Over the last six months, Steve Israel, the Long Island congressman in charge of defending Democratic House seats from the coming Republican onslaught, used his phone to call candidates, email donors and type 40,000 words of his second novel, a sendup of National Rifle Association lobbyists titled “Big Guns.”
“I write on planes, I write in cars. I write well into the night and in the early morning,” said Representative Israel, who, as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, suffered a devastating and perhaps career-endangering rout on Tuesday, both nationally and in his New York backyard. “I love writing. I hope that I can spend more time doing that.”
Mr. Israel may soon have an abundance of downtime. With him at the helm, Democrats lost at least 14 seats nationwide in the election this week. In his state alone, Democrats lost three races, and failed to even come close to removing Representative Michael G. Grimm, the Staten Island Republican who is under a federal criminal indictment. Upstate, a longtime incumbent, Representative Louise M. Slaughter, clung to a slim — and potentially disputable — lead.
First Draft | Steve Israel on Gridlock
Representative Steve Israel, Democrat of New York, says strict campaign finance reform would help fix Washington.
Video by A.J. Chavar on Publish Date October 15, 2014.The morning after, Mr. Israel, 56, was bracing for a heap of blame (“an occupational hazard,” he called it), a potential loss of influence (“I’ve been clear that I would like to continue to have a seat at the leadership table”), ridicule in the press (he labeled a recent New York Post report about his marital status a “low blow”), and internecine attacks from his enemies (“when you are a national figure you can expect people to have a pretty big target on your back”).
While some colleagues in the New York congressional delegation credited Mr. Israel for taking on what they considered a miserable assignment, others have already begun criticizing his efficacy as leader of the campaign committee. In response, his aides spent Wednesday morning firing off sympathetic assessments from The Cook Political Report. (“It really could have been worse, and the D.C.C.C. and House Majority PAC deserve plenty of credit for shifting their resources to defense early and saving those who could be saved.”)
For his part, Mr. Israel said that “virtually every colleague who was not re-elected sent me messages saying, ‘You did all you could and then some.’ ” He offered, “I’m happy to put some on the phone with you.”
But many of the complaints centered on his recruiting efforts, criticism that he described as unfair. Take, for instance, the Democratic candidate who lost badly to Mr. Grimm, Domenic M. Recchia Jr. Mr. Israel said that before settling on Mr. Recchia, he had approached Assemblyman Michael Cusick and had lunch with a former representative, Michael E. McMahon, but both passed. Only Mr. Recchia, a former councilman from Brooklyn, had raised money and had a political infrastructure and an appetite for the race.
So it was the inarticulate Mr. Recchia “versus a bunch of other people who range from disinterested to slamming the door on your face,” Mr. Israel said. “Who’re you going to go with?”
For weeks, Mr. Israel had been managing expectations as President Obama proved to be an anchor weighing down many Democratic candidates nationally, and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo did little to help down-ticket Democrats in New York.
Asked whether Mr. Cuomo had been a drag on local Democrats, Mr. Israel said on Wednesday: “I have no comment on Governor Cuomo’s effect on this election. Quote me on that.” Moments later, he added, “We had conversations several months ago with the governor’s staff about helping to organize and coordinate a campaign and I didn’t see the fruition to those conversations.”
But as Mr. Israel flew from New York to Washington around 4 p.m. on Tuesday, he did not know just how bad the results would be.
Once at the campaign committee’s headquarters, he received reports of bad weather affecting turnout from Illinois and Maine, and called around to candidates to get a sense of what they were seeing. He made television appearances, got a debriefing from his targeting director (“our field program was meeting its bench marks”) and took heart in an early and unexpected victory by Gwen Graham in Florida. But as the magnitude of the drubbing took shape, he took a seat next to Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader and his political patron, and told her, “We need to brace ourselves.”
He ate pizza. He ate “little sugar wafer cookies.” He watched with horror as the Republican wave crashed into New York and threatened even the safest-seeming seats.
“I talked to Louise a few days ago,” Mr. Israel said, referring to Representative Slaughter, a 14-term incumbent from the Rochester area who held a lead of a few hundred votes. “She said it was a tough environment, but she said there was no sense of ‘I need cavalry.’ ”
“I talked to Sean Patrick Maloney,” he said, referring to a freshman Democratic congressman from the Hudson Valley who won his race by the slimmest of margins. “We talked about ‘Do we need to get lawyers there?’ ”
Mr. Israel went to sleep at 4 a.m. on Wednesday, woke up an hour later and prepared his “I won’t sugarcoat this” talking points for a 6:20 a.m. appearance on CNN. A few hours later, he was on his way to Ronald Reagan National Airport, and back to La Guardia Airport, where a staff member would pick him up and drive him to Long Island. He had a lunch date with his campaign manager and then planned to spend the day with his girlfriend and her teenage daughter. “I promised them whatever they want to do, I’ll do,” he said.
One thing he definitely did not want to do was continue in his campaign post. (“I’ll tell you what I’m not going to do over any term. I’m not going to stay on as D.C.C.C. chair.”) But writing? That’s another story.
“In a sense, being D.C.C.C. chair has required that I not pursue some of my deep personal interests,” Mr. Israel said, adding that in January he was to begin a book tour in support of his first satirical novel, also tapped out on a smartphone, “The Global War on Morris,” about a Republican administration that accidentally identifies a Jewish Mets fan from Great Neck as a terrorist.
“Quite honestly,” he said, “writing that book was very therapeutic.”