You could search the photos with your own eyes. Don’t just take somebody else’s word for it. The groundbreaking ceremony? Not there. Ribbon cutting? Nope. He’s missing from the picture. Nowhere to be seen. You don’t need to visit an eye doctor.
Politicians who are any good at their craft will do their very best to make sure the public works groundbreaking shovel photo makes its way into any and all kinds of media. And that the cheap wooden or metal frame in which the photo gets crusted with dust–will forever along with the shovel and the hardhat gather dust–remain inside the taxpayer paid office for public viewing and myth making long after everyone else in the picture is dead.
That is one of the rules of political life: put on hard hat, grab shovel, bend a bit so it looks like you’re really putting callouses on your hands, then raise head, look at camera, smile and repeat.
The only subway completed anywhere in the USA for more than a generation runs under Manhattan’s East side located Second Avenue. And the billion plus bucks needed to get it started came from the feds.
This is an issue in the heating-up battle for the newly drawn Manhattan congressional seat where west side Jerry Nadler faces east side Carolyn Maloney.
The Second Avenue subway planned nearly eighty years ago—buried in the chaos of the late 1970’s fiscal crisis, bureaucracy, poor government decision making and competition for funding—might have remained unbuilt if it had not been for the woman now facing Nadler.
Maloney said while running for U.S. Congress that if sent to Washington, she would get the dream train built. It was a tough election campaign. She faced a well-funded incumbent, S. William Green. Remember Green Stamps. Yup. That Bill Green. Despite incumbency and his immense family fortune, Maloney won the race.
When asked about campaign promises, Maloney remains one of the few politicians who will not have to break into a language previously unknown of blah blahs and uh-huhs and you have to understands and you knows in terms of the end of the day.
Maloney got the dough from the feds, went to the meetings, listened to the bureaucratic nonsense. And New York got the Second Avenue. She did it. Period.
Her opponent has been recorded saying something else. He says well, he gave her the money. Nice way to knock a competent woman’s extraordinary achievement. Awfully ugly. Untrue and unfair. Gave her the money? Nadler wrote the check for an estimated $1.7 billion to get it started? Ridiculous.
Which brings us back to politicians and public works photos, hard hats, shovels and callouses.
Nadler is not in the newest Second Avenue subway ground breaking photo. Because he wasn’t there. He’s not in the ribbon cutting ceremony. Because he wasn’t there. And as much as $1.7 billion federal bucks? Maloney got the dough for New York City. That woman, Maloney did it. Not that man, Nadler who says he’s the hero. It’s just what men seem to do when women are the people who deserve the honor.
That’s why Maloney’s in the pictures. And he isn’t. And shouldn’t be.
