People think of New York City as a Democratic juggernaut, despite the fact that the city hasn’t had a Democratic mayor since 1993, Bill Clinton’s first year in office. It’s true that the Democrats control all of the cities seats in the House of Representatives, but that only became true this year when city councilman Mike McMahon won the Staten Island seat in the aftermath of revelations that the incumbent, Vito Fossella, had a secret second family in Virginia. Staten Island is a lot like metro Detroit in that it combines a lot of hard-working middle class people with culturally conservative values with a lot of millionaires. In the absence of scandal and presidential incompetence, the seat would be reliably Republican in most years.
That’s why you get a quote like this from Rep. McMahon.
“I spend all my time [in Congress] making the case that the profile of the rich doesn’t stand in my district,” Mr. McMahon said. “People feel that they’re getting hit from all sides.”
In other words, he doesn’t want a surtax on the uber-wealthy to pay form national health care. And Rep. McMahon is joined by a quite a few other newly-minted Democratic representatives who are serving in affluent suburbs. The Democrats won these districts largely because of the Southern cultural swing of the Republicans during the latter half of the Gingrich Revolution. Tom DeLay and Bill Frist didn’t sell in Greenwich, Connecticut or Northern Virginia, but those are the two richest areas of the country.
Rep. McMahon is right that money doesn’t go as far on Staten Island as it does in most of the rest of the country, but that doesn’t alleviate him from his duty as a Democrat to help the president pass his health care agenda in a fiscally responsible way. That means the bill must be paid for. Who does McMahon think is going to pay for it if not the super-wealthy?
