I thought it only fitting that we conclude American Rattlesnake’s coverage of competitive congressional races this year with a profile of a contest that is taking place in my district, the 13th Congressional District of New York, since this site’s chief writer is a native New Yorker, and this is the only competitive congressional race to occur within New York City this election cycle. The man you see above is my congressman, Michael E. “Mike” McMahon, whose name will appear on both the Democratic and Independence Party lines as fellow voters in my district cast their ballots tomorrow morning. Despite the highly unflattering photograph-taken by yours truly-Congressman McMahon is actually a rather savvy politician, as should be expected from someone who represents the most conservative, most Republican district in this city’s large congressional delegation.
Although he votes with his party more than ninety percent of the time, he also makes a point of breaking with national Democratic and Obama administration priorities-such as the sweeping health care law enacted by Congress this past March, which was the subject of the town hall meeting at which I photographed my congressman-often enough that he can legitimately be described as a “moderate,” or at the very least, a center-left Democrat. Gersh Kuntsman wrote an interesting profile of Rep. McMahon’s dichotomous record earlier this year in The Brooklyn Paper.
Unfortunately, Mr. McMahon’s maverick thinking does not extend to the issues of border security and immigration policy. In fact, his immigration views are lamentably similar to the rest of the Democratic Caucus, including an ill-informed hostility to SB 1070, as this article in the Staten Island Advance informs us. For this reason alone, the candidacy of his Republican opponent, a decorated Gulf War veteran and former FBI agent named Michael Grimm,bears consideration. As horrible as McMahon’s pro-amnesty views are, they stand in stark contrast to the pro-enforcement stance taken by his opponent.
If McMahon is a good friend of LULAC and MALDEF, then Grimm is surely an opponent of those two malefactors, and a friend to my fellow Staten Islanders and the Brooklynites whose camaraderie I sorely miss. Do yourselves a favor tomorrow, and think long and hard before you decide to re-elect the charming, politically adept, but very deficient congressman from our district.
It is not so much unflattering, methinks, as merely out-of-focus!?! May I assume, as a former Staten Islander myself, that Representative McMahon owes his current job to a disgraced predecessor’s unquenchable thirst and irrepressible libido (although, not in that particular chronological order)?!? I guess that I should have stuck around and just run for the seat myself…!?!?!
Believe me, you couldn’t have been any worse than Straniere.
No, but I might have had to Italicize or, at least, Gaelicize my Anglophonic surname even to have had a shot at any partisan nomination!?! I surely could have used that $174,000.00 per annum, though!
Hey, we have a German-American congressman now. People here seem to be very open-minded.
To paraphrase the late Dino Crocetti, of Steubenville, Ohio: “I tried being [‘very open-minded’] once, Frank; all I could get was construction work!” I myself am actually a (so as to say) “Euro-mongrel” [having descended from at least eight different European nationalities], including my being completely Slavic on my mother’s side [both maternal grandparents having been (legal) immigrants, of the early-Twentieth-Century variety, from the then-Austro-Hungarian Empire].