U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (top left), D-N.Y., is facing challenges from Democrats Scott Noren (top center) and Jonathan Tasini (top right) and from Republicans Joseph DioGuardi (bottom left), Bruce Blakeman (bottom center) and David Malpass (bottom right).
Five men want Kirsten Gillibrand’s job.
That job is as New York’s junior senator in Washington, D.C. Gillibrand, a Democrat, is the incumbent. Her five challengers are two fellow Democrats and three Republicans.
The Democrats are Scott Noren, an oral surgeon from Ithaca and Jonathan Tasini, a union leader, organizer and labor writer from New York City. Noren is making his first bid for public office. Tasini ran against and lost to Hillary Clinton in the 2006 Senate.
The three Republicans are Joseph DioGuardi, a certified public accountant and author from Long Island; Bruce Blakeman, a lawyer from Long Island; and David Malpass, an economist from New York City. DioGuardi and Blakeman have held public offices but Malpass has not.
The primary elections will be Sept. 14 and the general election is Nov. 2.
Gillibrand has the advantages of name recognition, party support and a donor base that come with the incumbency. But none of the races will be easy in today’s political climate, said James Campbell, a political scientist at the University at Buffalo.
“The political winds are very strongly in the Republicans’ favor this year,” Campbell said. “That would give any Democrat some pause going into this election.”
With anti-government sentiment in the more rural parts of New York, a Republican candidate might be able to take the senate seat from the Democrats, Campbell said.“It’s possible with the right candidate clicking with the voters, even if he or she isn’t that well-known going into the race,”Campbell said.
Gillibrand was appointed to the Senate seat in 2009 by Gov. David Paterson to succeed Hillary Rodham Clinton after she was chosen by President Barack Obama as his Secretary of State. Under state law, Gillibrand now has to win the November election to finish Clinton’s term, which lasts through January of 2013. After that, Gillibrand would be up for election to her first full six-year term, lasting from January of 2013 through January of 2019.
Democrats have held both senate seats in New York since 1977. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., is the incumbent in the race for the other Senate seat in New York.
In the race for Gillibrand’s seat, here is an early look at the candidates:
Kirsten Gillibrand (Democrat, incumbent)
Gillibrand, 43, moved to the senate seat from the House of Representatives. She had been in the House from the 20th Congressional District, which includes Glens Falls and Saratoga Springs, since 2006. Gillibrand beat Republican incumbent John Sweeney, becoming the first woman to represent the 20th Congressional District and the first Democrat since 1979.
Gillibrand was born and raised in Albany. She has a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College and a law degree from University of California-Los Angeles. She was a law clerk on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York State and served as special counsel to Andrew Cuomo when he was the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under the Clinton administration. Before going into politics, Gillibrand practiced law in New York City.
In the Senate, Gillibrand’s record includes voting in favor of the controversial health care legislation signed into law by Obama in March and for the reauthorization of the Childhood Nutrition Act, which regulates the healthiness of school food for children who get subsidized lunches. The health care law will extend insurance coverage to 37 million Americans, forbid insurance companies from refusing to cover the sick with so-called pre-existing conditions, require everyone to have insurance and provide subsidies to those who can’t afford the cost. The law was vehemently opposed by Republicans and other conservatives, who have promised to target the measure’s supporters in the upcoming election.
In the Senate, Gillibrand serves on the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry.
In her campaign, Gillabrand touts her office’s transparency about her actions. Gillibrand has been committed to transparency in government said Glen Caplin, her press secretary. “She was one of the first members of Congress to put her daily schedule, her earmark requests and her financial disclosure forms online,” Caplin said.
Gillibrand and her husband, Jonathan Gillibrand, have two sons, Theodor, 6; and Henry, who will turn 2 in May.
Jonathan Tasini (Democrat, challenger)
Jonathan Tasini, 54, has worked with, studied and written about labor unions for more than 30 years. From 1990 to 2003, Tasini was the president of the National Writers’ Union, a labor union for freelance writers. While the union’s president, he was the lead plaintiff in a landmark copyright infringement case against The New York Times that won compensation for freelance writers when their work was sold to electronic databases, such as LexisNexis. He is now the president of the Economic Future Group, a national strategy consulting group.
Tasini spent much of his late child hood living in Israel with his father and stepmother. He studied at Tel Aviv University and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from University of California Los Angeles.
On the issues, Tasini has said that he would like to tighten regulations on the financial institutions that he said caused the recession that began in 2007.
“The people running Goldman Sachs and many of the banks and financial institutions care only about promoting their own welfare,” Tasini said in a video on his campaign Web site. “They line their pockets with tens of millions of dollars and build astonishing wealth while they gamble with the rest of the lives of the rest of Americans.”
He opposes the war in Afghanistan and has said that he would like to see American troops brought back home as soon as possible.
Scott Noren (Democrat, challenger)
Scott Noren, 50, is an oral surgeon practicing in Ithaca. Noren received a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He received a dental degree from Loyola University.
Noren was on active duty for the United States Army for six years as an oral surgeon. He’s been an activist, he said, with a medical whistleblowers group and went to Washington to lobby for government protection for them.
Noren has also said that he wants to cap rates on monthly premiums on health insurance for families and individuals, while maintaining a private insurance system. “We need to reduce the Medicare and Medicaid pool and increase the access to more highly regulated private insurance options. These regulations will include capping monthly premiums,” Noren writes on his Web site.
Noren was born and raised in Illinois. He is married and has four children.
Bruce Blakeman (Republican, challenger)
Bruce Blakeman, 54, is a lawyer and Port Authority board member from Long Island. In 2009, Blakeman briefly ran for mayor of New York City but dropped out before the vote. He received a bachelor’s degree from Arizona State University and a law degree from California Western University. Blakeman practices law in New York City. From 1996 to 1999, Blakeman was the presiding officer of the Nassau County legislature. He has also been on the town board of Hempstead, N.Y. In 1998, he ran unsuccessfully as the Republican candidate for New York state comptroller.
He wants the Republican nomination, he has said, because he is dissatisfied with the federal government’s spending. “Our national debt already exceeds $12 trillion, much of it owed to foreign governments. Our leaders have acted irresponsibly. They’ve jeopardized our future and that of our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren,” Blakeman writes on his Web site.
Blakeman is divorced and lives in Manhattan with his son, Arlen, who attends high school there.
Joseph DioGuardi (Republican, challenger)
Joseph DioGuardi, 69, is a certified public accountant, author, and former Congressman who grew up in the Bronx. He graduated from Fordham University in 1962 and became a partner at the accounting firm Arthur Anderson & Co. at the age of 31. He is pledging to run his campaign around fiscal responsibility in federal government.
“I will promote serious budget reform measures to reduce the profligate spending in the federal government and dangerous levels of debt that have put us in economic jeopardy,” DioGuardi writes on his Web site.
From 1985 to 1989, DioGuardi served in the House of Representatives from New York’s 20th Congressional District. He did not run for a third term, he said when he left the House, to concentrate on his career as a certified public accountant and author of non-fiction books about accountability government spending. DioGuardi has also been a public advocate for human rights in Kosovo and transparency in state and federal government. He is president of a not-for-profit group called Truth In Government that advocates for more public scrutiny of government spending.
DioGuardi’s first wife Carol died of complications from ovarian cancer. He had two children with her, Kara and John. Kara is a songwriter and a judge on “American Idol.” Dioguardi is married to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, who is a writer, political activist and foreign policy analyst.
David Malpass (Republican, challenger)
David Malpass, 53, is the president and founder of Encima Global, a Wall Street economic advising firm. He graduated from Colorado College with a bachelor’s degree in physics and received his MBA from the University of Denver.
Malpass writes a column for Forbes Magazine and writes for the Wall Street Journal. As the president of Encima Global, he monitors and analyzes global market trends.
Malpass was formerly a chief economist for Bear Sterns Cos. His resume also includes working as an assistant treasury secretary in the Reagan administration and as an assistant secretary of state in the George H.W. Bush administration.
In his Senate campaign, he calls for cutting taxes on businesses to encourage them to hire more workers. He has said that he will bring fiscal responsibility to a federal government that has let spending get out of control.
“The solution is a strong U.S. jobs and wealth program,” Malpass wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion article on Oct. 7, 2009. “It has to include stable money, a flatter, more competitive tax structure, spending restraint, and common-sense bank regulation so small business lending can restart.”
He and his wife, Adele, have four children. They have lived in Manhattan for the past 20 years.
(Justin Sondel is a graduate student in magazine, newspaper and online journalism.)
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