Bruno and the 20th Congressional District

We were having dinner at the house of old friends in Glens Falls on Saturday night, when one of our hosts said his grandfather had lived across the street from where Joe Bruno, the longtime and now indicted former Senate majority leader, grew up. So we took his wife for a ride and she showed us the house, on Walnut Street in the East End of Glens Falls. It's a plain, two-story building with a chimney on each side showing it was once a two-family, though from the front it looks awful small for that. But from the side you can see it extends a bit in the back, so there was room for two six-room cold-water flats, in one of which the Bruno family grew up. There were eight children, a mother who died when Joe was 17, and an immigrant father who made his living shoveling coal in a paper mill (I think the same one where my son works in the wood yard). I know the neighborhood well, since we lived not far away for many years, and for four years in the 1980s I worked even closer, at The Post-Star. The Embassy was the bar (they served thick hamburgers, too) where reporters hung out, at the corner of Lawrence Street a few doors north of Bruno's old house. It and the apartments above burned down a few years ago, killing two people, and the site is now a parking lot for Poopie's restaurant next door. Another bar I used to go to occasionally, Peter's Pub, is at the other end of Bruno's block, and there are other still operating businesses around. It remains a functioning working-class neighborhood, and no doubt the houses now have hot water. And, like most of Bruno's old Senate district (which Glens Falls was not in), it is in the 20th Congressional District, where Republican Jim Tedisco and Democrat Scott Murphy (and Libertarian Eric Sundwall) are now battling it out.

Bruno's indictment on corruption charges reduces the likelihood that anyone will put a plaque on the house, and his pursuit of wealth took him a long way from the old neighborhood. But for a Republican, he was very attentive to working-class concerns, expanding health-care coverage and drawing strong union support. He was a regular politician, like the Democrats who've run political machines in places like Albany and Chicago and Tammany Hall.

Tedisco, Bruno's sometime, less powerful ally in the state Legislature, is not tainted by apparent conflicts of interest like other legislative leaders, and has a better claim to be a reformer. That explains why the DCCC has been reduced to citing his travel expenses and per-diems in its lame attack ads. (As I have previously noted, the NRCC has been running lame Indian-investment ads against Murphy).Tedisco has also adopted the working-class mantle in the campaign, which has its drawbacks as he competes for bourgeois voters and feels obliged to get behind the national GOP's indefensible tax policies. But it works for him when, as Assembly minority leader, he calls for Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to investigate the AIG bonuses, which he and his colleagues will be doing today (and which conservative pundit Bill Kristol would likely endorse).

But as Tip O'Neill's old chestnut goes, and as Bruno would likely agree, all politics is local. As an assemblyman and legislative leader, Tedisco can help his congressional candidacy by standing up for dairy farming and Saratoga rail service, and working on a plausible response to the collapse of the Aqueduct VLT deal. One problem at Aqueduct, as I understand it, was the Spitzer-Paterson administration's position (also Bruno's) that there should be VLTs at Belmont, too. Shelly Silver has been against Belmont VLTs, so maybe Tedisco can make common cause with his old adversary and help salvage an Aqueduct deal, the revenue from which is vital for NYRA, the Saratoga track and local horse farms.