Laudano's campaign manager: "We are Americans here"

Don’t give Alec Brook-Krasny the keys to Albany just yet.

In an interview with rubyjewsday.com, Clarinda Annarummo, campaign manager for Patricia Laudano, the Republican candidate for State Assembly in the 46th District, signaled that Laudano intends to make a race of it against Brook-Krasny in the November general election. Annarummo, Republican district leader in the 46th, also made an underlying theme of Laudano’s campaign unmistakably clear; namely that Laudano will be the ‘American’ candidate against the Russian-born Brook- Krasny.

“Both candidates in the Democratic primary wanted to be the first Russian to be elected (to higher office),” Annarummo said in a phone interview. “I think you need a better reason than that to run here in the 46th, which is a very diverse district. I mean, we are Americans here.”

While no Republican has been elected in this district since the 1920’s, Oleg Gutnik showed that a Republican could come close by winning 42 percent of the vote when he ran as the GOP candidate against Democrat Adele Cohen in 2001. In that race, Gutnick had the support of nearly the entire Russian community against Cohen, whom many Russians detested for knocking Brook-Krasny, the first-ever Russian candidate off the ballot the previous year by challenging his nominating petitions. Might we now see a reverse of that electoral calculus, with the more than half of the district that is non-Russian-speaking (American-born Jews, Blacks, Italian-Americans, Hispanics, Pakistanis) lining up behind Laudano, a middle-aged Italian-American realtor in Dyker Heights, who has never before run for political office? At first glance, it looks unlikely, as Laudano’s full-throated support for right-wing GOP positions (support for the death penalty and expediting its use in NY, lower taxes, tuition tax credits, charter schools) is unlikely to appeal to left-leaning American-born Jews or Blacks, among whom Brook-Krasny appears to have already made some impressive inroads, or among immigrant groups like Hispanics and Pakistanis, who will be turned off by anti-immigrant appeals. Certainly, Laudano will appeal to a certain strata of the old line Italian-American population in Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights, though the energetic support for Krasny by Councilman Domenic Recchia will hold at least some portion of the Italian vote for the Democrats.

Giving that forbidding electoral calculus, Laudano may decide to hold back on explicit appeals to anti-immigrant and anti-Russian feeling, in order to appeal to the Russian community itself; especially that part of the community that avidly supported Kagan and believes the election was stolen from him. ”Don’t forget a lot of Russians are registered Republicans, so we expect a significant vote in that community,” said Annarummo, who noted, “Kagan certainly received impressive numbers (in the Democratic primary) considering that the Democratic machine and all the elected officials were behind Brook-Krasny.” In an apparent allusion to Brook-Krasny’s making an issue of Kagan’s past; that he joined the Communist Party and attended a military school with ties to the KGB, Annarummo said, “Voters don’t like mid-slinging and personal attacks. I also think that (candidates’) ethnicity should not impact the campaign.”

So Laudano will probably try to implicitly appeal to the resentment of many non-Russian voters at what they see as the Russian ‘takeover’ of the 46th District while at the same time reaching out to Russians who supported Kagan. It won’t be easy to pull off. If Kagan stays embittered and refuses to endorse Krasny, or if he covertly or overtly backs Laudano, a considerable portion of his following might indeed back the Republican. But those voters are unlikely to do so if she too overtly stresses that she is the American candidate against the Russian one. Still, the bottom line is that Laudano intends to run hard, and after Krasny’s razor-thin victory over Kagan, he will have to take her seriously.