Feature

It's Their Party

Troy Johnson: "I just love the party. I love what it stands for. Work for yourself. Help yourself. That's the philosophy. It's a very simple solution."

(Photo: Nathaniel Welch)

The Player
If the local Democratic party can’t hold onto the likes of Troy Johnson, then it’s really headed for ruin. At least, that’s what Johnson himself believes.

As he himself explains, “I’m not a typical minority.” His father, a cook at Gouverneur Hospital, was Black Cherokee, his mother, a nutritionist at the federal Department of Agriculture, Puerto Rican. During his early childhood, the family lived among working-class Jews and Irish “in the South Bronx, before it was ‘the South Bronx,’ ” Johnson says. They fled, like many, in the mid-seventies, and ended up in Wakefield, a quasi-suburban enclave in the North Bronx.

His parents dutifully voted Democratic. “I was apolitical,” says Johnson, now 37. What he cared about was football. His goal was the pros. But after a tryout for the Dallas Cowboys in 1987, he tore up his knee. Luckily, he was starting to discover a new arena in which to fulfill his competitive instincts—politics. His interest had started back in college. During a scrimmage at Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium, he found himself thinking about the Liberty Bell, the Founding Fathers, and Ronald Reagan, then president. “I just felt really proud to be American,” he says. He watched his mother embrace Rudy Giuliani over David Dinkins in 1989. “That bipartisan thing sort of woke me up.” Then in 1993, a Republican cousin started working on Christine Whitman’s gubernatorial campaign in New Jersey. “My cousin had always been active within the party, and he told me, ‘Learn your history; this is the party that freed the blacks!’ ”

Before long, he was passionate. “I just love the party. I love what it stands for. This country is based on capitalism. Work for yourself. Help yourself. That’s the philosophy. It’s a very simple solution.”

The gains in the war on crime that came during the Giuliani years were all the further proof he needed. “Before Rudy, you couldn’t walk the streets,” Johnson says. “Crime was a huge issue for the minorities. Even going back to 1993, a lot of Hispanics voted for Giuliani. They said, ‘Hey, I want to be safe.’ Everybody wants to be safe. That’s their No. 1 priority. As far as crime goes, Rudy Giuliani really saved the city.”

Soon, Johnson was ready to graduate beyond his grassroots work for other Republican candidates in minority neighborhoods. In 1996, he attempted his biggest stab at glory since his Cowboys tryout, taking on entrenched Democrat Keith L.T. Wright for the 70th District Assembly seat in Harlem. “I got destroyed. I got 550 votes, man, compared to 20,000.”

But Democrats, he says, would be unwise to look at numbers like that and presume they predict the future. “Look at Mississippi. Thirty-six percent of the state is black. Trent Lott is their U.S. senator. It’s clear the country is becoming—I don’t want to say conservative, that could get me in trouble—but more Republican. There are 230 congressmen that are Republican. The trend is our way.

“Here, it is a little different,” allows Johnson, a civil servant who now lives with his wife and young son on East 72nd Street. “You have to remember that New York City is not America. Still, Mayor Bloomberg got 50 percent of the Hispanic vote in the last election, Pataki 40 percent. Bloomberg got 25 percent of the African-American vote. There are conservative blacks out in Astoria, Queens. There’s a movement happening.”

The Sacrificial Lamb
If you can’t be a winner, at least be a martyr. Just don’t tell that to Michael Benjamin. Next to him, Bobby Lee and Stonewall Jackson would have seemed like heavy favorites. Benjamin, 34, is a former securities trader who is currently mounting a campaign to unseat Senator Chuck Schumer. The good news for Benjamin is that, after chugging his old Ford Explorer through every one of the state’s 62 counties, he’s raised $600,000 from nearly 16,500 supporters. The bad news? Schumer’s raised $18 million.

It’s far from guaranteed that he’ll ever make it onto the ticket. But Benjamin is undaunted, having run a doomed race for Jerry Nadler’s congressional seat in 1996, although with Rudy Giuliani’s endorsement. For this race, Benjamin even abandoned his daytime career as a self-employed trader of options and securities.

The son of naturalized immigrants—his father is an Iranian Jew, his mother Honduran—Benjamin spent much of his youth in Latin America, where his father restructured Third World debt for Bank of America. Benjamin, however, spent at least several months of each year with his grandparents in Forest Hills, and after enrolling at New York University in 1988, put down roots in the city for good. He’s now in the process of moving from the Upper East Side to Brooklyn Heights.

“Senator Schumer has consistently voted for more regulations, more taxes, and more bureaucracy,” fumes Benjamin, who is pro-life but whose true passion is his crusade against taxation and red tape. “In the late nineties, I started a Web-design company. It lasted for about a year, then we dissolved the company. We did all the paperwork. That was five years ago. I still get bills, I still get paperwork!” Benjamin is so incensed by New York’s taxes that he’s willing to speak out against people like Governor Pataki, a man whose support Benjamin needs to get himself onto the 2004 ticket. “I really like the governor’s focus on bringing high-technology jobs from the semiconductor and nanotech businesses upstate,” he says. “That’s the future. But I sort of wish he would have been more focused on easing heavy regulations and high taxes on businesses in New York.”

Benjamin, like most local Republicans, is also incensed by the smoking ban. “I really believe in the power of choice. I would have pushed to allow bars and restaurants to pick whether or not they are a smoking establishment or nonsmoking, and put a sign outside.”

He’s also critical of the ban’s originator, Mayor Bloomberg. “I don’t believe that increasing property taxes to a level that causes businesses to leave New York is really the answer to our budget problems here,” he says. “We’re driving businesses, and people, out of New York.”

Then again, Benjamin says, Bloomberg’s not exactly a dyed-in-the-wool Republican. “It’s interesting how in New York, some of the captains of Wall Street are so liberal. Somebody should actually do a study on how the heads of Goldman Sachs, like Jon Corzine and Bob Rubin, and the head of Bloomberg, Michael Bloomberg, could be so liberal. It’s the free markets that made them so wealthy. Why shouldn’t all people be able to benefit from that?”