Who shot New Beginnings?

Win or lose, the biggest story of the 2006 Council election season has been the New Beginnings slate. They announced their presence on the scene with a somewhat strange advertisement/press release that The Suburbanite mistook for its own original work and published as a news story. Then they (or rather their vocal campaign director, Dr. Joseph Harris) transformed a sleepy campaign contested by a huge field of relative unknowns into a heated battle by fanning the flames of ethnic and religious tension by circulating an e-mail containing accusations of complicity in bigotry against the four Orthodox Jewish candidates in the field (clearly a tactical mistake in addition to a moral/ethical lapse).* And then, having been forced to wipe the egg off of their collective face in the aftermath of that blunder, they came under attack by a slick direct mail and phone campaign that linked them with the Democratic Party machine and the local unions that endorsed them, and drew the painfully obvious conclusion that New Beginnings might not be the most taxpayer-friendly candidates in the field.

Their paralysis in the face of this well-coordinated (and may I add, quite persuasive) attack did not last for long. Within twenty-four hours after the mailings were delivered, I received a phone call from a local activist offering to answer any questions I may have had in the wake of the "disinformation" campaign that had sullied the New Beginnings name (as if it had been so squeaky clean prior to that). Not too long after that, a recorded phone message came from a tired sounding Dennis Crowley urging me to vote line 7. The speculation offered by the New Beginnings messages was that a "well-financed" landlords' group opposed to the "strong position" New Beginnings had staked out on "affordable housing" was behind the attack ads. However, the three candidates from New Beginnings were not the only ones who had come out in favor of strengthening the Teaneck rent control ordinances (after all, it was Mr. Arrington who had the endorsement of the tenants' associations, and Mr. Howard Rose probably made a bigger issue of vacancy decontrol throughout the campaign). So who was it that spent all that time and money going after New Beginnings?



* Note to future candidates- if you are going to hold yourselves out as champions of diversity who deplore voting along ethnic, racial, and religious (what about gender?) lines, don't claim that you are purposely running as a threesome in order to leave a spot open for an Orthodox Jewish candidate to be elected too. That is offensive to all Teaneck residents, not to mention patronizing to the Orthodox Jewish community.