Word: duryea
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...keep going until you hit Montauk Point, the eastern tip of the island, windswept home of fishermen and lobstermen and a charming stone lighthouse that somehow never managed to keep scores of Atlantic clippers away from the homicidal rocks off the coast. Montauk is also the home of Perry Duryea, who wants very much to be governor of the state, and who may well get his wish quite soon...
...Perry Duryea looks like a product of eastern Long Island, as much a part of the coastal view as the countless red-and-white lobster pots from which he has, over the years, extracted a fortune worth a couple or three million dollars. Craggy-faced, silver-haired, attractively beefy, Duryea reminds you of a fine old patrician gentleman: so much money and style, and so little of the incisive wit or brilliance that might scare off the natives. He speaks the language of the east, which is to say he pronounces his words with a heavy Republican accent, and with...
They are wrong, of course, but Duryea won't tell them that. In fact, for several months now, the Republican has been quietly taking a man-sized chunk of credit for the last-minute, spit-and-chicken-wire debt refinancing agreement that was the first step out of New York City's fiscal crisis. Duryea has campaigned well: Peddling his wares upstate, he stresses his early opposition to the Big MAC bond agreement, which he says was designed to make sure the city wouldn't get off with easy terms that might have endangered the state's own bonds...
Although he has been indicted only once, Duryea has otherwise lived a model life for a Long Island Republican, bartering the long plodding years in the Albany legislature into the leadership of the state party, the speakership of the state assembly during the glorious years before the heathen Democrats took over in 1974, and finally, this year, the Republican gubernatorial nomination. People like him, and many will vote for him--some because he likes the death penalty, some because he favors tax reform, many because he just looks so much like a governor, a stately, silver-maned Millard Fillmore-clone...
...THAT HE would ever confess to it. Duryea, as the Manhattan commentators smugly like to point out, is a "downstater," a suburban Republican totally unlike those wild men from up north who run around in animal skins and try to turn every election into a blood match against the five boroughs. Duryea, they want to think, symbolizes the Republican Party's new era--a shift away from the rural, anti-city sloganeering of past elections, a conscious effort to win the big urban voting blocs that for decades (Rockefeller excepted), have been under Democratic lock and key. For the first...