Senate Contender Peddling Himself, One Pedal at a Time

By Josh Kurtz, Roll Call Staff

Jonathan Tasini called from Hudson, N.Y., on Monday afternoon. It was day five of his three-week-long bike ride from New York City to Buffalo, and though rain has been raging up and down the East Coast for the past few days, the long-shot Democratic Senate candidate hasn’t felt a drop. Only after he completed Monday’s ride from Kingston to Hudson did the skies open up. “You look at karmic signs, but the rain has not caught up with us,” a happy Tasini said.

Tasini, a 49-year-old freelance writer, will need good karma — lots and lots and lots of it — if he is to have any shot of upsetting Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) in the September primary. It’s questionable whether, as any good cyclist hopes for, he’ll even pick up a draft as she zooms by him toward her expected 2008 White House run. But if the weather gods are with him, Tasini believes the issues are as well. He has made opposition to the war in Iraq — which Clinton voted to authorize in 2002 — the driving force of his campaign. He opposes free-trade agreements, which Clinton has generally supported. He opposes the death penalty and a proposed constitutional amendment to ban flag burning. She’s for them.

“I’m convinced that if you had a column of my positions and a column of her positions and took our names off, I’d win,” Tasini said. “My positions are closer to the voters — the primary voters.” The idea for the 600-mile ride came after Tasini hit a campaign event in Kingston several weeks ago.

He found himself wishing he could meet more voters and decided that the way to do it would be to walk across New York. But his aides reminded him “that it’s an awfully big state.” So he opted instead to peddle himself to the voters by pedaling his way across the state. Officially, Tasini is calling his trip a Ride for Peace. He began at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in lower Manhattan and is armed with petitions calling on the New York Democratic Party to support legislation by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) to end the war in Iraq. At each stop along the way, he talks about the human and economic costs of the war. So far, 114 New Yorkers have perished in Iraq. And in each town, he attempts to describe what the community could have gained in government assistance had the United States not been paying for the war. When he finally reaches Buffalo, Tasini will present his anti-war petitions at the state Democratic convention, which kicks off May 30. There’s no question that Clinton will officially win the state party’s endorsement at the convention, and with it, a free ride to the primary. If Tasini can convince 25 percent of the delegates to vote for him at the convention, he too will make it onto the primary ballot.

But even Tasini concedes that probably won’t happen. Instead, he’ll have to gather 15,000 valid petition signatures from registered Democrats across the state, including a minimum of 100 signatures in at least half of the state’s Congressional districts. One state Democratic leader who is close to Clinton said there was “no way” Tasini would get 25 percent of the convention vote. “I pretend he doesn’t exist, to tell you the truth,” the Democrat said. But Tasini is convinced he’ll do better than people think, especially if he can engage Clinton in a debate on Iraq. “There’s a tremendous anger against the incumbent on the war,” he said. Tasini certainly knows something about David vs. Goliath battles. As the president of the National Writers Union, an organization of 7,000 freelance writers, he successfully sued The New York Times in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. In Tasini v. The New York Times, the high court ordered the paper to put together a compensation package for freelancers for the electronic rights to their stories that the Times had published. But if the Times was once an adversary, it now may be, unwittingly, a help to Tasini’s Senate campaign. That’s because editorial columnist Bob Herbert last week wrote a flattering column contrasting Tasini’s anti-war stance to Clinton’s. Tasini is now, unapologetically, using the column as part of a fundraising appeal. “I never built my life around trying to have relationships with rich people,” he said, contrasting his need for campaign cash to Clinton’s. As of March 31, she had $19.7 million in the bank; Tasini had $26,000. But fundraising won’t be uppermost on Tasini’s mind for the next two weeks; staying dry and staying alive will be. Already he’s had one bad spill, on Sunday south of Kingston. A car crept too close to the shoulder and Tasini, in attempt to avoid getting clipped, hit a big pothole instead and was thrown from his Trek 7700 bike. After assessing his scrapes and bruises, he was back in the saddle. He rides 30-35 miles each day, reaching his destination in the early afternoon. Then, it’s a series of rallies, meetings, media interviews and low-dollar fundraisers. He sleeps at a supporter’s home every night. “People, with few exceptions, have been wonderful,” he said.

The bike ride and campaign will both end, but for Tasini, the struggle will go on: He’s hoping to put together a coalition of labor groups, peace activists and environmentalists for future political battles. “I did not enter this race to have any effect on the 2008 presidential election,” he said. “I have a very long-term view of this. If, 10 years from now, we’re electing progressive town supervisors and city council members and members of the state Assembly, it will have been worth it.”