Brown Aims to Get Now-Blue Upper East Side to Go Red Again
Former firefighter talks national security; Krueger presses health care, economy
When Tim Brown stares into the gaping abyss that is the
subway stop at
On the many faces headed to work in the early hours on
That is the response he gets when he tells people he is a
Republican.
“The problem is, when you say ‘Republican,’ people think
George Bush,” said Brown, who is hoping to beat Liz Krueger for the Senate seat
that stretches from
Occasionally, though, there is hope.
“When you do get an actual Republican, their eyes light up,”
he said. “It’s like you’re on an island together.”
Krueger’s district used to be one of the state’s and city’s
most reliably Republican, represented for decades by Roy Goodman. But as with
elsewhere in the state, demographic trends began to slowly favor Democrats, and
today, the district has about two and a half Democrats for every one
Republican. The steep deficit has helped Krueger trounce each of her
challengers since winning the special election prompted by Goodman’s
resignation, itself prompted by her near-toppling of the local legend in the
2000 race.
Krueger is now one of the Democratic conference’s more
formidable members. She headed the party’s senatorial campaign committee in
2006, and is counting on putting her acquired influence to use if the Democrats
take back the Senate in the fall.
“The Democrats taking the majority is an opportunity for me,
as someone who is a Democrat and has gained some seniority in my six years, and
I think, more importantly, has gained some really sophisticated understanding
of how it works and we can fix it,” she said.
So the election this fall may boil down to an inversion of
the one at the top of the ballot: the Democrat touting her experience, the
Republican, his vision for change.
“I’m change,” Brown said. “I’m the guy coming off the
street. I’m a blue-collar guy, I’m a union guy.”
In fact, Brown is union guy twice over, his membership
representing the oddly commingled threads of his eclectic biography: the
Uniformed Firefighters Association and the Screen Actors Guild.
Before he was a candidate for State Senate, Brown was a
firefighter, one who walked out of the lobby of Tower 2 at the
Brown soon developed a friendship with Rudolph Giuliani,
which led him to support him and work on his presidential campaign, though this
put him at odds with his firefighter colleagues, many of whom have spoken out
against the former mayor.
On the side, he picked up a recurring role as an inmate on
the television series Oz, courtesy of his friendship with the show’s creator,
Tom Fontana.
Brown is hoping his biography, despite his party line, will
attract voters on the
“I’m an interesting person,” he said. “I consider myself a
new-breed Republican. I hope that I can become a leader in the Republican Party
and take the party in a new direction.”
Brown is using his background to shape an image for himself
as the national security candidate in the mold of Giuliani, conjuring memories
of September 11 and reminding voters weary of terrorism that the threat of an
attack still exists.
“My district has
Krueger prefers to focus on core domestic issues.
“I’ve been an outspoken advocate for universal health care
coverage in
Brown has his own opinions on those matters. For one, he
thinks Krueger has neglected the district’s hospitals by allowing funding to
flow upstate. But before he gets there, he has to get on the ballot—and along
the way, convince people to look past the letter next to his name.
“This is hard work,” he said of canvassing the subway stops
for Republican signatures. “If you can’t handle rejection, being a Republican
in
