Is Jerry Kassar's "Radio Silence" for now really a cry for help ?

One of the architects of the 2013 Republican-Conservative fiasco in Brooklyn, Golden's Chief of Staff and the Conservative Party Chairman would rather talk about last year’s disaster than the one that happened just three days ago

Kassar, Golden & Co. are showing a pattern here

If nothing else, the Golden political apparatus remains true to form. Going back quite a while, and through several reversals for Marty Golden, Jerry Kassar and company, the typical response from the Golden-Kassar team has been a period of “radio silence” –  that’s why it was no surprise when Jerry Kassar’s “Common Sense” column this week had nothing to say about this year’s election results.

Last Tuesday was a day of cumulative  reversals for Mr. Kassar and his two bosses, State Senator Martin Golden and NYS Conservative Party Chairman Michael Long.  Kassar, Golden and Long were heavily invested in the races of Joseph Lhota for Mayor, Charles “Joe” Hynes for Brooklyn DA and John Quaglione for City Council, the latter two from their home base area of Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights. All three candidacies crashed and burned like they were mid-fifties rockets trying to orbit America’s first satellite.

The individual failed candidates – Lhota, Hynes and Quaglione  –  shared the same fate and identifying markings, even though they had very different genealogies. All three ran as Republican-Conservatives, but how they got that way was very different, one to the other. Hynes, a lifelong Democrat, was picked without opposition, as the long-time incumbent DA.. Quaglione was picked early by Jerry Kassar for the Conservative line, but faced a primary on the GOP line until a deal was made to lure Andy Sullivan into the adjoining district, with the offer of an uncontested Republican-Conservative line there for Sullivan. Lhota, who was in no way conservative, was picked early by Mike Long and Jerry Kassar to be the Conservative Party’s nominee for mayor; however he didn’t secure the GOP line until a narrow primary victory over John Catsimatidis in September 2013.

Through each tortuous step of each of these Republican-Conservative candidates were the guiding hands of Kassar, Long and Golden – nudging things along. According to the best laid plans, all three of these candidacies were supposed to be mutually supporting and held the early promise of  possible cumulative successes.

The glitches with these plans began almost with each of the initial roll-outs. And additional heavy lifting and last minute adjustments had to be made to coax DA Hynes out of his initial concession following a surprise Democratic primary loss, and to give his Republican-Conservative DA campaign virtual top billing on the ticket in Brooklyn.

Early on, a real wet blanket fell on all of this when Golden, Kassar and company became embroiled in the 2013 GOP organizing process. Who knows what motivated it (there have been some whispers that it is part of a 2014 master plan, but let's wait and see). In any case, it came into the open with Marty Golden’s unprovoked  surprise attack on his longtime GOP ally Craig Eaton. There was a major uptick in the drama and intensity of all of it when mayoral candidate John Catsimatidis joined the fray; and both the Lhota and Quaglione campaigns were drafted into the global war in a teapot under the banner “Republicans for Change.” That fracas went through the summer, into the fall, and because of a bizarre lawsuit continued through election day. That nominally "intra-party" fight soiled and encumbered everything up to that fateful end.

The final failure of this election cycle was there for everybody to see on November 5th. Typical of the Kassar-Golden approach to failures and other inconvenient facts of life is a period of silence on their part. If they continue true to form, stand by for their next stages, denial and dissembling.

As with so many who show patterns of destructive behavior, these guys really do need an intervention of some sort.