Dick Hubert’s Worldview: Post election thoughts about candidates both local and nat’l who tried our patience

November 13, 2024 at 11:02 p.m.

Mondaire Jones, former Congressman from a 17th District that then encompassed Rye Brook and Port Chester, now has lost any hope of regaining a Congressional seat with his new 17th District race ending in defeat.

Well. How are you feeling after the election?

I know both Republicans and Democrats who are deeply disappointed and/or thrilled with the performance of their candidates locally.

Let’s focus first on the Hudson Valley region.

I’m sure like many of you, I’m delighted to be able to turn on my TV and watch cable or over the air TV stations, or even a YouTube video or two, without seeing any local political commercials. They were annoying and noisy.

Some were even advertisements for the other side.

That’s how I wound up rooting for the defeat of Republican Anthony D’Esposito over on Long Island. I thought he came across in his own commercials as an overbearing bully. (He lost!)

My award for the “biggest self-inflicted wound” commercial goes to our former Democratic Congressman Mondaire Jones, who ran in the wrong place at the wrong time for re-election to his old 17^th District seat.

Jones was the subject of withering attack ads from Republican incumbent (and re-elected) Mike Lawler, most notably accurately accusing him of being in favor of “defunding the police.”

Jones’ TV commercial response was to say that this was a position he held long ago, and he had changed it.

Lawler responded with an ad noting that Jones was in favor of “defunding the police” just four years ago.

That was a giant “ouch.”

The fact that Jones had Rockland County’s Hasidic community against him didn’t help either.

The one Congressman-elect whose commercials you did NOT see over the last several pre-election weeks was our 16^th District Democrat George Latimer, whose commercials hammering his Democratic primary opponent Jamaal Bowman ran back in—do you remember?—May and June!

As I’ve noted in a previous column, Latimer’s Republican opponent Dr. Miriam Levitt Flisser received no funding from any GOP PAC and couldn’t even get an endorsement from her next district Congressional Republican compatriot Mike Lawler. So, no real contest in November.

Latimer and I have been carrying on an occasional exchange of texts. Before the election Nov. 5, he sent me the early voting results by party registration in Westchester County. In CD 16, the Democrat to GOP voting gap was 58% to 19%; in the 17^th it was 46% to 27%.

Which raises the question again: how foolish Mondaire Jones was in 2022 not to challenge Jamaal Bowman instead of trying his luck in Brooklyn’s 16^th.

As Latimer noted to me wryly: “Had Mondaire Jones beaten Bowman, he’d have saved me this race, and my retirement from elective office would have started post CE (County Executive) years in Dec. 2025. But…we press on…Surviving June was plenty excitement for me.”

So it’s Congressmen Lawler and Latimer now representing Westchester County, with Rockland thrown in for Lawler.

Come January, will they ever vote on the same side on major legislation?

Surviving Trump and his acolytes

President-elect Trump wants Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to “go wild” in the health sector. The nightmare scenario of RFK being named as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare hangs out there right now like the sword of Damocles.

I say “nightmare” because I value my vaccinations for COVID, flu, shingles, and all the other illnesses vaccinations have allowed me to avoid my entire life. I am eternally grateful to the scientists behind those vaccines, the Federal agencies that oversee their acceptability and manufacture, and the drug companies that produce them.

RFK is a vaccine denier. How crazy is that in this day and age!

And speaking of crazy, how is Trump going to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war there in 24 hours? You have to feel for President Zelenskyy of Ukraine, caught between Vladimir Putin and an army reinforced by the North Koreans with troops, Iran with rocket technology, China with money, and a GOP Congress that seems to want to cut off all funding (per VP elect J.D. Vance). And then there’s President Biden still worrying about letting the Ukrainians fend off the Russians by using American weapons against Russian military targets inside Russia.

I have nightmares about Ukraine, the future of NATO, China’s ambitions with Taiwan, Israel’s continuing internal political wars which see an avenging Netanyahu firing his defense minister and determined to kill as many Hamas, Hezbollah, and their innocent fellow Palestinian and Lebanese neighbors as possible.

Then domestically there are the Jan. 6 criminals whom Trump wants to pardon, and his political and media enemies he wants to jail, punish financially, or worse.

How bad will it get?

That’s my question, and the waiting period to find out is going to be as brutal as the answer.

Dick Hubert, a retired television news producer-writer-reporter living in Rye Brook, has been honored with the Peabody Award, the DuPont Columbia Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Journalism Award.

Editor’s Note: This column, written by Dick Hubert, represents his opinion and not that of this newspaper.