So Tom Suozzi is starting to look like that rare species, an actual conservative Democrat. Not sure how this gets him many votes in a Democratic Primary, but it could make the substance interesting.
His early policy stuff — abstinence, no new taxes — has slanted that way, as have his hires. First there was former Lieberman staffer Dan Gerstein.
And now Suozzi has hired Harry Siegel, a former editorial-page editor at the New York Sun and the former editor of the conservative alt-weekly New York Press, as his policy director. Harry is the one who quit, with his deputies, after his publisher refused to run the famous Danish Mohammed cartoons.
Suozzi aide Kim Devlin calls him “a real find.”
As for Siegel’s politics, he’s an idiosyncratic urban conservative, though I’m not sure he’d describe himself that way. Here’s from the manifesto he ran on taking over the Press:
These need not be the only alternatives, but it’s where we now are. Gotham is fast becoming Mayor Bloomberg’s vision of a luxury city, where the wealthy subsidize the poor and everyone in between scrambles to make it. Or leaves. And that’s not to mention the vision—we use the word generously—of the Democratic candidates.
Not sure how that translates into policy. Also in that piece, an account of some stumbling drunkenness, which everyone’s in favor of.
But now that we’re getting some real ideological distinctions in the Democratic Primary, this seems like a reasonable question: What do Spitzer and Suozzi think about the Iraq War?
