Each has spent most of campaign attacking opponent to accentuate differences.
View full sizeDemocratic U.S. Rep. Dan Maffei and his 25th Congressional District challenger, Republican candidate Ann Marie Buerkle, held one of a series of debates at the YNN studios in East Syracuse Oct. 13. The debate was sponsored by Leadership Greater Syracuse.For a moment earlier this month, U.S. Rep. Dan Maffei and Anne Marie Buerkle were able to agree on an issue during an often bitter series of debates.
The two surprised each other: They agreed that the United States urgently needs to pass immigration reform, and they both opposed the idea of granting amnesty to the nation’s estimated 11 million illegal residents.
“I think we finally found a common ground,” Buerkle said, smiling at Maffei.
It was perhaps the only light moment in an acrimonious campaign for the 25th Congressional District seat. Maffei, a freshman Democrat from DeWitt, and Buerkle, a conservative Republican from Onondaga Hill, have staked out views as polar opposites on almost every issue in a campaign marked by their stark contrasts.
Buerkle has attempted to tap into voter anger with Congress and the federal government. She wants a smaller government that spends less, lowers taxes and lifts regulatory burdens on businesses. She calls Maffei a liberal Democrat and a Washington insider who has “declared a war on prosperity.”
Maffei defends his record and calls attention to the alternative: He has portrayed Buerkle as an extreme right-wing ideologue who wants to repeal health care reform, shut down the U.S. Department of Education, believes global warming is a myth and views President Barack Obama as the worst president in U.S. history.
View full sizeGRAPHIC: Where Dan Maffei and Ann Marie Buerkle stand on the issues“The biggest difference is that she follows her ideology or views, and they don’t necessarily respond to our history in Central New York or what is out there today,” Maffei said.
He added, “She takes a different position from us on everything. It’s hard to know if that’s what she really thinks or she is trying to draw a contrast.”
Buerkle maintains that Maffei has spent the campaign trying to hide the depth of those contrasts.
“I think Dan is very liberal,” Buerkle said of her opponent. “I think he is more liberal than he wants voters to know. He has wanted to present himself as a moderate and a peacemaker. But that’s not what his record shows. He hasn’t represented Upstate New York. He has represented a Washington agenda.”
Indeed, each candidate has attempted to portray the other as out-of-touch with the average Central New Yorker in a politically divided district that covers all of Onondaga and Wayne counties, northern Cayuga County and three towns in Monroe County.
As of April 1, the 25th District had 138,146 enrolled Republicans, 137,792 enrolled Democrats and 98,083 voters who were not enrolled in a political party, according to the state Board of Elections.
On Tuesday, it will be up to those voters to decide whether Buerkle or Maffei would better represent their interests in Congress. Both campaigns claim they have internal polls — but will not make them public — showing their candidate in the lead in the final days before the election.
A Post-Standard/Siena Research Institute poll conducted Oct. 10 to 12, showed Maffei had a 12-point lead. He was ahead 51 percent to 39 percent with 10 percent undecided. Maffei’s strongest appeal was among women (55 percent to 33 percent) and voters older than 55.
The race has attracted national attention and money in a year when Republicans are expecting a “wave” election will give them at least the 39 seats needed to recapture control of the House of Representatives.
Republican strategists say they need to pick up at least four seats in New York, where the GOP currently holds only two of the seats in a 29-member delegation.
With so much at stake, big money has flowed into the local race. As of Oct. 13, Maffei had raised more than $2.7 million in the campaign; Buerkle, about $550,000. But in the final weeks of the campaign, outside groups from Washington, D.C., have come into the district to spend large sums attacking Maffei.
One group, American Crossroads, a Republican organization founded by former President George W. Bush’s advisers, Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie, spent more than $411,000 in a single week attacking Maffei in TV ads.
Buerkle has been endorsed by prominent Republicans who are possible 2012 presidential candidates, including Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, George Pataki and, on Thursday, Rudy Giuliani, as well as House Republican Leader John Boehner.
Romney, Pataki and Boehner made stops in Central New York to campaign with Buerkle.
Maffei has pulled in his own star power, requesting a campaign visit from former President Bill Clinton, who packed more than 1,000 people into a rally inside a hangar at Syracuse Hancock International Airport.
On the issues, both candidates spent the early part of the campaign emphasizing their differences. Maffei voted for Obama’s health care reform legislation, but still wants to make changes to improve the bill. Buerkle vowed that she would immediately vote to de-fund the legislation, and then back efforts to repeal the law.
Both candidates view the economy and job creation as their top priority. Buerkle wants government to get out of the way — with lower taxes and less regulation — and let small businesses lead a recovery.
“I don’t think the government has a role in every aspect of our lives,” she said. “Particularly when we talk about jobs and economy, the small-business owners are the ones who are going to get the economy growing and who are going to create jobs.”
Buerkle said she would have opposed Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus program, and opposes the idea of a new $50 billion stimulus for infrastructure. She also would have voted against a landmark financial regulatory reform bill to rein in Wall Street, legislation that Maffei helped write.
Maffei supported the stimulus program, noting more than 30 percent of it was tax cuts aimed at businesses. He also has supported lower corporate tax rates, investment tax credits and additional small-business tax incentives.
He said Buerkle’s economic plan is “more tax cuts for the wealthy with no offsets. Those are all ideas we have tried before.”
Maffei added, “I defy anybody to figure out some sort of difference between what she advocates and the policies we had under George W. Bush.”
The two candidates also disagree on how much of the Bush-era tax cuts should be extended (Buerkle would extend the cuts to the wealthiest Americans; Maffei would limit the cuts to the first $1 million in an individual’s annual earnings), the future of the war in Afghanistan (Maffei opposes its continuation) and how best to bring down the national debt and federal budget deficit.
But many of those issues have been overshadowed in the final weeks of the campaign as both candidates have taken part in an increasingly nasty advertising war.
Maffei has attacked Buerkle repeatedly because she is listed as delinquent on more than $20,000 in taxes for a strip shopping center she owns in Camillus. Buerkle says Maffei’s attacks are overblown because her tenants are responsible for the taxes under terms of their leases.
Buerkle has brought up the fact that Maffei once worked as a staffer on the House Ways and Means Committee under its former chairman, U.S. Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-Harlem, who has been charged with ethics violations.
Buerkle called for Maffei to return about $80,000 in campaign donations Rangel helped Maffei raise over several years. But no one has suggested that any of that money was raised illegally or unethically, and Maffei has declined to return it.
In the latest attack, Maffei is running a Web advertisement drawing attention to Buerkle’s activism against abortion rights in the late 1980s, when she took part in high-profile Syracuse protests and served as a local spokeswoman for the group Operation Rescue.
“I think all of that negative campaigning insults the voters because they want to know about the issues,” Buerkle said.
Maffei said that his efforts to discuss Buerkle’s ideological views, and her past, are an important issue.
“People in and around Syracuse, who have known how much of an extremist she has been for 20 years, think that people all over the district must know,” Maffei said, noting Buerkle was a political unknown in the western part of the district in Wayne and Monroe counties.
He said Buerkle has tried to move away from some of her more extreme views during the campaign.
“It’s like Santa Claus waking up one more morning and declaring he is not jolly,” Maffei said of Buerkle. “It’s not us defining her that way.”
Contact Washington correspondent Mark Weiner at mweiner@syracuse.com or 571-970-3751.