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Progressive Cred & the Mayor
April 2, 2009 | Gay City News
In the early 1990s, while growing up near Coney Island, Andrea Batista Schlesinger served as the high school student representative on the Board of Education, which oversaw New York City schools prior to the current regime of mayoral control. During the fractious fight over a proposed - and ultimately rejected - "Children of the Rainbow" curriculum that, among other things, would have explored family diversity, including households headed by gay and lesbian parents, she fought hard to have students represented on a Board committee weighing the best course of action.
Batista Schlesinger succeeded in getting students appointed - but was disappointed that they were given no vote.
After high school, she headed to the Midwest to earn a public policy degree at the University of Chicago, a sort of small-scale Harvard, except that the students at U of C are really serious about their studies. Since then, she ran a nationwide effort by the Pew Charitable Trusts to forge a dialogue among college students about the future of Social Security, handled public relations at Teach For America, a non-profit that aims to reduce educational inequality, and served as an educational advisor to Fernando Ferrer while he was Bronx borough president and also making his 2001 mayoral bid.
From 2002 until early this year, she has led the Drum Major Institute (DMI), a Manhattan think tank, with a staff of 13 and a budget approaching $2 million, that aims to counter the influence of similar groups on the right and to promote progressive government solutions to the social and economic challenges facing what she terms "current and aspiring middle class people."
Years ago, Batista Schlesinger was involved with the Out People of Color Political Action Club, a nonpartisan group that twice endorsed Ferrer for mayor, and also Brooklyn's Lambda Independent Democrats. Yet, in early February, she became the tenth staff member hired by Mayor Michael Bloomberg's reelection campaign.
What does her appointment to the campaign say about just how tough a slog Democrats face in challenging Democrat turned-Republican turned-Independent Michael Bloomberg this November?
"The goal of my career as well as the Drum Major Institute's work is to advance progressive ideas," she explained in a recent interview. "And you have a mayor here - who is a progressive thinker, who the Drum Major Institute honored a few years ago, who we've also criticized and pushed - reaching out and asking me to be on the team. He's popular. If my mission is to move ideas, if the Drum Major Institute's mission is to move ideas, how could one say no to that opportunity?"
How many other progressives, how many other Democrats - mindful of the 64-percent Bloomberg approval rating that Batista Schlesinger noted and also of the politics of advancing their issues - will come to the same conclusion?
Daily News columnist Errol Louis apparently thinks there's strong likelihood that many will - but he's dubious about their motives and, in any event, not happy about that prospect. In a February 5 article, he wrote about three well-known Democratic operatives - Howard Wolfson, Hank Sheinkopf, and Basil Smikle - who had "jumped ship" to join Bloomberg, but saved his harshest fire for Batista Schlesinger. Louis predicted that she would be "humored until the election is over, after which an administration that scorned and ignored DMI policy suggestions for years simply will go back to business as usual."
Not content to question her political judgment, Louis went a step further, writing that she was "now within sniffing distance of the Bloomberg bonus pool." In past campaigns, the mayor handed out post-election bonuses totaling tens of thousands of dollars each to valued staff.
The charge stung Batista Schlesinger. "I am very sensitive, maybe because I'm a policy person and not a politics person," she explained. Noting Louis never called her for comment, she continued, "I was wounded and I was angry because I thought this is what the left does. They eat their own. And because too many people who have the power of a microphone have no power analysis. People have to have an analysis of how power operates and how we can drive our agenda."
Emphasizing that she's "a believer in the cause," Batista Schlesinger disputed the notion advanced by some pundits that appointments like hers signal the mayor's intention to move left for the upcoming election. "I think there's continuity in the mayor's approach," she said. "On every policy from attacking poverty to public health to education to immigration - very important issues to the city - I think he's been solidly in the progressive camp." Bloomberg, she said, "believes that government can play a positive role in people's life"; she pointedly contrasted him with former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who she said only worked "to police them and to punish them and to ignore entrenched problems."
Batista Schlesinger described the mayor's 2007 Earth Day speech, in which he laid out PLAN-Y-C, a comprehensive climate change plan for the city, as pivotal, and recalled her reaction as she sat in the audience: "Now this is real progressive thinking. Not electoral cycle thinking but 20, 30 years down the road." DMI honored Bloomberg for that speech. She also particularly praises the mayor for his call for progressive immigration reform three years ago, "when he was still a Republican."
Batista Schlesinger conceded that while at DMI and since joining the campaign, she has not closely examined issues on which the mayor has clashed with some LGBT and HIV/ AIDS advocates, though in some cases she expects she will dig into the fundamental policy questions. Despite her education policy background, she offered no view about Bloomberg's longstanding refusal to implement the anti-bullying Dignity for All Schools Act (DASA) passed by the City Council over his veto in 2004, or the progress made in implementing the mayor's alternative Respect For All program finally rolled out last fall. She would only say, "You can't always interpret the mayor's response to some bill as encroaching on his authority as him being opposed to the spirit of the bill," referring to Bloomberg's objection to the bullying law. "It's easy to draw that inference, and it's not always correct."
Batista Schlesinger was similarly noncommittal about Bloomberg's failure to meet the goal he laid out in 2003 of halving HIV infections within several years, or his administration's cut of nearly $5 million in HIV/AIDS services in the current year's budget, despite the fact that infection rates among gay and bisexual men have remained constant during his two terms.
Only regarding the mayor's stewardship of the 2004 Republican National Convention - when police aggressively went after protesters, and some detainees were held on Hudson River piers in defiance of a federal court order - did Batista Schlesinger offer criticism: "My personal reaction in '04 was, 'This is excessive.' But beyond that I don't have too much of an analysis. When you work for any leader, you are going to accept that not everything is going to hew to your position."
Batista Schlesinger - whose partner of two and a half years is Ana Maria Archila, co-director of Make the Road New York, a well-regarded community organizing group that works for social justice, primarily in Brooklyn and Queens - believes her work in the Bloomberg campaign falls on a continuum of efforts among local progressives. She noted that none of the allies she's worked with in politics or other progressive efforts have given her flak; many of them, in fact, have "come here and shared their ideas about what they think of the mayor. And how do they get invited? Because I invited them."
As for the criticism the Daily News' Louis offered, Batista Schlesinger argued his thinking is counter-productive: "It will paralyze other progressives from entering into government and getting involved in campaigns. It will ghettoize us into positions of dissent and protest. And we need to be in places of dissent and protest, but we also need to be around the table."
She described a program DMI has developed to train college activists to enter policy careers. Of the alumni of that effort, Batista Schlesinger said, "They were so proud when they saw that I was going to take this. Because that's the same message I was giving them - you need to be around the table. What does that column say to them, that to be around the table means that they are not pursuing the path of the righteous activist? That's the wrong message for them. So I take this very seriously."
April 2, 2009
In the early 1990s, while growing up near Coney Island, Andrea Batista Schlesinger served as the high school student representative on the Board of Education, which oversaw New York City schools prior to the current regime of mayoral control. During the fractious fight over a proposed - and ultimately rejected - "Children of the Rainbow" curriculum that, among other things, would have explored family diversity, including households headed by gay and lesbian parents, she fought hard to have students represented on a Board committee weighing the best course of action.
Batista Schlesinger succeeded in getting students appointed - but was disappointed that they were given no vote.
After high school, she headed to the Midwest to earn a public policy degree at the University of Chicago, a sort of small-scale Harvard, except that the students at U of C are really serious about their studies. Since then, she ran a nationwide effort by the Pew Charitable Trusts to forge a dialogue among college students about the future of Social Security, handled public relations at Teach For America, a non-profit that aims to reduce educational inequality, and served as an educational advisor to Fernando Ferrer while he was Bronx borough president and also making his 2001 mayoral bid.
From 2002 until early this year, she has led the Drum Major Institute (DMI), a Manhattan think tank, with a staff of 13 and a budget approaching $2 million, that aims to counter the influence of similar groups on the right and to promote progressive government solutions to the social and economic challenges facing what she terms "current and aspiring middle class people."
Years ago, Batista Schlesinger was involved with the Out People of Color Political Action Club, a nonpartisan group that twice endorsed Ferrer for mayor, and also Brooklyn's Lambda Independent Democrats. Yet, in early February, she became the tenth staff member hired by Mayor Michael Bloomberg's reelection campaign.
What does her appointment to the campaign say about just how tough a slog Democrats face in challenging Democrat turned-Republican turned-Independent Michael Bloomberg this November?
"The goal of my career as well as the Drum Major Institute's work is to advance progressive ideas," she explained in a recent interview. "And you have a mayor here - who is a progressive thinker, who the Drum Major Institute honored a few years ago, who we've also criticized and pushed - reaching out and asking me to be on the team. He's popular. If my mission is to move ideas, if the Drum Major Institute's mission is to move ideas, how could one say no to that opportunity?"
How many other progressives, how many other Democrats - mindful of the 64-percent Bloomberg approval rating that Batista Schlesinger noted and also of the politics of advancing their issues - will come to the same conclusion?
Daily News columnist Errol Louis apparently thinks there's strong likelihood that many will - but he's dubious about their motives and, in any event, not happy about that prospect. In a February 5 article, he wrote about three well-known Democratic operatives - Howard Wolfson, Hank Sheinkopf, and Basil Smikle - who had "jumped ship" to join Bloomberg, but saved his harshest fire for Batista Schlesinger. Louis predicted that she would be "humored until the election is over, after which an administration that scorned and ignored DMI policy suggestions for years simply will go back to business as usual."
Not content to question her political judgment, Louis went a step further, writing that she was "now within sniffing distance of the Bloomberg bonus pool." In past campaigns, the mayor handed out post-election bonuses totaling tens of thousands of dollars each to valued staff.
The charge stung Batista Schlesinger. "I am very sensitive, maybe because I'm a policy person and not a politics person," she explained. Noting Louis never called her for comment, she continued, "I was wounded and I was angry because I thought this is what the left does. They eat their own. And because too many people who have the power of a microphone have no power analysis. People have to have an analysis of how power operates and how we can drive our agenda."
Emphasizing that she's "a believer in the cause," Batista Schlesinger disputed the notion advanced by some pundits that appointments like hers signal the mayor's intention to move left for the upcoming election. "I think there's continuity in the mayor's approach," she said. "On every policy from attacking poverty to public health to education to immigration - very important issues to the city - I think he's been solidly in the progressive camp." Bloomberg, she said, "believes that government can play a positive role in people's life"; she pointedly contrasted him with former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who she said only worked "to police them and to punish them and to ignore entrenched problems."
Batista Schlesinger described the mayor's 2007 Earth Day speech, in which he laid out PLAN-Y-C, a comprehensive climate change plan for the city, as pivotal, and recalled her reaction as she sat in the audience: "Now this is real progressive thinking. Not electoral cycle thinking but 20, 30 years down the road." DMI honored Bloomberg for that speech. She also particularly praises the mayor for his call for progressive immigration reform three years ago, "when he was still a Republican."
Batista Schlesinger conceded that while at DMI and since joining the campaign, she has not closely examined issues on which the mayor has clashed with some LGBT and HIV/ AIDS advocates, though in some cases she expects she will dig into the fundamental policy questions. Despite her education policy background, she offered no view about Bloomberg's longstanding refusal to implement the anti-bullying Dignity for All Schools Act (DASA) passed by the City Council over his veto in 2004, or the progress made in implementing the mayor's alternative Respect For All program finally rolled out last fall. She would only say, "You can't always interpret the mayor's response to some bill as encroaching on his authority as him being opposed to the spirit of the bill," referring to Bloomberg's objection to the bullying law. "It's easy to draw that inference, and it's not always correct."
Batista Schlesinger was similarly noncommittal about Bloomberg's failure to meet the goal he laid out in 2003 of halving HIV infections within several years, or his administration's cut of nearly $5 million in HIV/AIDS services in the current year's budget, despite the fact that infection rates among gay and bisexual men have remained constant during his two terms.
Only regarding the mayor's stewardship of the 2004 Republican National Convention - when police aggressively went after protesters, and some detainees were held on Hudson River piers in defiance of a federal court order - did Batista Schlesinger offer criticism: "My personal reaction in '04 was, 'This is excessive.' But beyond that I don't have too much of an analysis. When you work for any leader, you are going to accept that not everything is going to hew to your position."
Batista Schlesinger - whose partner of two and a half years is Ana Maria Archila, co-director of Make the Road New York, a well-regarded community organizing group that works for social justice, primarily in Brooklyn and Queens - believes her work in the Bloomberg campaign falls on a continuum of efforts among local progressives. She noted that none of the allies she's worked with in politics or other progressive efforts have given her flak; many of them, in fact, have "come here and shared their ideas about what they think of the mayor. And how do they get invited? Because I invited them."
As for the criticism the Daily News' Louis offered, Batista Schlesinger argued his thinking is counter-productive: "It will paralyze other progressives from entering into government and getting involved in campaigns. It will ghettoize us into positions of dissent and protest. And we need to be in places of dissent and protest, but we also need to be around the table."
She described a program DMI has developed to train college activists to enter policy careers. Of the alumni of that effort, Batista Schlesinger said, "They were so proud when they saw that I was going to take this. Because that's the same message I was giving them - you need to be around the table. What does that column say to them, that to be around the table means that they are not pursuing the path of the righteous activist? That's the wrong message for them. So I take this very seriously."
April 2, 2009