BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | Downtowners flocked to the polls in droves Tuesday to help elect President Barack Obama to a second term. With the hardship of Hurricane Sandy and the crushing blackout only several days behind them, many cited the president’s response to the disaster and his better position generally on climate change versus Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Voters – especially women – also said they feared Romney would reverse the country’s progress on social issues and threaten women’s right to choose.
Turnout was very heavy in spots, with waits of an hour to an hour and a half at some polls. Doris Diether, in her 80s, one of the city’s longest-serving community board members, voted at an N.Y.U. building on Washington Square, where she said the wait was an hour and a half, but she got to cut the line.
“They let me go to the front because I’m a senior citizen and I have a cane,” she said.
A registered Republican, she said the choice was clear for her, and it wasn’t Romney.
“He was here during the blackout,” she said of Obama. “He had something to say about it. The other guy didn’t have anything to say.”
There was an hour wait to vote at the McBurney YMCA, on 14th St., where the line stretched down to Sixth Ave., around the corner and all the way up to the $1 pizza store.
Similarly, Jennifer Schwartz, a student who had just voted at the Y, asked who she had blackened the oval for, said, “Obama – sure. Yeah, I feel with Sandy, too. I’m going to say it, ‘global warming.’ It’s kind of crazy that it happens two years in a row… . He did a good job.”
Sandi Bachom, a filmmaker who quipped she was “on an apology tour” because of her name, was indignant over the Republicans’ positions on women’s issues.
“This is the most important election in my lifetime and I’m 68,” she said. “When I was a girl abortion was illegal – and what these people are trying to do with vaginal probes, ‘legitimate rapes.’
“The government doesn’t have any business in my vagina, thank you very much,” she declared. “The Republicans are all for small government, except when it comes to my vagina.”
Don Hogle, a brand strategist, waiting on line outside the Y, also said he was planning to fill in the Obama oval. He said the economy ultimately “takes care of itself,” but climate change needs to be addressed.
“We experienced that last week,” he said. “We’re completely unprepared and we have one of the largest population centers on the coast that’s vulnerable.”
His white clerical collar gleaming crisply as he waited in the long line, Associate Rector Stephen Holton of Grace Church said, compared to Romney, “I think Obama is the only one who’s thinking about the country as a whole. He’s thinking about the poor and people that don’t have healthcare.”
Bobbing up and down in the cold with her baby in a carrier beneath a special extra-large coat, a woman who didn’t give her name said, “I’m usually not a single-issue voter. But the whole issue of abortion, if Romney is elected it could set us back decades.” She said it was “important” that she was actually holding a baby as she made her pro-choice remarks, adding, “But I still believe in the right not to have one.”
Rich and Shelley Barnett, retirees who both formerly worked in finance, said they were concerned about Romney’s nebulous plans for Medicare for people over age 55.
“I don’t know how if you cut spending it helps the economy revive,” she said.
“If you have Romney it’s an invitation to recession,” he said, adding, “The economy is better now than when Obama came in. Consumer confidence is up. The NASDAQ is at its highest level in 15 years and the Dow is up 100 percent since 2008. Five and a half million jobs have been created since the middle of 2009. When Obama came into office we were losing 800,000 to 900,000 jobs a month.”
So was anybody in the line outside the McBurney Y planning to vote for Romney? Jeff Edelstein broke out laughing at the question.
“In this line?” he asked with a smile. “Pretty unlikely. Go uptown – but not on this side,” he said, waving toward the west, “that side,” he said, waving toward the Upper East Side. A laid-off editor, he’s studying library information at Pratt down the block. “At least it’s still words,” he said cheerfully.
One man, though, who voted at the Boys and Girls Republic poll site on E. Sixth St. expressed ambivalence about both Obama and Romney. When asked who he inked in the oval for, he spelled out the name Virgil Goode, apparently feeling the candidate, who ran on the Constitution Party line, was that obscure.
A Riis Houses resident who works in a deli on E. 14th St., he said, “Frankly, I just had it with both parties. They both stand for the same crap.”
Former Mayor Ed Koch helped the Obama effort in Florida the week before the election. He did two robo-calls for the president, TV segments and op-eds in the Sun Sentinel and Jerusalem Post.
“It was a blowout victory for President Obama,” Koch said the day after the election. “He won the popular vote – which no one thought he would – as well as the battleground states. I think the Republicans lost because of their positions on wanting to privatize Social Security and Medicare and because they ignored the needs of women and the needs of Hispanic voters. The Republicans need to recognize it’s to their benefit to cooperate rather than to hold back the flood of legislation that Obama has offered to help the country. I think you’re going to see more cooperation – if they don’t, they’ll lose even more seats.”
Congressmember Nydia Velazquez said she was not only thrilled at Obama’s re-election but that four Democratic women were added to Congress and also that 75 percent of Latinos, according to exit polls, went for Obama.
“This election, I hope, turned the page on the Tea Party period of American politics, and now we can move forward to find solutions,” she said.
Assemblymember Deborah Glick said, “I think people were smart and realized what we were being offered was a third Bush term. They realized we are digging our way out and this wasn’t a time to return to failed policies – a return to the 1940s and ’50s on social issues, to attack contraception. Ninety-eight percent of women of childbearing age, at some point, use contraception. I don’t think that a lot of guys understand how viscerally enraging those policies are. Good progressive men understand these policies one way, but I don’t think they grasp the depth of anger that they engender.”
Elsewhere, Rich Caccappolo, a leading figure in Greenwich Village Little League and a member of Community Board 2, joined Bob Kerrey on the trail in his Senate bid in Nebraska, helping Kerrey with the IT side of his campaign. But the political comeback effort by the former New School president and former Nebraska governor and senator was thwarted by Republican Deb Fischer.
With Obama cementing his leadership by winning a second term, fittingly, this upcoming inauguration won’t see a repeat of the scandalous “drunken Negro head cookie” that Ted Kefalinos whipped up for Obama’s first inauguration after he beat the pastry chef’s candidate of choice, John McCain. The bizarre, splotchy chocolate gouache creation sparked outrage, protests by the New Black Panthers and a boycott by P.S. 41 students. But he won’t be cooking up his controversial cookies again this time – at least not in the Village. Kefalinos was evicted at the end of the summer from his Greenwich Ave. storefront, which is being filled by a Thai restaurant.
“He was behind on rent like crazy,” Angel Torres, who does maintenance for the restaurants on the block, said of Kefalinos. “He was going to retire. He didn’t pay the rent for months, so he was evicted.”
Walking by the storefront on Tuesday, Mariette Berowitz said she never cared for Kefalinos’s pastries or for him.
“I never liked it,” she said. “I’m so glad he’s out – you know, schadenfreude?”
But just as people like different candidates in presidential elections, so it goes with pastries.
“I did like his cookies,” Torres said.
