Tedisco, Klueg slug it out for Farley seat
ALBANY >> With two weeks to go, the Republican primary for the nomination to run for Hugh Farley’s seat in the state Senate is turning into a slugfest worthy of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.
In one corner is Jim Tedisco, R-Glenville, who has served in the state Assembly since 1983, lost a 2009 race for the seat in the U.S. House of Representatives vacated by Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand and was subsequently ousted as Assembly minority leader.
In the other is Christian Klueg, a youthful Fulton County real estate business owner whose response to Albany’s endless run of scandals and upstate decline could be summed up as, throw out the bums and stand up to the Democrats.
The two are running in a Sept. 13 primary in the 49th Senate District, a sprawling and mostly sparsely populated district that runs from Schenectady to north of Indian Lake in the Adirondacks. Republicans have 72,354 enrolled voters in the district, with 58,358 Democrats and 45,171 voters not enrolled in any party, according to the state Board of Elections.
The winner in the Republican primary will face off against Chad Putman, a deputy city clerk in Schenectady who is the Democratic nominee.
Klueg and Tedisco bashed each other mercilessly this week in a live debate on WENT-AM radio in Gloversville, with the moderator at one point threatening to cut off their microphones as they refused to stop talking over each other.
Klueg said Tedisco voted with Assembly Democrats 91.4 percent of the time, “the most likely upstate Republican to vote with the Democrats.” Tedisco dismissed Klueg’s comments as the “rhetoric of non-accomplishment.”
“Listen, government isn’t a
business, and when you lowball your (real estate) sales, you reduce the value of property,” Tedisco said during the sharp exchange, after Klueg talked about how successful his business is. “I’m told that’s what you do when you do your real estate business.”
“So now you’re going to go on personal attacks against me?” Klueg shot back. “You’re making a personal attack that I lowball real estate. This is great.”
Klueg is the owner of CMK & Associates Real Estate, a successful firm he started in 2008 thta now has 60 employees and annual sales of real estate valued at $80 million. His resume includes winning the Fulton-Montgomery Regional Chamber of Commerce’s Thomas B. Constantino Entrepreneurial Award in 2013 and being selected by the Albany Business Review for its “40 Under 40” leadership award last year.
Klueg grew up near the Great Sacandaga Lake and lives in Northville with his wife and four children. He announced a primary challenge to Farley in 2015, when he was 33 and Farley was 82. Now Klueg, who is about to turn 35, is competing with Tedisco, 66, the choice of party leaders to fill Farley’s vacancy.
Tedisco is well known to voters, elected to the Schenectady City Council at age 27 in 1977 and then to the state Legislature in 1982. He was a local basketball star before that and still holds the all-time career scoring record at Union College. He lives in Glenville with his wife, Mary Song Tedisco, who once ran for mayor of Saratoga Springs, and a stepson.
As a legislator, Tedisco drew national headlines for butting heads with then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer while the Assembly’s minority leader, resulting in a cellphone conversation whose takeaway quote is likely destined for Spitzer’s obituary.
“Listen,” Spitzer “shrieked” according to accounts at the time, “I’m a [expletive] steamroller, and I’ll roll over you and anybody else.” Spitzer was angry with Tedisco for opposing his plan to issue state drivers licenses to illegal aliens.
“I was thinking to myself, ‘My God, is this really the governor?’” Tedisco told Vanity Fair magazine afterwards. “To tell you the truth, I almost drove off the Thruway.”
Tedisco also clashed publicly with then-Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who was convicted last year on corruption charges. That heated exchange is now heard in radio ads Tedisco’s campaign is running.
Tedisco is best known for sponsoring Buster’s Law, a 1999 bill that made aggravated cruelty to animals a felony. The law is named after a cat burned to death by a teenager in Schenectady in 1997, a crime that drew national attention.
Both Klueg and Tedisco back Trump’s campaign for president and oppose Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s SAFE Act, a gun control law that remains a big issue for many voters in the district.
Klueg said he is running because the state is headed in the wrong direction under both Cuomo and the current leadership of the GOP’s Senate majority. He called Tedisco a “career politician” and said it is obvious voters want change both locally and nationally.
“I love where we live,” Klueg said. “I look at the direction our state is going, both from the way it is treating businesses ... (and) in the assault on our freedoms. Unfortunately, our Republican-led [state] Senate hasn’t really done too much to stand up to Cuomo on these issues, so I think it is time for a change.
“I’m passionate about the future of New York for my children and my friends and my family, and that is why I am running.”
Tedisco criticized what he termed “ageism” when he is called a “career politician” and says his knowledge and experience is a plus. He dismissed Klueg for not offering much more than “I’m not in office, he is in office, so you should get rid of him and put me in his place.”
“I love public service, and I think that is clear from my record and I think that’s why the response has been so overwhelming, even in the new part of the district,” Tedisco said. “People want a real representative, and I guess when you define a real representative, I think I check the boxes.”
“I’ve stood up to the most powerful elements in state government,” Tedisco said, citing his vocal opposition to a Spitzer’s licensing scheme, which was ultimately shelved before he resigned in a sex scandal. “Sheldon Silver, I didn’t wait until he was shackled and standing in front of a judge. I got in his face at his own press conference on the property tax cap, and I offered the first property tax cap.”