The repugnant regime of Niagara County Democratic Chairman Dan Rivera can perhaps be best summed up after last week's primary election debacle in two words:
Jon Powers.
Powers was an Iraq War veteran and former Republican who was horrified by the misery and carnage he witnessed during his tour of duty, and on returning home to Williamsville he changed his registration to Democrat and began campaigning for the 26th District congressional seat currently occupied by Tom Reynolds, who had announced his plan to retire.
Powers was the first to announce his candidacy last year and was an early favorite. His work lobbying Congress on behalf of Iraqi war orphans garnered him national attention, and he was profiled by Brian Williams on the NBC Nightly News and written about in left-wing media outlets such as The Nation and Daily Kos.
Money poured in from around the country to help finance his campaign, with approximately 85 percent of the donations coming from outside the district. His antiwar message resonated with many, and his status as a political outsider was seen as a welcome relief by Western New Yorkers, who have grown palpably tired of the party machines that have dominated the discourse for as long as anyone can remember.
Later, millionaire industrialist Jack Davis entered the primary race. Best known for a pair of losing campaigns against Reynolds in 2004 and 2006, the elderly Davis decided this was his year. Finally, Alice Kryzan, a Buffalo attorney little known outside of that city, launched her darkhorse candidacy.
With Davis pledging $3 million of his own money to secure the nomination, Powers knew he would have to come up with some additional money beyond that being supplied by the antiwar crowd at MoveOn.org, and he did what any political neophyte would do, contacting the heads of the local Democratic committees and pleading his case.
The 26th District encompasses a massive geographical area and includes all or part of eight counties, including Niagara County. While Powers eventually gained the endorsements of all the county committees, it was here that he met up with Dan Rivera, a slick political operative well known for his bullying management style and use of dirty tricks as part of the campaigns he's been involved in.
It was a meeting that would ultimately doom Powers' efforts.
Rivera's signature campaign was the 2006 re-election bid by state Assemblywoman Francine Del Monte. Niagara Falls native Gary Parenti, a political consultant who has helped managed campaigns throughout the country and around the world, mounted a primary challenge focusing on Del Monte's less-than-stellar record of accomplishment since being elected to Albany eight years ago.
Parenti's candidacy was on the ascent, and he might well have unseated the incumbent but for Rivera's reaching into his bag of tricks. Working at the time as an investigator for the Liberty Mutual Insurance Co., Rivera used his authority to gain access to long-sealed court records that detailed a couple brushes with law enforcement Parenti had had as a young man.
Rivera dutifully took copies of the sealed court records to the good offices of the Niagara Gazette, which happily published them the next day. The last-minute smear job torpedoed the Parenti candidacy, which didn't have time to respond, and Del Monte went back to her corner office at the State Capitol building none the worse for wear.
After his defeat, Parenti sued Liberty Mutual in court for invasion of privacy, and due to the unethical and illegal nature of Rivera's actions, the company was forced to settle for an amount reported to be in the low six figures. Rivera was fired from his job.
In the Powers campaign, Rivera again reached deep inside his bag of tricks.
Hoping to derail Davis, he lodged complaints with both Niagara County District Attorney Michael Violante and the state Board of Elections, alleging everything from invalid petitions to bribery. As a result of his complaints, even the Niagara Falls Reporter received a subpoena demanding to see all financial transactions between Davis and the paper.
The fishing expedition revealed nothing, as no such transactions had ever taken place, but the various complaints were carefully crafted into Powers campaign television commercials that linked Davis with the words "district attorney," "fraud," "bribery" and "investigation."
Completely absent from the commercials were any mention of Powers' war record, his work on behalf of Iraqi war orphans or what he hoped to accomplish once he was elected. The entire focus of the Powers campaign shifted from positive change to spurious allegations that his opponent was some sort of criminal mastermind.
The plan backfired. No shrinking violet himself, the feisty Davis commissioned his own opposition research. Powers, it turned out, had been using campaign contributions to pay his own rent, a big no-no under state election law.
Then it was revealed that Powers had used much of the money raised by his Iraq war orphan charity to pay himself a rather large salary. Finally, there was a messy confrontation with Ohio police that resulted in the candidate being charged with disorderly conduct in 2004.
The information was used to devastating effect against Powers. Democratic voters grew sick of the negative campaigning on both sides and voted overwhelmingly for Kryzan, who scored a late hit in the campaign with a commercial depicting Powers and Davis lookalikes pummeling each other in an otherwise bucolic park. Her signature line, "Take it somewhere else," caught the public imagination and propelled her to victory.
In Niagara County, which Rivera had personally promised to deliver for Powers, the previously unknown Kryzan was triumphant, beating Powers by seven points.
"Jack Davis has made a lot of friends in Niagara County over the years, and did a lot financially for the Democratic Committee here when he ran against Reynolds," one veteran committeeman said. "Rivera came in with Powers and tried to shove him down everybody's throat."
Indeed, Davis pulled 1,163 votes, just 230 fewer than the endorsed candidate.
"If we have many more elections like this one, pretty soon there won't even be a Democratic Party in Niagara County," the committeeman said.
The measure of success for a party boss has traditionally been the ability to win elections. In this respect, Rivera seems to be marching to the beat of a different drummer, having lost far more than he's won.
A typical Rivera campaign coming up in November is the race to unseat wildly popular Republican state Sen. George Maziarz. The chairman has given the nod to Sheriff's Deputy Brian Grear, who until last week at least was a registered Republican!
Grear ran on every line imaginable last Tuesday, hoping that like a piece of mud thrown at a wall, he might stick somewhere. By the slimmest of margins he prevailed on the Democratic line, so one might imagine he'll change his registration over prior to Nov. 9, if only in order to keep up appearances.
Grear has been nursing a grudge against Maziarz ever since 2005, when he ran against Sheriff Tom Beilein as a Republican and had his hat handed to him by a 25-point margin, managing just 19,311 votes to Beilein's 31,793. In order to accomplish this incredible bit of nothing, he spent around $80,000, mostly his own money.
At first, Grear thought that, rather than spending his own money, he'd rather spend other people's money in his hopeless quest to become sheriff. So he approached Maziarz and county Republican Chairman Henry Wojtaszek to try and get some of the GOP money they control.
The upshot was that Maziarz and Wojtaszek offered some suggestions on the sort of campaign tactics that have given the Republicans an insurmountable lock on the county, and Grear thought he knew more about it than they did, so they didn't give him any money and he went away mad.
And lost the election and lost his money and told everyone it was all George Maziarz's fault.
In April of this year, Grear announced he would challenge the endorsed Republican candidate, Niagara Falls Chief of Detectives Ernie Palmer, in this year's race for sheriff, but was stymied again by Maziarz and Wojtaszek. In revenge, and with a $10,000 campaign boost from Rivera, he decided to challenge Maziarz himself.
The money was donated by actual Niagara County Democrats in the hope that it would be used to support bona fide Democratic candidates who might stand a snowball's chance in hell of winning political campaigns against Republicans, something Rivera has shown little interest in.
Rivera currently has few money worries of his own. After being fired by Liberty Mutual two years ago, he went to work for Marc Panepinto, a Buffalo attorney and party aparatchik who has been convicted of election law violations himself and was formerly an organizer for the mobbed-up Laborers Local 210 union during the 1990s.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Sept. 16 2008 |