Newsday.com
Pols drive around license issue in local contests
Dan Janison

11:27 PM EST, November 7, 2007

Rival players in election campaigns across Nassau and Suffolk could hear and see and smell this huge October surprise of a driver's license issue. They spin it differently, but they agree on one thing today: The subject moved through the region like a biting fall wind.

There were the negative mailings. The flood of news coverage. The Republicans' drive to pump it up and the Democrats' attempts to play it down. By Election Day, the huge backlash against Gov. Eliot Spitzer's plan to get illegal immigrants to apply for licenses became so potent that it colored a Democratic presidential debate and its aftermath.

On Long Island, the storm even kept the Democratic governor away from local campaigns -- a dramatic change from last February when he involved himself in Craig Johnson's winning Nassau State Senate race.

Richard Schaffer, the Suffolk Democratic chairman, could feel the impact. "I think we limited the damage," he said. "I think a couple of the races were closer than I would have liked. ... The issue was used mostly in Brookhaven, and that may have caused Foley to lose a couple of points.

"I can't point to it as the sole reason. But considering we're so close to losing the town board, I'm not going to say it didn't have anything to do with it," Schaffer said.

One caution: Isolating blame can be deceptive. With an assortment of local races on various ballots and a lack of countywide and statewide contests, it is impossible to sort out how one single news topic shaped the outcome -- as opposed to taxes, tactical choices, rivalries, campaign spending, ballot lines, endorsements and corruption concerns.

Even before Spitzer issued his controversial plan in late September, Robert DiCarlo, Republican candidate for Brookhaven supervisor, bashed Democratic incumbent Brian Foley over houses crowded with undocumented immigrants.

If anyone consistently complained of illegal immigration in recent years, it was DiCarlo -- yet the former state senator still lost the race. Based on unofficial results, though, Republicans seemed to have recaptured the town board 4-3. And Frank Tassone, who served as DiCarlo's consultant, said elected officials who went door to door "kept hearing about it from voters who repeated to them the issue of driver's licenses, and they were pretty angry."

"I think it did have an effect in Brookhaven and was one of the reasons Robert DiCarlo was able to keep the race extremely competitive when we were outspent nearly three to one," he said.

In Nassau, in the razor-close contest between Legis. David Mejias and Republican challenger Joseph Belesi, the incumbent led with final counts still pending. Much of the negative mail was about tax assessments, but Belesi also worked to link Mejias to the license policy, which he says he opposes.

"I think it definitely had an impact," Mejias said. "They tried to hang their hat on it. They even lied about my position on it."

State and Nassau Republican Chairman Joseph Mondello, who praised Belesi's effort, predicted that the final tallies will show Spitzer's unintended impact.

"I think Spitzer was my partner in getting the job done here yesterday," Mondello said. "His nonsense energized our base. It got them angry -- and they were out there working."

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/polit ... 556.column