For Daily News Columnist Errol Louis, All Politics Is Local
Photo by Cristina J. Mauro
“I make a living by doing the metro coverage that the New York Times will not do,” Errol Louis explained to a lunchtime audience of NYU journalism students recently. Louis, a columnist for the Daily News, mostly covers the city’s local political scene. “I don’t ever think about getting scooped by the New York Times because it just doesn’t happen,” he said standing at the podium in a greenish-gray suit, purple shirt and matching tie. It doesn’t happen because the Times has a more national focus and Louis reports on the political microcosms of New York City’s five boroughs.
Whether it’s nepotism in the state legislature or gunshots on the campaign trail in Brooklyn, Louis fills at least two columns a week with political peep-shows. Sometimes he is a campaign referee keeping a close eye on local races, looking for sketchy campaign tactics like malicious anonymous flyers and bogus endorsements by the New York Times. “With dirty tricks, at least part of it is to try and make people so disgusted that they don’t vote…that is what makes it so slimy,” he said. Part of the columnist’s routine leading up to an election is to call campaigns and local officials, mining sources for reports of shenanigans. Louis prints what he discovers in order to send the message that someone is watching and people do care.
Of course, sometimes the candidates get away with dirty tricks and win. But Louis watches for crooked elected officials too. He told the aspiring reporters about covering people who ended up in jail, as if to challenge anyone who thought only national politics offered excitement. After quoting his father, who said, “Politics is no place for an honest man,” Louis rattled off several stories of shameless corruption on the part of local pols. In one episode, a family court judge was caught on tape taking cash bribes in “heart-breaking cases” of child custody and division of marital assets. In another, a state assemblyman was voting in favor of a private prison company in exchange for free rides to and from Albany while collecting reimbursements for “travel expenses.”
Sometimes instead of a barking watchdog, the column is a guidance counselor for voters, offering information and lessons on why local elections matter. And according to Louis, people are reading. “One of the great experiences I’ve had in my career came about two, three weeks after I started the job,” Louis said. “A guy got up on the A train, walked over, asked me if I was Errol Louis, said that he liked my column and that it made him want to follow politics again.”
For aspiring journalists who want to make a difference but are still looking for clips, jobs and areas of specialization, Louis made the circus atmosphere of local politics sound like an opportunity. He presented the idea of covering the local scene as a way of positioning oneself for the future, noting that important policies and high-profile national leaders typically begin at the local level. And the meteoric rise of a local politician to the national scene could also mean a career boost, or at least a scoop, for an informed journalist.
But even if that doesn’t happen, Louis said, covering local politics in the theatre of New York is a way for young journalists to cut their teeth. “It’s a sibling, it’s like the twin brother of police reporting in a big city,” he said. And in New York, “If you want to understand what the Democratic Party is, you can switch on Fox News or CNN and listen to a bunch of people blabbing about it or you can look into the largest county unit of the oldest political party in the world,” he said, referring to Kings County, which he said has 700,000 registered Democrats.
Louis, who is proud to say that he never attended journalism school and that he also dropped out of the political science doctoral program at Yale, has worked on several political campaigns, and he also made his own unsuccessful bid for city council in 1997.
Intrigued by his insider status, the students on hand at the NYU event peppered Louis with questions about his political perspective. “For a local politician, it is never about the issue,” he said, expressing his realist perspective. “The first job of any politician is to get reelected or to get elected to the post that they are seeking. And the first commandment of political reporting is that if you don’t get that then you will miss every other thing that they do.” But even if Louis doesn’t blame pols for putting politics before policy, he will certainly point it out in his column.
So does a local political columnist miss out on all the fun of a hot presidential race? Not at all. In fact, Louis occasionally writes about national politics in his column and he was even sent by the Daily News to cover the conventions in Boston and New York. He stuck to the local scene in his presentation at NYU, but he was happy to discuss the presidential race in a quick interview in Washington Square Park just prior.
A declared Democrat and political bettor, Louis has yet to find anyone to “make it interesting this year.” The first election he ever won money on was when Harold Washington became mayor of Chicago in 1983. A warning to strapped journalism students who would consider a presidential wager with Louis: he’s got game. Louis checks tracking polls religiously and hopes to travel before Election Day to the three swing states that he believes will decide the this year’s presidential race: Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania. So far they look red, blue and purple, respectively, he said. But Louis knows that all politics is local and he wants to see it for himself.
“I don’t just want to go to Cincinnati, I want to go to the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood in Cincinnati,” he said. “There are discreet areas where it’s going to matter.” His plan is to visit swing counties in swing states, speak with citizens and local political reporters, drive around checking out lawn signs, and to watch a little local TV.
Louis apparently follows his own advice. As he told the students at NYU, “You will find what you are looking for if you decide… to look into local politics.”
