N.Y. GOP CLASS WAR [by Frederick U. Dicker]
ALBANY - CLASS warfare is erupting in the New York GOP with a fury unseen since a proudly pushy, middle-class suburban, conservative Italo-American took on a polished political icon of the rich liberal Manhattan Republican establishment more than a quarter century ago.
Al D'Amato's paradigm-shattering struggle against Sen. Jacob K. Javits set the direction for the state GOP for decades. In this year's replay, the same Rockefeller/Javits/Wall Street wing of the party - now represented by Gov. Pataki, former Mayor Giuliani, longtime Rockefeller buddy Henry Kissinger and Manhattan GOP boss James Ortenzio - is backing two ultra-wealthy, pro-choice, pro-gay-rights Protestant Manhattan aristocrats: blueblood William Weld for governor, and Park Avenue housewife-cum-foreign-policy-expert Kathleen McFarland for U.S. Senate.
The party's D'Amato wing, most clearly represented by small-business-oriented upstate leaders, has lined up behind two suburban, middle-class, anti-abortion ethnic Catholics: gubernatorial hopeful John Faso, whose father was a TV repairman and school janitor, and Senate hopeful John Spencer, the ex-mayor of gritty Yonkers, whose father worked in construction and groomed Westchester golf courses for the likes of the Rockefellers.
The battle's class nature became stark last week with The Post's disclosure of an extraordinarily candid campaign memo from McFarland, a document that could serve as a primary source in a course on wealthy RINOs - Republicans in Name Only.
In the memo, KT (as she's known to her friends at the Colony Club and the Council on Foreign Relations) defined herself in stark class-based language to delight the likes of Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky (not to mention the geniuses of those wonderful, WASP-baiting 1930s films, "Marxists" Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo).
McFarland, an MIT and Oxford grad, and her investment-banker husband are - by her account - literally among what old-line WASPs used to call "the 500," the best families on the Gilded Age circuit. "I have a list of over 500 friends and family who should be willing to contribute money, time or both. Most of our friends are senior people in NY financial, banking and legal communities," wrote KT.
More: "I have a core of 40 women who will volunteer and work seriously: These are women whose husbands run the major law firms, investment banks, financial institutions and who themselves are on the boards of private schools, hospitals, museums and not-for-profit institutions in New York."
John Spencer, in sharp contrast, has an unpolished, working-class edge - gruff and anything but politically correct. An orphan adopted by a blue-collar Yonkers family, he dropped out of college to enlist in the Army, earning a Bronze Star as a first lieutenant in Vietnam. He's a card-carrying member of the Steamfitters Union.
Arrested twice in the early '70s for alcohol-induced brawls, Spencer later sobered up, joined AA and went on to become the majority leader of the Yonkers City Council, a two-term Yonkers mayor and a real-estate-management expert.
Weld, the former Massachusetts governor, comes from a Boston Brahmin family whose Bay State roots date back to the 17th century. Ancestor Edmund Weld reputedly graduated from Harvard College in 1650, to be followed by 18 more Welds, including Bill (who's also a Harvard Law grad).
Weld grew up on Long Island - the Long Island of old money and distinguished lineage, not the Long Island of ethnic, blue-collar refugees from crowded apartment buildings in Brooklyn and Queens.
John Faso grew up in that other Long Island; his father supplemented his income from a small TV-repair shop with night work as a janitor at a local Catholic school, sometimes with his son working at his side. For high school, Faso commuted on the LIRR to Archbishop Molloy HS in Queens. For college, he headed upstate to little-known SUNY Brockport. He did well enough there to get into Georgetown University Law School, earning his law degree at night while working a full-time day job.
These sharp class divides have many influential longtime Republicans agonizing over the choices they face. One invoked the famed class-based British TV series, calling it "the 'Upstairs, Downstairs' divide."
Their political instincts tell them they should back the rich, influential ticket of McFarland and Weld, gaining access to campaign cash, social and media respectability and what passes for more mainstream views here in liberal New York.
But on another level - call it their political hearts - these same activists prefer Spencer and Faso, believing that conservative GOP principles are solidly shared by the overwhelming number of middle-class New York voters.
A third option brings us back to Al D'Amato, who appears to have concluded that the forces he defeated so long ago will soon control the party again. So, in a move that would've been inconceivable a few years ago, D'Amato is poised to endorse Democrat Eliot Spitzer for governor. (In private, he's even had a few good words to say about Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.)
The Republican forces behind Weld, D'Amato told a friend, "are people who hate us. They look down on the middle class, they laugh at us, they hate us."
If the likes of McFarland and Weld again set the agenda for the state GOP, D'Amato won't be alone, many local party leaders agree: Hundreds of thousands of other working-and middle-class Republicans - who have nothing in common with the likes of Pataki, Giuliani, Kissinger and Ortenzio - will be pulling the Democratic lever on Election Day.
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Fredric U. Dicker is The Post's state editor.