Molinaro's Homecoming

The last politician

Southbound on NY-30 in the Town of Schoharie (Mr. Matté)

It is a Friday afternoon in March, the kind of day in the Upper Hudson Valley where the sky is the color of a bone-dry sidewalk and tires crunch battered road salt against stubborn, unplowed snow. In Catskill, or perhaps Schoharie, or one of those Delaware County towns where cell service goes to die and everything of local importance still happens at the wood-paneled VFW hall, Marc Molinaro is shaking a hand. It is likely a firm hand, practiced and warm, the hand of a man who has spent thirty-two of his fifty years searching for in each soul something that is increasingly no longer offered: something unseen behind the eye, some feeling that binds all men in common interest.

This belief now reads not only as old-fashioned, but faintly pathological.

He is back now, or at least he is trying to be back, which in the topography of New York politics is not at all the same thing. He is running for New York State Assembly; specifically, the 102nd district: a rural chunk of Upstate the size of Delaware that is overwhelmingly White, Republican, and pissed off. To the casual observer, it is a retreat, a quiet surrender of the federal billions and the Beltway green rooms for a nothing role in the eternal minority in Albany. To the pundit class it is incomprehensible, written about in an exasperated tone once reserved for the eccentricities of Howard Hughes. I have written about him before, in “Molinaro’s Gambit” and “Molinaro’s Endgame;” with this I now risk a trilogy.

One does not return to the Assembly. The Assembly is a place of beginnings, a cramped room in a Legislative Office Building too bland to be photographed where one taps their feet waiting for seniority or eyes an opportunity to parlay the role into something grander. It is where Mayor Mamdani served two and a half terms. It is twenty years ago, where Marc Molinaro served two and a half terms, his fourth public office of seven.

To go from overseeing the $20.5 billion purse of the FTA— the ability to derail every transit system from the MTA to the Honolulu Skyline at the stroke of a pen— to being one in one-hundred-fifty against a supermajority is to exhibit a very specific kind of madness. The Assembly is not a place where any man who has been County Executive, or nominee for Governor, or Congressman, or Administrator has any sense being.

And yet to describe this as descent is to misunderstand the sort of man Marc Molinaro has always been, and perhaps more pointedly the sort of ecosystem that made him. Ambition, in the way it is ordinarily understood and resented in ourselves, has never quite explained him. He has always wanted higher office, yes, pedal to the floor towards that end since he could vote. But his ambition has never been solely or perhaps even primarily ideological, nor entirely material, nor reducible to the blunt narcotic of prestige. It has a twinge of something older and more provincial than that, rooted in a belief that “public life” is a coherent thing and that to move through it skillfully is in and of itself a virtue.

There was, not so long ago, a type of man (they were always men) one encountered on town boards and in diner booths from Quogue to Canandaigua: men who did not necessarily stand for all that much in the modern sense but who could dance with supernatural fluidity through the local circuitry of power. They remembered names, wives, bypass surgeries, ancient grudges among long dead pols, which fire chief’s son got jammed up in County for drink-driving in 2004 and which widow at the town library still felt slighted by a zoning fight from the Carey years. They could feel the pressure systems of a region in the almost mystical way an old farmer can smell a downpour before it breaks. They were not charismatic in the theatrical way in vogue now. They did not electrify. They absorbed. They circulated. They steeped in politics not as an instrument towards an end but as a habitat.

It is tempting, because the aesthetic of all this is so quaint, to mistake it for innocence. Politics was never innocent, clubhouse politics least of all. It was transactional, hierarchical, frequently suffocating, full of petty tyrants and graft and sexism. But it did at least presume a public. It presumed that politics was about a place and the people within, that governing meant arbitrating among interests one might actually see on line at ShopRite. It presumed continuity. It presumed memory. Most of all, it presumed that politics was made of human beings encountering each other in person rather than cultivated branding colliding in airless national space. These were politicians in the deepest and least glamorous sense: people for whom the management of interpersonal relationships was not a means, but a craft.

Marc Molinaro may be the last one left in New York who still believes that craft alone can be his salvation.

This is not because he is uniquely talented, though he is talented, nor because he is uniquely hollow, though hollowness has long been one of his great adaptive strengths. It is because he emerged from a specific world that is now mostly gone, a time when one tuned into a presidential debate with no idea who they were to vote for. This was a world in which politics was not yet fully nationalized, in which one could plausibly construct a public self out of attentiveness and raw stamina. It was a world in which biography could be fashioned not as a tabloid piece, but as a credential. Youngest mayor in America. Child of instability. Precocity under pressure. Making his way, rung by rung, up the well-trawled local ladder.

And for a long time that was enough. The Hudson Valley and its neighboring Catskills counties produced, rewarded, and in some sense required this type. Places neither wholly rural nor wholly suburban, too close to the city to be absolved of its pull and too far from it to profit much by its glamour, have long favored men who can translate between worlds without ever fully belonging to any of them.

Molinaro’s genius, if that is the word, was that he learned early how to turn his own life story into a civic asset. Not in the confessional mode that politics insufferably demanded until quite recently, where suffering must be narrated as key to policy, but in the older form where hardship functioned as an aura of authenticity. He came from the sort of background that journalists and voters alike knew how to describe to others with respectful compression. It was the kind of story that let every audience hear what it wanted, read a bit of themself into. Resilience. Bootstraps. Grit. A kid who cared too much. A kid who belonged in rooms full of adults. A kid who made himself legible to institutions because institutions— unlike football or morality or money— could at least be mastered.

That last part matters. What animated Marc Molinaro was never merely the desire to win but the desire to become intelligible to social structures larger than himself. He is a man who has spent his entire adult life seeking peer recognition from office. Not celebrity. Not adoration. Office. Title. The place in the chain of command, the stationery, the chief of a traveling entourage. There are people in politics who yearn to be loved and people who yearn to dominate and people who yearn to reorder the world according to a theory. His ambition is less theatrical. He yearns to be valedictorian of the proles.

This is why the office itself almost never mattered in the way outsiders imagined it should. Mayor, Assemblyman, County Executive, Gubernatorial Nominee, Congressman, Federal Administrator— these are far different in scope and prestige, yes, but they are also to a man like Molinaro variations on a single immutable spiritual condition. To hold office is to be where things happen, to be within circulation, to possess not power for power’s sake exactly but a kind of sanctioned relevance. He has always behaved like someone for whom irrelevance would constitute not merely professional failure but ontological collapse.

That last role he held, that almost spectral tenure as FTA Administrator, the one with the most cachet and the most power by far, placed him furthest from that feeling of relevance. And now here he is pursuing placement in a chamber no one pursues unless they have nowhere else to go or still believe, against all available evidence, that going there means something.

To say that Marc Molinaro is the last politician is not to flatter him. It is in some ways the opposite. It is to say that he belongs to an anthropological category that no longer fits the age. There is a deathliness in this type. Politics, as it now exists, rewards different instincts. It rewards those who can become symbols faster than they can register as human. It rewards ferocity, novelty, totalization. One is expected to stand for something unmistakable and preferably polarizing. One is expected to be optimized for clipping, for coalition-branding, for ideological readability at national scale. One is expected to produce emotion on demand.

Molinaro was built for the old test. He can still pass it with unflinching ease. Put him in any room across the five county stretch he seeks to claim and he will move through it with the sleek assurance of a creature evolved for exactly that space. He can make aging widows feel noticed, local reporters feel respected, and skeptical civil nobodies momentarily restored to rightful importance. None of this is fake, which is why it works. The mistake many of his critics and opposition researchers make is to imagine him as a pure opportunist, as though calculation and sincerity are mutually exclusive. They are not. In men like Molinaro, they are fused so completely as to become inseparable. He doesn’t mind. He has spent too long practicing attentiveness for it to be wholly false. The problem is that attentiveness is no longer enough, and the world he learned to operate in no longer exists in the same way.

Marc Molinaro has spent years being dissolved by this change.

This is part of why he fascinates. Not because he is uniquely consequential; he isn’t. Not because he is especially evil; he is less monstrous than many and more compromised than he advertises. Not because he represents the future; he very much does not. He fascinates because he is a remainder. A human leftover from a version of politics that has been stripped for parts without a proper funeral. He is what forms in the in-between, when time keeps cycling offices long after it has stopped generating belief in the forms that animate them.

He is difficult to hate cleanly because he is legible at human scale. He does not possess the sleek carnivorousness of the professional national Republican, the clarity of purpose of the left’s tribunes, or even the synthetic telegenic glow of the newer, focus-grouped New York climber. He is an anachronism.

This is what made his congressional stint feel so curiously weightless. He had spent decades honing a blade for a form of public life based on proximity, and then arrived in a House increasingly organized around distance: distance from district, distance from consequence, distance from any durable relationship between competence and reward. Congress wants you either theatrical or obedient. Preferably both. Congress doesn’t want you calling anyone in such a district that isn’t about to cut a check. It wants you to go on television and flatten your own region and career into two or three sentences.

He will wheel and deal Greene, Delaware, Otsego, Schoharie, and Albany counties until all know his name and then some. In November, he will almost certainly win, and he’ll make the forty-minute drive to represent both the dying breed at the VFW halls and the Brooklyn summer homers whose mail-in ballots booted him from Washington in the first place. He will return to a chamber unworthy of his résumé and perfectly suited to his psyche. He would rather be an institution to 140,000 than a clerical shadow to 350 million.

Climbers, when the ladder gives out, become pundits or consultants or college presidents with embossed business cards. They do not reattach themselves to a chamber with few cameras, little money, and no plausible upward script. This is not a stepping stone, for there is nowhere obvious left to step. It is not martyrdom, he isn’t tragic enough to play at that. It is not strategic by even the most charitable read of the consultant class, though consultants will of course reverse-engineer a way that it is. It is compulsion. Not merely a desire for office but a deep attachment to the practice of officeholding itself.

He wants to be in the bloodstream. He wants to have a district. He wants to spend the next decade attending the sorts of dry events from which ambitious men are supposed to have emancipated themselves. He wants constituents, petitioners, random old men with opinions about bike lanes. He wants the calls. He wants the little crises. He wants to be inexorably tied to a chunk of geography in the anchored, all-encompassing way politicians once did.

And so there he is, on a Friday in March, back among the roads and luncheons and careful handshakes, back in the weather pattern that formed him. Not a visionary. Not a conqueror. Not even, anymore, much of a climber. A politician.

He goes back to Albany because Albany is still, however dimly, a place where a politician can exist.