I had no idea she was Hispanic. Learn something new everyday.
Here's the gratuitous shot of a liberal I wish wasn't.
Posted on 08/20/2002 10:40:27 AM PDT by Marianne
Henry Wojtaszek is probably the only GOP candidate from the Niagara region in recent years who unabashedly plays to the party's conservative heartbeat. He is plainly pro-life, pro-gun and anti-tax.
WASHINGTON - Results of recent special and primary elections, some of them obscure, could lift the campaign prospects of Henry F. Wojtaszek from the category of "improbable" to "to be determined."
Henry who?
Henry F. Wojtaszek, 39, (pronounced wo-TA-sek) is the Republican candidate picked to unseat powerful Democratic congressional incumbent Louise M. Slaughter of the Rochester suburb of Fairport.
Besides being the only person who lives west of the Genesee River to run in this earmuff-shaped congressional district, Wojtaszek is a Navy veteran, a lawyer and the city attorney in North Tonawanda.
His campaign has many of the earmarks of the failed challenges that Republicans have mounted since 1976 to knock off retiring Congressman John J. LaFalce, D-Town of Tonawanda.
Relatively few people know Wojtaszek in the Buffalo Niagara region. Absolutely nobody knows him in the eastern end of the new district, Rochester and its suburbs. He started very late in the game, and he has no visible campaign treasury.
The National Republican Congressional Committee is hobbling Wojtaszek further by insisting on a kind of a "screen test," or trial run, before they will give him any of the $70,000 they are holding for him.
And yet. . . . There are stirrings here and there that indicate that despite all this, the man may have an outside chance.
Wojtaszek offers the sole opportunity to elect a Niagara-based member of the House from the district in the immediate future.
Measured by media market, the district is about 60 percent Niagara-oriented.
More importantly, Wojtaszek is probably the only GOP candidate from the Niagara region in recent years who unabashedly plays to the party's conservative heartbeat.
He is plainly pro-life, pro-gun and anti-tax.
Presenting himself on his Web site as a "Roman Catholic," Wojtaszek opposes abortion except in the case of rape, incest and where a mother's health is endangered.
By contrast, Slaughter is among the most prominent pro-choice members of Congress, and the support she won among women through her unfailing loyalty to the cause was a factor in nudging LaFalce, a pro-life Democrat, into retirement.
Wojtaszek plans to make an issue of Slaughter's support for a late-term procedure referred to by its critics as "partial birth abortion."
Two elections in recent days suggest that women carrying the pro-choice banner into a hotly contested election may not always get the strong tail-wind they did in 1992, the so-called Year of the Woman.
Veteran Congressman John Dingell, D-Mich., walloped another Democratic incumbent, Lynn Rivers, 2-1. She was forced by redistricting into a race with him.
Lined up against Dingell were big-name gun-control advocates such as actor Michael Douglas and Hispanic media personality Lynda Carter, and the deep purse of Emily's List, the nation's largest political contributor to pro-choice candidates.
Like Dingell, Wojtaszek offers himself as a strong Second Amendment candidate, saying there are already plenty of gun-control laws on the books. Slaughter has established herself as a staunch gun-control congresswoman.
In moderate Fairfax County, Va., another no-name ethnic newcomer, Republican Ken Cucccinelli, handily defeated a longtime school board member, Democrat Cathy Belter, for a state Senate seat.
The issues were abortion and taxes, with Cuccinelli making his opposition to abortion central to his campaign.
The better-known Belter outspent the novice and had the backing of Virginia's popular governor, Mark Warner, and powerful land developers in the region, who favored a sales tax increase.
Wojtaszek hopes to make an issue of votes that he says Slaughter cast in favor of more taxation.
Unlike Wojtaszek, Cuccinelli got an early jump in the campaign. For example, Wojtaszek's Web site was fully operable only last Wednesday.
Cuccinelli's campaign was a retail affair, built on volunteers who knocked on doors and made phone calls. He also got plenty of help on the Internet from networking Evangelicals and Catholics, including a priest or two.
There is little time left for Wojtaszek to mount such a ground-level effort, but it isn't impossible. Republican leaders here say they are waiting to see how energetically Wojtaszek engages the campaign before committing major bucks to him.
But it will be the Democrats who could provide the biggest opening for Wojtaszek against Slaughter. If former Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo defeats State Comptroller Carl McCall in the primary for governor, the potentially huge black vote Slaughter inherited in Rochester and Buffalo might not turn out for her on Nov. 4.
In any event, the race might show whether there is a true conservative base in this strangely shaped district, the kind of surge that sent former Congressman Bill Paxon, R-Amherst, and his successor, Thomas M. Reynolds, R-Clarence, down here with such hefty margins.
I had no idea she was Hispanic. Learn something new everyday.
Here's the gratuitous shot of a liberal I wish wasn't.
A chunk in the city of Buffalo -- a chunk in Niagara Falls -- with a six-mile wide strip along Lake Ontario leading to another chunk in the city of Rochester.
It contains the majority of the black populations in all three cities and requires media buys in two major markets.
Incumbent Slaughter has the money to advertise in both cities and her very liberal record will appeal to the city voters at both ends of the district.
Wojtaszek might be able to attract Niagara Falls and Buffalo voters who resent being represented by someone who lives in suburban Rochester but I'm afraid the rural voters who would like his conservativatism won't be able to outweigh the inner-city vote. Nonetheless, it's worth a shot at helping him isn't it?
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