How terrible a candidate do you have to be to lose to a cheesy walking suit best known for threatening to break a reporter in half, who also happens to have a federal indictment hanging over him? (There was also that time in a bar bathroom.) Domenic Recchia, who lives in Brooklyn but is running for Michael Grimm’s seat in Staten Island, is just that bad. (Neither of them does much reading.) Recchia’s campaign has been so awful that not one but two local papers begrudgingly backed Grimm, damning him with some of the faintest praise of all time.
Last week it was the Staten Island Advance:
There are, on occasion, electoral races in which both candidates are of high quality and high integrity and conduct a tough but fair campaign about the issues. […] The election for the House of Representatives seat in the 11th New York Congressional District is nothing like that.
On one side is the sometimes hot-headed Republican incumbent who is facing a 20-count federal indictment. On the other is a career Brooklyn Democratic pol, who, term-limited out of his high-ranking post in the City Council, thought about other city offices before he settled on the idea of the job representing in Congress a borough he knows little about, his claims of deep ties here notwithstanding.
That’s the choice voters have. And that’s the choice we have in making an endorsement in a race that could not be much uglier.
But somehow, the Daily News topped it:
In Domenic Recchia, the Democrats have fielded a candidate so dumb, ill-informed, evasive and inarticulate that voting for a thuggish Republican who could wind up in a prison jumpsuit starts to make rational sense.
At least Michael Grimm can string three sentences together in arguing that he deserves the presumption of innocence on federal criminal charges stemming from his past operation of a restaurant.
Should he be convicted, Grimm has promised to resign, paving the way for a match between two fresh candidates. All the better.
Voting for a guy in hopes he gets sent to prison — and they wonder why we disrespect the most accurately stereotyped borough.
