallies from the two voting machines. Lewis, in his first political race, found himself fourth out of eight candidates seeking four council seats.
“I wasn't sure what to make of it,” he recalls. “I had had a fair number of conversations with campaign veterans, and I thought I would be third or fourth in the city overall. So fourth in a part of the city where I should have done well was a little disquieting.”
After gathering the numbers, Lewis and his wife, Cathy, took the results into neighboring Scotia, where the Schenectady County Republicans had set up their headquarters at the Glen Sanders Mansion, a restaurant. Party workers, including about ten Young Republicans from Union, would tally the results brought in by people like Lewis to get an unofficial idea of how all the races in the county were shaping up. Here Lewis continued to get disquieting news.
“The first set of votes, with thirty of the city's forty-eight districts reporting, had me sixth,” he says. “I was really worried and could already see I was going to have a problem. 'Shock' is too strong a word, but it definitely was not what we had hoped for.”
To dampen everyone's spirits even further, Republicans in a number of county legislator districts were not doing well. (Lewis says that for a variety of reasons — size of budgets, number of jobs available, prestige within the state — many in both parties are more interested in the county than the city.) When the long-time Republican chairman of the county legislature lost his seat, the room plunged into gloom. “Are we going to lose the entire county?” was on everyone's mind (Republicans had controlled the legislature for thirty-two years).
Finally, results from the city were all in. Lewis finished fifth, with twelve percent of the vote — certainly a respectable showing for someone who had never run for anything, but, in the end, disappointing.
All in all, Lewis says, the experience was exhilarating, exhausting, and exciting. It gave him the political bug (he may run again) and it left him with a couple of big questions (more on those later). But first — how did a professor of economics and associate dean for undergraduate education get into something like this?
Lewis, a Midwesterner, is a self-described political junkie. “I was the kind of kid who stayed up and watched the conventions,” he says. “I didn't want to go to bed.”
He came to Schenectady in 1969 after graduating from Carleton College in Minnesota. He was an accounting manager and then a corporate auditor for the General Electric Co., took a leave of absence to earn his master's degree and doctorate from the University of Chicago, and returned to Schenectady in 1979 to join the Union faculty. About ten years later he began writing a once-a-month opinion column for the Schenectady Gazette, focusing initially on economic issues but gradually broadening to include local and state issues.
Over the years, he was asked, casually, whether he would be interested in running for the city council or county legislature. In early 1999, he decided to give it a try.
“What intrigued me most was the fact that the Republicans finally seemed to be on the point of moving the city forward,” he says. “The Metroplex Authority (a new entity charged primarily with redeveloping downtown) was being set up, and the governor (Republican George Pataki) was starting to be interested in Schenectady. In addition, the Republicans, under Mayor Al Jurczynski, said they wanted a 'new look' and a 'new way of moving the city forward.' So I said yes.”
Lewis knew that not all of his positions were in the current Republican mold. A fiscal conservative, he was middle of the road to liberal on social issues, and he was determined not to change. But he also knew that many local conservatives were more interested in other issues, such as public safety, than they were in party ideology. Lewis gained the support of the both the Conservative Party and the Independence Party — New York's version of the Reform Party.
Then, just as the campaign started to work up speed, the city council race took a surprising turn. Local newspapers reported that former Mayor Frank Duci would be running for the city council.
Duci, seventy-eight and one of the veteran warhorses of New York State politics, had begun to hint early in the year that he might run for the county legislature, which probably would have resulted in a primary battle. His hints alarmed party leaders, and after extensive conversations Duci was added to the city Republican ticket.
Duci, one of the best-known Republicans in the city and a proven vote-getter, was perhaps also the most controversial, and Lewis in the past had been critical of some of Duci's policies. As soon as the stories appeared about Duci running in the city, Lewis began to hear from people who said they supported him but were sorry to see Duci on the ticket.
Although all four Republicans cooperated in some respects, each ran essentially an independent campaign. Unlike the Democrats, whose lawn signs and literature presented a four-person team, the Republicans had individual lawn signs, and their campaign literature made little mention of a new Republican “team.”
After the maneuvering, the campaigning began in earnest, and Lewis quickly found out what local campaigning is all about. For example, he had three ballot lines — Republican, Conservative, and Independence — so he had to carry around three sets of petitions to get his name on the ballot. “I literally ran for office in June and July, driving all over the city myself to get petitions signed,” he says.
Much of Lewis's “organization” consisted of his wife, Cathy, who served as campaign manager, treasurer, and sounding board, and who even pounded in lawn signs throughout the city. “In some ways, I was surprised at how much you are on your own,” Lewis says. “It really is an entrepreneurial effort. Cliff Brown and Ted Gilman (members of the College's Political Science Department) had told me how steep the learning curve is for first-time candidates. They were right.”
Into the fall, Lewis walked the neighborhoods, ringing doorbells, handing out literature, talking and listening (in some cases for a long time, as he did when an elderly woman lectured him for forty-five minutes on the need for the city to get closer to God). He appeared at candidate forums, went to church festivals, talked during the “Comments from the Public” portion of City Council meetings, wrote several letters to the local newspaper, and managed to get on television a few times (even if it was only in his faculty role as an economist asked to comment on Alan Greenspan; it was still good exposure).
With all this, Lewis was surprised at the difficulties of getting his message out.
“I suppose my model involved press conferences, position papers, and public meetings and debates,” he says. “Given what I thought were my strengths — analysis and speaking — I thought I would have more chances to distinguish myself from the other candidates. What I discovered is how much of the campaigning is done at a personal level — going door to door, for example — and how little public discussion there would be about the city's future.”
Although the races for mayor and county legislature were hotly contested, the city council races attracted less attention than many had thought they would earlier in the year. The breakdown of the party structure and the “sound bite” nature of campaigning — although they reflect the national scene — troubled Lewis. Political parties, he notes, have traditionally been vehicles for social integration, a way to bring people together, and now they are increasingly likely to be nothing more than a line on the ballot. The short-attention span nature of campaigning creates difficulties for candidates who believe, as Lewis does, that part of the process is the need to educate the public about the choices government must make. “I guess I found out part of me can't stop being a teacher,” he says.
He offers the following example of the difficulty of “teaching.”
“For a variety of reasons, you can't say it would make more sense to raise taxes a little each year than to have big jumps in non-election years,” he says. “I remember sitting at one council committee meeting where they tried to postpone the purchase of new garbage trucks because of the cost in an election year. But the current trucks are so old they break down frequently. If you were running a business, you'd get good equipment now because you know it will pay for itself in a few years.”
A result of these kinds of decisions, he says, is that people become more cynical about government. The politicians then exploit the cynicism (e.g., negative advertising), and the public becomes even more cynical. “At the end of the day, people in politics (or politicians and the electorate combined) have made government less credible and less effective,” he says.
Despite the difficulties, Lewis forged ahead. He took any opportunity he could to spread his message of downtown redevelopment, job creation, shoring up the city's housing market, consolidating certain government services to save money and eliminate waste, and cooperation rather than conflict in city government. He actually got to like the door-to-door campaigning, found it interesting to learn more about how the city really works, and was fascinated by how people formed their expectations of what politicians should, and could, do. There were down moments, but then a friendly phone call or a warm chat with a voter would lift his spirits. “I got to know a lot of helpful and committed people in politics who I liked and hope to keep working with,” he says. He was also buoyed by the tremendous support he says he received from faculty and staff, and he found that voters were “quite respectful of a faculty member as long as you don't come across as an ivory-tower theorist.”
Then came Election Day.
Lewis looks back at the defeat with a variety of emotions, ranging from satisfaction in making the effort to surprise at some parts of the process.
One surprise was that although the Republican mayor was reelected with nearly sixty percent of the vote, the four winners in the city council race were Democrats. (Lewis did have the satisfaction of attracting more votes than any other Republican.)
“Everyone has a different theory why this happened,” he says. “Democrats outnumber Republicans in the city by a three-to-two margin, voters wanted to balance the Republican mayor with a Democratic council, Democratic candidates ran a more team effort.”
Difficult to judge was the effect of Duci's entry into the race. Some saw his campaign as the return of an old friend; others saw his candidacy as the return of the contentiousness that has long hindered Schenectady's development.
Lewis also saw at the local level a paradox that has been commented on nationally.
“There's a lot of complaining from all across the political spectrum about elected officials and the way they govern Schenectady,” he says. “But here, as elsewhere, incumbents generally prevail. As a new candidate, what message do I draw from the results? That the majority, despite their protestations, preferred the status quo? That some voters may have liked my message but needed to be more familiar with me? That I didn't get my message out strongly enough? It's certainly plenty to think about for the next few months.”
Would he do it again?
There's a pause.
“Well, actually, I'm thinking about running two years from now.”
With that, be begins discussing some steps he will have to take to keep his name in front of the public. But that's another story.