The first time I met Rep. Michael Arcuri (D-NY), his 70-year-old mother Betty wanted to make sure I got the full set of Mike Arcuri for Congress baseball cards.
A couple of weeks ago, the newly-elected Democratic congressman called me on the cusp of the House’s vote to set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.
87 picnics, union halls and roadside diner grip ’n grins since our first meeting, Arcuri has rocketed from obscurity as the Oneida County D.A. to a sexier sort of obscurity as one of the 42 freshly-minted members of the House of Representatives.
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Arcuri — who was recently rated the third most powerful in the freshman class — has already been marked as a player. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t had to deal with growing pains. Like finding a roommate.
“We met during orientation, and we struck up a friendship real quick and decided to live together,” the frosh told me when I asked about his roommate, Rep. Zack Space (D-Ohio), a newly-elected Democrat from Ohio.
There’s a world of difference between the Potomac and the Hudson. But the frosh told me that getting elected to Congress reminds him of nothing so much as his first days at SUNY-Albany.
“Are you bringing a TV, or do I have to bring a TV?” he asked Space before they moved in to their Washington apartment.
“We’re on different time schedules, so the only time I really see him is on the [House] floor,” Arcuri told me.
With the help of a local grassroots operation assisted by the Cornell Dems and support from the national party, Arcuri won in one of the top 10 races in last year’s midterm elections, and was instrumental in making the new Democratic majority.
“Enjoy what Bush has to say tomorrow,” Arcuri operative Andrew Tyler said the night of his win, “because he’s not going to know what the fuck to do with himself.”
Since the vote on Iraq appropriations, the president, whose place in history will make Bill Buckner feel better, has been fumbling left and right. When the Senate passed a similar resolution last week and Emperor Nero was threatening a veto, papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post warned of a constitutional crisis.
Arcuri, for his part, is hoping the Republicans do as much fumbling on the field as off. The former center at SUNY-Albany said he can’t wait to play touch against the Republican Conference.
“We’ve got a bunch of good football players on our side,” he assured me. “We’ll definitely take them.”
With heavy hitters like former NFL quarterback and newly-elected North Carolina Congressman Heath Shuler on the line of scrimmage (“We hang out all the time,” Arcuri told me), the Dems just might have a chance on the gridiron.
Arcuri said he’s had to get used to going from calling the shots as D.A. to the compromise that comes with being just one part of a 435-member House.
“Being D.A.’s like being in a puddle two feet wide and a mile deep … being in Congress is like being in a puddle two feet deep and a mile wide,” he said.
In a bigger pond, Arcuri’s now faced with the prospect of considering the widest possible range of issues: from global warming, the war in Iraq and D.C. voting rights to more pedestrian issues like whether or not to build a power line through upstate New York.
As much as he may want to (“My constituents didn’t elect me to be a rubber stamp for the Bush Administration,” he told me) Arcuri can’t escape the pothole stuff. This week, for example, his office announced that the USDA was granting $50,000 to the Oneonta YMCA.
“When all is said and done,” he told me, invoking Tip O’Neill, “people are interested in what you’re doing for them at home.”
Arcuri was also forced to compromise on the Iraq war bill. During the campaign, he said he wanted the National Guard home by the end of 2006 and the rest of the troops home by the end of this year. The bill that passed calls for the troops to come home by October 2008.
“It’s far further into the future than I would have liked,” Arcuri said, finally conceding, “It doesn’t matter what I believe. Governing is about compromise … if we don’t have a bill, there will be no check on George Bush. We needed to get all the members of the caucus — both the progressives and the Blue Dog types — to agree on something.”
Two weeks ago, Arcuri was on the floor during debate about giving Washington D.C.’s delegate to Congress voting rights. Rep. Steve Israel, the Long Island Democrat, walked by and clapped him on the shoulder: “Did you pinch yourself yet this morning?” Israel asked.
“Every day you have a Mr. Smith moment,” Arcuri told me. “Being here is an incredible experience.”
But if it’s possible, Arcuri’s staff is even fresher than he is.
For some perspective, in a summer 2005 article in Newsweek’s student-produced Current magazine, Arcuri’s press secretary, then a Georgetown senior, is quoted alongside godmother-of-all-sex-columnists Natalie Krinsky, of Chloe Does Yale and “Sex in the Elm City” fame, expounding on the relative merits and bounds of hooking up. (Ed: Never talk to reporters. Someone WILL Google you.)
“My definition of the hook-up was that there was oral sex or at least some nudity when you slept over, some sort of genital contact . . . But not everyone would agree with that,” she told Current at the time. “Some people would say it’s anywhere between making out and having sex with someone,” she said. Apparently, college kids hook up. In other news, the Pope is Catholic. Stop the presses.
Two years later, she’s running public relations for one of the most dynamic members of the new Congress.
Aside from the article’s hilariously breathless tone in its feigned ignorance of the “new trend,” the Current story says something else: This ain’t your grandparents’ Democratic majority.
David Wittenberg is a Senior Editor at The Sun. Wittenberg can be contacted at daw49@cornell.edu. The Scoop will appear alternate Thursdays.
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