At 42 years old, Joanie Mahoney has lived in Republican politics for more than 30 years.
It was 1977 and a 12-year-old Joanie Mahoney got her first taste of campaigning. Her father, Bernard Mahoney, was making his first run for elected office: a councilor-at-large seat on the Syracuse Common Council. It was a sought-after position that year — a six-way race. Bernard Mahoney enlisted the help of his nine children. Joanie Mahoney, the most outgoing of the children according to her father, was a natural.
“She learned to get along with everyone,” Bernard Mahoney recalled. “She was quite suitable to smiling and handing out literature.”
Throughout the rest of her childhood and into her early adulthood, Joanie Mahoney followed in her father’s footsteps as he went door-to-door, campaigning for Common Council, mayor and state assemblyman. These days, it’s her turn to do the doorknocking for her own campaign as the Republican candidate for Onondaga County executive — and her father is more than happy to return the favor.
“I told her early on that I would do anything she wanted me to do, including, if she wanted me to, staying right out of her way,” Bernard Mahoney said.
In the Sept. 18 primary, Joanie Mahoney beat the Republican Party’s choice — Dale Sweetland — for the GOP ballot-line by 21 votes. In the general election on Nov. 6, she faces Democrat Bill Magnarelli, who is stepping down from his seat representing the 120th District in the State Assembly. Also on the November ballot will be Sweetland, who has the ballot lines of the Conservative and Independence parties, and Edward F. Ryan, who lost the Democratic nomination to Magnarelli but is on the ballot as the candidate for the It’s Your County party. Both Ryan and Sweetland have said they will not campaign aggressively, leaving the race between Magnarelli and Mahoney.
Mahoney and her campaign did not respond to 10 requests for interviews for this story. But her parents, friends and co-workers describe her as a charismatic leader, who isn’t afraid to fight for what she believes in. After gaining political experience on the common council and in her 2005 campaign for mayor, Mahoney is a very different politician this time around, say those who know her well.
“Born in a home of politics”
Mahoney is the middle child in an Irish-Catholic family of nine children.
Big families were the norm in the Onondaga Park neighborhood in which they lived, her mother, Joanne Mahoney, said. “Some families had 10, 12 or even 15 kids. Still though, she’s right smack dab in the middle of nine kids, so it’s sometimes hard to remember who did what,” she said, only half-joking.
Bernard Mahoney sold computers for IBM and Memorex Inc. before getting into politics. He would often have to travel across the country on long business trips. When he was gone, Joanie Mahoney and her brothers and sisters would track their father’s journeys on a large National Geographic map of the United States that hung in their kitchen.
“If I was in Texas, my wife would say this is where daddy is and this is where we are,” Bernard Mahoney said.
The map still hangs in the kitchen of Bernard and Joanne Mahoney’s home. They’ve lived there for more than 40 years. Both say that it is this stability that has made their daughter connect with the area so much.
“There really has been a lot of stability in our household. Our kids get along. We’ve always lived here,” Bernard Mahoney said. “It’s always been this house, this neighborhood and this city.”
As Bernard Mahoney began his political campaigning, the rest of the family helped out.
But Joanie Mahoney was different, recall her parents and others who know her well. She wasn’t just helping her father. She was laying the foundation for her own career.
Robert Giarrusso is the former chairman of the Onondaga County Republican Committee and a long-time friend of the Mahoney family. He saw something special in Mahoney from the time she was a child. She stood out from her brothers and sisters.
“She was born in a home of politics and she was well aware of it,” he said
Joanie Mahoney followed a career path that closely mirrored that of her father. Both started out as lawyers. Joanie Mahoney began as an attorney at a private practice and then became a criminal prosecutor in the Onondaga Country District Attorney’s office. Her father was a lawyer with MacKenzie, Smith, Lewis, Michel and Hughes.
Then they moved on to the Syracuse Common Council. He served as a councilor-at-large from 1978 to 1985. She filled the same position from 1999 to 2002. Both father and daughter ran for mayor and both lost. Bernard Mahoney lost three times, in 1985, in 1989 and in 2001. Joanie Mahoney lost in 2005 — to the very man, Matt Driscoll, who beat her father four years earlier.
“A Presence”
Bernard Mahoney’s friends began to take notice of Joanie Mahoney even as a child. “Even from an early age, she was always at ease with people in my political life,” her father said.
William Fitzpatrick is the Onondaga County District Attorney. He worked with Joanie Mahoney for five years when she was a criminal prosecutor in his office. “She’s got a presence about her,” he said in a recent phone interview. “She’s just got a tremendous energy.”
When he met Joanie Mahoney in 1991, Fitzpatrick recalled, he knew she would make a great lawyer. She was good with people. She looked them dead in the eye when she talked to them, Fitzpatrick said. She had experience at a private law practice.
“I just have a very high opinion of her,” he said. Fitzpatrick and Mahoney began to talk about the importance of public service. He later gave her a job in his office.
Robert Giarrusso, chairman of the county Republican committee, acted as Joanie Mahoney’s mentor early in her political career. “She didn’t have to get into politics, but she wanted to,” he said. “She’s the only one who followed in her father’s footsteps.”
He encouraged her to leave her career as a lawyer and begin a career in politics. He introduced her to the right people and helped her get elected to the Common Council. He also advised her in the 2005 mayoral race.
A Fighter
Bernard Mahoney sometime refers to Joanie as his “problem child.”
Even before she got into politics, he said, she was never afraid to fight for what she wanted.
Joanie Mahoney’s high school counselors, for example, told her that she should go to a small college, Bernard Mahoney recalled. She listened to them and went to the State University of New York College at Geneseo. After a year, she decided to transfer to Syracuse University because she loved the idea of a bigger school.
At SU, she went to the dean’s office to talk about transferring. She did not have an appointment, so the secretary would not let her in. After arguing with the secretary, she then went downstairs, called the secretary on a pay phone, made an appointment and walked back up to the office a few minutes later with a big smile on her face.
“She’s always been a self-starter and a problem solver,” Bernard Mahoney said. “She’s always respectful, but she will maintain a spirited defense of her position if she thinks she’s right.”
Steve DeRegis served on the Common Council with Mahoney for four years. He describes her passion and charisma as infectious. And, DeRegis said, Joanie Mahoney isn’t afraid to take unpopular positions if she thinks they’re right.
“She’s got a great smile,” DeRegis said. “But I don’t think people realize how hard she fights.”
When they served on the Common Council together, DeRegis was the minority leader. His job was to keep his fellow Republicans together in a voting bloc. Mahoney made that difficult, he recalled.
“We didn’t always agree, I can tell you that much,” DeRegis said. “She would certainly buck the party line.”
For example, a school district needed more money from the council. DeRegis didn’t want to grant it more money because he felt school board members should have spent more conservatively. Mahoney wholeheartedly disagreed, he recalled.
Mahoney tried to persuade the council that the town needed the money. After much argument and a veto by the mayor, the council voted to deny the school the funds.
“She was never scared to put herself on the line,” DeRegis said. “She’s a fighter.”
This Time Around
Now that the primaries are over, Mahoney is trying to extend her appeal beyond her Republican support base.
She learned how much party affiliation can affect voters’ decisions when she ran for mayor in 2005 against Democratic incumbent Matt Driscoll. In the closest mayoral race in Syracuse in 80 years, she lost by only 3.6 percent of the vote. The closeness of the race is an exception, not a rule.
In the county executive race, she cannot ignore the fact that Syracuse has more than twice as many registered Democrats as Republicans. Onondaga County has almost always had more registered Republicans than Democrats. This year the number of registered Democrats and the number of registered Republicans is almost dead even in the county, according to The Post-Standard.
At the Sept. 27 county executive debate, she emphasized the importance of both parties working together. “I don’t want it to be about Democrats and Republicans and who’s going to scratch whose back,” she said. “We’re all in this together.”
She has positioned herself as a “fresh start,” one that offers a different approach to old issues. “We need to think more creatively,” she said in the debate. “We need an entirely new approach. We need a fresh set of eyes to look at every issue.”
Among the issues that Mahoney focuses on:
- Create better public transportation in the city.
- Keep property taxes stable for people over 65.
- Provide tax relief for businesses and families
- Encourage businesses to invest in the county by traveling around the country and selling the area to them.
- Modernize and consolidate local government; reduce bureaucracy.
(Andrew Restuccia is a senior newspaper and religion and society major)
-30-
