Posted on 04/16/2004 1:01:51 PM PDT by Pharmboy
RINGING the bell of the basement war room of the Metropolitan Republican Club on East 83rd Street - press the "Bunker" button - is likely to bring to the door a convivial woman with a sideline as a jazz singer.
She is Lolita Jackson, 36, who was elected president of the century-old political club last year. Ms. Jackson, who lives on the Upper East Side, spends much of her time these days hunkered down in the basement campaign offices, marshaling members to help organize the Republican National Convention, to be held in Manhattan at the end of August. She hopes to use the rare opportunity of a G.O.P. convention in heavily Democratic New York City to help the club regain some of its standing as a political powerhouse.
"I think it's going to help us get our groove back, as it were," says Ms. Jackson, one of the five Met Club members who are to serve as delegates at the convention.
Nearly every East Side Republican elected since the Depression came out of the Met Club, but over the last few years, the club has lost its stronghold on local seats. For the first time in many decades, the club has no members in office in Manhattan.
Ms. Jackson is busily screening candidates to run in East Side elections this November. Also, she says, she hopes to tap the city's hidden reserves of latent Republicans. "The notion that Manhattan voters are all secular Democrats is false," she says. "A lot of people have pent-up feelings to help the party, and there are a lot of newcomers to the city who also want to be involved."
Since her party needed her, she took a leave of absence from her job, marketing mutual funds at Morgan Stanley. Since it needed her to raise money, she took her Rolodex with her. Ms. Jackson has her sights set on becoming a "maverick,'' a status bestowed by G.O.P. officials on young Republicans who raise at least $50,000.
The Met Club was founded in 1902; its members have included Teddy Roosevelt, Governors Thomas E. Dewey and Nelson A. Rockefeller, Senator Jacob K. Javits and Mayor John V. Lindsay. The club's three-story brick town house has leather couches on richly woven rugs, and oil paintings of some of its prominent Republicans. Ms. Jackson, who sings with two working jazz bands, has performed at charity events at B. B. King's in Times Square and at Carnegie Hall. She has also regularly performed at Republican functions, but now, as an official of the Met Club, she can no longer be paid for those events, which makes it hard to hire a band to sing with.
BUT she does not concede that she has gone from G.O.P. diva to den mother.
"Politics is only one facet of who I am," she says. "I'm not a one-dimensional person."
She is single and, in her spare time, is conducting a bipartisan search for a handsome bass player to marry. Fellow musicians are usually surprised by her party affiliation, she says. And as a young black Republican, she adds, she also gets her share of criticism from other black New Yorkers. "People who don't know me well think it's an oxymoron that I'm a Republican," she says. "But if you know me, you know it matches my personality."
Ms. Jackson survived the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001. In 1993, she made her way down the stairs from the 72nd floor in two hours. On 9/11, she was on the 70th floor of the south tower. After seeing part of the explosion when the first plane crashed into the north tower, she had gotten down as far as the 44th floor when she felt her building being hit. She took the 44 flights in 10 minutes, she says, and escaped.
"I should not be here right now, but God got me out," she said. "He let me live for a reason and I'm going to live my life the way I need to, like every day is a gift."
Ms. Jackson, who attends the Sunday jazz services at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in the Hunter College auditorium, says she equates her religion with her political philosophy. She says she is a "Giuliani Republican" who is strong on education, socially moderate, fiscally conservative and in favor of less government and lower taxes.
Growing up in Somerset, N.J., in a family of Democrats, she developed an up-by-your-own-bootstraps mindset. "I was around a lot of people on welfare growing up, and for many of them, their goal in life was to stay on public assistance for generations," she says. "There comes a time when you have to take control of your own destiny."
Lolita Jackson
In the 1988 presidential election, she said, "I remember Jesse Jackson was running, and I was turned off by the notion that one black person was trying to speak for an entire race of people."
She went to the University of Pennsylvania on a full financial-aid package, joined the gospel choir and sang in jazz and funk bands. After college, she moved to the Upper East Side, and after grabbing a Republican campaign flier one day, she began campaign work and joined the Met Club in 1994.
"At the time, we had taken back Congress and the Senate and we were suddenly relevant," she said. "I was like, 'Hey, this is the place to be.' "
And if the convention helps, it may well be again.
"I'm calling it Halley's comet," she added, "because I don't think it's ever coming back."
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Yep, just about every Republican organization here in Manhattan is more or less RINO. The only one that I can think of that isn't RINO (New York Young Republican Club) and is fairly conservative -- was the only one to endorse Badillo over Bloomberg in the 2001 GOP mayoral primary -- isn't exactly hardcore socially conservative. But it's still where most NYC FReepers go, and more a cross of conservative and libertarian.
I think the conservative movement is making progress, albeit slow.
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