He resembles Al Franken during his Harvard days, sporting horn-rimmed glasses and curly black hair. At 26, the Brooklyn native is seen as the clearest harbinger of what some call “the hipster vote.” It’s not because he wears a pair of skinny jeans (he doesn’t) but because of his team’s ability to get enough voters in Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Fort Greene to cast a ballot for him despite being unaware of this obscure position.

This Williamsburg happy hour event was designed to solicit money for New Kings Democrats, Restler’s home club started by local Barack Obama organizers Matt Cowherd and Rachel Lauter. The club formed after they felt rebuffed from participating in county politics by Brooklyn Democratic Party leader Vito Lopez of Bushwick.

The two-man panel discussion detailed just how they beat Warren Cohn, the son of the man who held the district leader spot for nearly three decades and who had inherited the support of the Brooklyn Democratic Party. A few dozen mingled in the bar dressed in businesscasual for the after-work event, and even had note pads to jot down campaign tips.

Restler’s victory means more than having one more self-described reformer in a party position—also known as a state Democratic committee member—that is low on the totem poll of local politics. It shows the borough’s movement is seeping outside of its Brownstone Belt base.

Restler’s campaign needed to register like-minded Democrats in north and central Brooklyn, so he and a band of insurgent district leader candidates took up a classic party reform message that railed against the Brooklyn Boss, the patronage, the cronyism and the selection of unqualified judges.

But that message was married with one about increasing community involvement. They sold participation in party politics as a way to get a supermarket in Fort Greene or a new park space.

New Kings Democrats’ next step is to now register and educate more Democrats about local politics. The campaign is starting a registration effort aimed to tap into the same sensibilities that are driving residents to start a boycott of the new Duane Reade that recently opened across the street from local mainstay Kings Pharmacy on Bedford Avenue.

“It’s shop local, eat local, vote local,” Restler says.

The registration drive has fertile ground in its target neighborhoods. “Especially in north Brooklyn, you’ve got large communities of folks who are new to New York,” Restler explains.

The campaign can now be used as a blueprint for reformers who want a bit of power in their local Democratic Party but have little or no access to Democratic constituencies or political patrons that can get candidates elected.

“Without a doubt the model we put forward on this campaign is replicable,” Restler says.

In politics, of course, money adds legitimacy to a campaign. But district leader races rarely attract big bucks. The Restler campaign raised more than $61,000—almost enough money to run a competitive City Council race. The most raised in competitive primaries such as this is a fraction of what Restler’s campaign accomplished. A candidate for state committee in the Upper West Side, for example, raised a little more than $13,000 to go against a man that held the seat for 30 years. Paul Newell, the candidate who gave Speaker Sheldon Silver his first real primary race in decades two years ago, only raised $3,000 for his recent district leader race in Lower Manhattan.

“We ran it like it was a race for any real paid office,” Sarah Baker, Restler’s campaign manager, says.

The press Restler received included not only the city’s big political blogs that cover New York State and local politics, but the community papers and the New York Times’ hyper-local Fort Greene blog. Restler was getting write-ups in the daily news blogs that obsess over city- and statewide politics. Websites and newsletters for Brooklyn’s culturally adept gave Restler a platform. It was direct mail for free. That’s the kind of attention that would make candidates for an actual office, much less a district leader, envious.

Low-level elected offices such as these typically only bring out the most politically aware person or someone that works in the Democratic Party. The small pool of votes gives the “machine” the upper hand. A hurdle for the Restler campaign was offsetting the reliable Satmar Jewish community in Williamsburg, which derives its political power from voting en masse.

While Cohn scored a lopsided 80 percent of the vote in the Hasidic Jewish neighborhood, according to Restler’s campaign, Restler had an aggressive door-knocking operation that helped rack up a similar percentage in the creative underclass hubs of north Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Fort Greene.

“That was enough to win by 120 votes,” Restler tells the audience at his fundraiser.

The desire to bring in new Democratic voters is expanding to other neighborhoods. I recently met with three Prospect Heights residents who formed a reform Democratic club for the neighborhood. The two clubs share the same ideals: registration drives, opening up the county party and educational campaigns that highlight the importance of local politics.

“Our club wants to educate and make people aware of the [political] process,” Frampton Tolbert says. He also works at Historic Districts Council, the landmark advocacy group. “Our primary goal is not to be a club house for politicians.”

The focus is educating their neighbors to “understand what local politics is for,” says Ede Fox, a City Council staffer and club member.

Raul Rothblatt, who owns a worldmusic management company, got involved in city politics because of Atlantic Yards, a development only a short walk from his Prospect Heights apartment. He found the club to be an access point for politically motivated people, especially the growing number of new arrivals.

According to Rothblatt, “It’s not easy to find out about local stuff.” Rothblatt is also the first vice president of Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats, so he has experience in political clubs, but the reform clubs in the borough were started during the Vietnam War. Try as they might, attracting newer and younger members is difficult. “In a lot of existing clubs, often, the members are older,” Rothblatt says.

Already, the club has held events about the recent ballot initiatives on term limits and new voting machines, and they will plan more on redistricting, the decennial process of redrawing legislative districts. These sorts of topics, dealing with the minutiae of municipal government, can make a lay person’s eyes glaze over, but it’s key in realizing the goal of opening up local party politics.

This was a theme in Restler’s campaign, which attacked “Boss Vito Lopez” for keeping a lid on the party. Restler’s message is more political and pointed, but the desired effect is the same. “This is a broader vision, in my eyes,” Restler said, “for how we can advance our local community agendas more effectively through the political process.”

If New York City had its own currency, Ed Koch would surely
be on one of the bills. He left office in 1989 but still stays in the public
eye any way he can, from being a pundit and author to a TV judge and movie
columnist. But Koch was more than a folksy catchphrase (“How’m I doin’?”) or a
brash personality. He came into office as the city faced bankruptcy and put in
policies that reinvented New York physically and financially.

Historian Jonathan Soffer’s biography, Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City, is a richly sourced and detailed assessment of the mayor, a city
in the financial trenches and urban politics. We spoke with Soffer, a professor
of history at NYU-Poly, about working with Koch, his enduring public persona
and the real cause of New York City’s money problems.

New York Press: What
was your relationship with Koch during your research and writing?

Jonathan Soffer: Cordial
but independent. He did read the draft and did comment on them. The agreement
was that he would tell me when he thought I had gotten my facts wrong but the
interpretations were entirely mine and he pretty much stuck to that. He was
really a gentleman about that. I actually wonder if I myself would be so calm
if somebody were writing a biography about me.

You write about his
most heated battles as mayor. What do you think of his personality and style?

There were beneficial aspects to it. As I quote Sen. Daniel
Moynihan in the book, he gave New York back its morale. But his bluntness raised suspicions among many members of minorities that he was not protecting or promoting their interests.

Koch has been trying
to shame state lawmakers into taking up reform measures for his New York
Uprising campaign.

The rhetoric of the campaign does illustrate Koch can
operate in two modes pragmatic and compromise, on one hand. On the other hand,
he can divide people into friends and enemies. People who don’t support his
exact reform proposals are enemies of reform. That rhetoric is the kind of
rhetoric that led people to believe Koch was a divisive mayor.

Speaking of reform,
you document his administration’s brushes with corruption during his third
term.

This is one point in which we differ. He was consistently
very serious about reform and engaged in a lot of reform—judicial reform,
taking the politics out of the appointment of city judges. At the same time, I
think he did maintain friendly relationship with county leaders and overcompensated
for his earlier suspicion of regulars that were kind of intense. He was known
as a hard-noser on these kinds of issues. He abandoned this suspicion of the
regulars and kind of overcompensated a little bit and wasn’t suspicious enough
of Democratic bosses Stanley Friedman, Donald Manes and Meade Esposito.

This era of New York
City—from John Lindsay to Koch—has been a popular topic as of late.

People are fascinated because the city went so low; because
it’s a period of transition where the old post-war LaGuardia city is largely
destroyed. Destroyed in terms of physically destroyed, destroyed in terms of
the political economy of the city and how the city makes its money—all of that
collapsed in this period of 1962 to 1984. It is being replaced over the course
of the Koch administration. On the other hand the Rent is
Too Damn High has become a common slogan. My rent back in 1977 was $260 a month for an apartment in
Manhattan. And it wasn’t that bad a place to live. The city was much more
different place to live in, in a lot of ways. But it was tough to live here.

People were proud of overcoming that for the pleasures of living here. They very much valued the pleasures of the city.
Whether that would have continued as more and more of the city continued to
burn, if the city had actually gone into bankruptcy I don’t think that would
have continued. It might have gotten so bad that they would have left like they
left Detroit.

Since this is a biography so late in his life, this might have been an opportunity for him
to come out as gay, as so many people believe him to be.

He says it’s a private matter and what I wrote in the book, and
he read this before it was published and he didn’t say anything to me about it.
I wrote that Ed Koch does not construct himself as gay, and he does not
construct himself as straight either. He has not told me who he had sex with. I
actually did not ask him.

I did ask him about things that had come out in the press
claiming that rumors that somebody named Richard Nathan had told playwright
Larry Kramer and had been investigated by Rudolph Giuliani as to whether or not
he had had an affair with the mayor. Nathan, when he was alive, refused to say
that publicly or confirm it in any way. And he’s dead now, so a fourth-hand
rumor is all there is. There’s no proof of it. My feeling was, if Rudy Giuliani
couldn’t prove it and Larry Kramer couldn’t prove it, there’s no way I was
going to prove it.

How does a former
mayor of New York—one of the biggest cities in the world—stay in the public eye
with such acts as being a People’s Court judge, movie critic, pundit, etc.?

I think Ed likes to be in the public eye. I think he is
extremely witty and funny to watch. I’ve been doing joint appearances with him
and he’s really fabulous in front of an audience. He wrote a book on buzz and
how to get yourself talked about. He really does know how to do that. But at
the same time, one of the main reasons is that he has a very strong sense of
justice sometimes that gets him in trouble politically when someone doesn’t
have the same idea of what justice is, but he wants to use his ability to get
attention politically to advance things he thinks are just. He can be very
controversial because not everyone agrees that what he sees is just is just.

In describing why New
York City’s finances were in the tank, you avoid maligning generous programs,
liberalism and unions.

When Koch took over the mayoralty, the cost of providing
care to the uninsured people, whether through Medicaid or through direct care
subsidies to the Health and Hospitals Corporation, was 106 percent of New
York’s budget gap. If someone between 1970 and 1980 said, “OK, healthcare
costs, we need to do something about healthcare, we need to have a federalized
healthcare system, we need to expand Medicare.” If someone developed a
federalized healthcare system for United States, New York would probably not
have had a fiscal crisis. And Ed Koch realized this at the time.

The city got swamped by cuts in federal spending by what
became an anti-urban much more suburban oriented series of presidential administrations
in the 1970s and 1980s in both parties. The time Koch gets there, industry is pretty
much gone and it’s gone partly because cities all over America are being de-industrialized.
That industrial city model had to be replaced and pretty much the only place to
go by the time Koch came in was finance. And that made up a much less
diversified economy. It worked for a while but it’s cyclical and has its ups
and downs that made it much more difficult to stabilize the economy. Since this
last crash, as astute an observer of Bloomberg said after 9/11, the era of
finance as the engine of its economy is ending. I think finance, insurance and
real estate is going to continue to be tremendously important to the city’s
economy. But the city has to find a way of earning its living. It’s reinvented
itself many times since 1626 and hopefully it will reinvent itself again.

Eliot Spitzer, before his stunning downfall as governor, was the white knight of Wall Street as attorney general. Before him, Robert Abrams put the attorney general office’s focus on consumer rights.

Each attorney general puts their stamp on an office that commands more than 650 lawyers. This September, five candidates are running in the Democratic primary for the state’s top law job, a position held by Andrew Cuomo, the front-runner to be the state’s next governor.

In interviews with New York Press, each candidate stated that they wanted the next attorney general to be the “People’s Lawyer” and they all want to clean up the ethical morass in Albany. But the candidates have very different visions for the office, strategies to fight corruption and backgrounds that demonstrate their ability to do the job.

Richard Brodsky is a member of the State Assembly, representing parts of Westchester County. But his prominence in the chamber—and his argument for being the next attorney general—comes more from investigation than legislation.

He was at the helm of two powerful committees: Oversight, Analysis and Investigation, and most recently Corporations, Authorities, and Commissions.

Where Albany reform, in this race, means pushing independent redistricting of legislative seats, public financing of campaigns and strong ethics laws, Brodsky believes “Albany’s governing institutions”

“I come to that as [the] only successful reformer up there,” he said.

Brodsky led the reform of authorities— public bodies created by the state to handle public projects. These authorities build dormitories and schools, provide transportation or produce power. But Brodsky called them “Soviet-style bureaucracies” that make up New York’s shadow government.

“I did it,” he said of his reform measures, “and I did it when people said I couldn’t.”

Brodsky fought the proposed Jets Stadium on the West Side, tussled with Yankees-owner George Steinbrenner over the new publicly-subsidized stadium, and sued when Indian Point, a nuclear power plant in upstate New York, got an exemption from fire safety standards.

But there is a political element to the attorney general’s office that Brodsky believes will bring reform to Albany.

“On the budget, on gridlock, on campaign finance, on reapportionment, you’ve got to have someone with political skills to change Albany.”

Sean Coffey, a former assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York and lead lawyer on the WorldCom class-action suit, wants to use the attorney general’s office as a bully pulpit to enact reform in a Legislature loath to do so.

With Cuomo making ethics the centerpiece of his gubernatorial campaign, Coffey believes that the attorney general can be “noisy” and the governor’s “wingman.”

“I can pick up the slack,” Coffey said.

Albany, he is hammering Wall Street. He boasts of getting burned investors more than $6 billion from WorldCom, a telephone company.

An oft-repeated line on the campaign trail is that he doesn’t have to beat up on Wall Street to prove he can. As attorney general, Coffey’s goal for the financial industry is keeping it “honest” by focusing on audit firms, credit rating agencies—the “gatekeepers,” he says.

“You need somebody who understands this stuff,” Coffey said.

He believes his opponents’ political ambitions could influence temperament. While a joke in political circles dictates that “AG” stands for “Aspiring Governor,” Coffey says he doesn’t want that position. As a former federal prosecutor and litigator, there should be a nonpartisan agenda for the office, he said.

“I know a good case from a bad case,” Coffey said.

But where Coffey was fighting Wall Street from his law office, Eric Dinallo was an assistant attorney general under Spitzer.

He is credited with resurrecting the Martin Act, which allowed the attorney general to investigate financial fraud and made the New York State Attorney General’s office nationally known.

Dinallo wants to use the prominence of the office to deal with problems in everyday New Yorkers’ lives.

“I want to take it and worry less about the markets, which I clearly have comfort and a history of success in,” Dinallo said, “but worry more about consumer financial products: the fees people pay in their everyday lives. The checks they write at the kitchen table every month.”

Another kitchen-table topic that Dinallo wants to combat is public corruption in Albany. Dinallo criticizes his opponents for saying they would try to compel the State Legislature in to giving the attorney general more power to investigate public corruption—a tall order in Albany. Dinallo believes he can tackle public corruption using existing law, similar to the way he signed into law in 1921.

“I see big, big opportunities through creative, aggressive use of the law in public integrity,” Dinallo said.

Kathleen Rice, the district attorney for Long Island’s Nassau County, has made ethics in Albany the centerpiece of her campaign as well. She says that reform must be brought to the capital before New York can recover economically.

“Confidence in state government is at an all-time low,” she said. “When you have a situation like that, it’s very difficult to have this kind of recovery you need in the state.”

Rice points to how she changed the district attorney’s office after she was elected in 2005. She changed the plea policy on drunk driving and helped write tougher DWI laws.

“I attacked the epidemic of drunk driving in a way no one ever has before,” Rice said. “I know how to address an issue that, for one reason or another, people have failed to address.”

As attorney general, Rice wants to facilitate whistleblowers coming forward by increasing protections.

“Through that, you can get the reform, from an administrative standpoint certainly, of certain agencies if there are practices there that don’t lend themselves to good government,” Rice said. “I believe it’s setting the tone that the public trust something to be held sacrosanct.”

Eric Schneiderman, a state senator from the Upper West Side, is also focusing on restoring public trust. He points to his legislative achievements in correcting some of the bad business practices in the state. He sponsored a law that prevents insurance providers from canceling an entire class of coverage to avoid paying for expensive medical treatment. He also headed the panel to oust a sitting senator for assaulting his girlfriend—the first time since 1920.

A problem in Albany, he said, is that most of the unethical behavior is legal.

“I’m more interested in making cases against individuals as a part of an effort to achieve structural reforms, change the laws and change people’s attitudes,” Schneiderman said.

As attorney general, Schneiderman proposes to create a working group to examine New York’s securities laws. In government, he wants public integrity officers in each regional office of the attorney general.

“Folks who want to report local corruption can have a place to go other than the local prosecutor who probably has relationships with people you’re trying to report,” Schneiderman said.

The freelance journalist has traveled the world to document environmental devastation in Ireland and Peru. His prose delves into Congressional wonk-fests, giving immunity to telecommunication companies and Russian nanotechnology. A self-described “independent progressive,” Zaitchik says he never watched FOX News or listened to conservative radio before he landed a gig to research and write a book about Beck. He wrote pieces for The Nation, the Libertarian rag Reason Magazine, as well as the infamous Moscow-based The Exile, co-edited by Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames (Zaitchik is also a former New York Press editor-in-chief).

Though Beck’s ratings on television and radio put him in the middle of the pecking order among conservative pundits, Zaitchik researched the conservative provocateur for close to a year and found a compelling story that became Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance, recently released by Wiley.

“I realized how fascinated people were by him,” Zaitchik says. “It surprises me how little people know about him even though he is everywhere right now.”

In 2009, when Beck was pivoting from zany morning radio to TV, Zaitchik traded his globetrotting freelancing gigs for Ybor City”the only cool neighborhood” in Tampa, Fla., he explainswhere Clear Channel had set up shop and began to dominate the radio industry.

“Tampa was a very important city for that transformation,” Zaitchik explains. “It was also where [former Clear Channel programming executive] Gabe Hobbs was based, the guy who gave Beck his first talk radio job.”

Zaitchik interviewed Beck’s former friends and colleagues to detail his transformation from the schlock jock who viciously pranked his competitors to conservative media baron who vilifies easy targets like ACORN and President Woodrow Wilson. He watched and listened to an inordinate amount of Beck (“I basically tuned out a few weeks after I finished the last edit of the book”).

SIDEBAR: FINDING GLENN BECK FANS IN NYC

The triumph of ignorance refers to Beck’s enviablethough decliningratings for Glenn Beck, his FOX News show, and The Glenn Beck Program on the radio, plus his book sales, exorbitant speaking fees and paid product endorsements. Zaitchik details Beck’s crusade against obscure Washington, D.C., bureaucrats such as former green jobs czar Van Jones, the coke- and alcohol-fueled early days in his radio career and Beck’s dependence on the conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society and obscure Cold War-era anti-Communist crackpots.

But Zaitchik also explores other ignorant triumphs: the rise of the “morning zoo” radio shows, Clear Channel’s dumbing-down of talk radio and the Tea Party movement that organized around CNBC reporter Rick Santelli’s rant on the financial news program Squawk Box.

“[Beck's] career arc passed through all of these trends. His career in radio is a microcosm of what happened to the industry,” Zaitchik says. “He got into Fox right as it was getting a second breath with Obama. He was just right there at every point.”

Zaitchik and I met up to speak about his process and how Beck hijacked his life for close to a year. While we spoke we watched clips of Beck performances so we could get into the groove. The book may be done for Zaitchik, but Beck continues to haunt him.

NYPress: Was that the goal of this book?

Alexander Zaitchik: The goal was to understand who he was. It was not to write a slash-and-burn “Glenn Beck is a Big Fat Idiot” book. I wanted something more substantial, something that looked at Beck as an aspect of Obama-era conservatism and how he reflected that and informed it, and how he is bigger than just a rodeo clown.

When I flip through the channels and see Beck on, I can’t watch it for more than five minutes before wanting to rip my hair out. What was it like when you first started watching it and delved into the Beck world?

The initial fascination wore off pretty quick and then it got to the point where I was just watching how shameless and base his act was, and I started to get revolted. Quite frankly, people say, “You gotta pay me to watch this shit.” Well, I was being paid. I had that advance check dangling in front of me and the only way to get there was walking through the hall of horrors.

This book isn’t an encyclopedia of Beck’s worst moments.

That’s what the bloggers do. I don’t think the world needs that book. It would get pretty boring after about a hundred pages. Ultimately, I think it’s more important putting him in a broader context of the traditions and interests that he represents. Instead of looking at every speck of paint on the clown’s face, taking the clown for what it is and trying to figure out what it tells us about these other phenomena, like the state of conservatism, and where we are as a society.

Why do these conservatives try so hard to make more money than they could ever spend in their lives? You’ve been to Tea Party rallies, do these people care that he is making millions upon millions of dollars? Do they know?

They are definitely aware of it; Beck doesn’t hide it. He is actually perverse about the way he brags about taking a private plane to sign a million-dollar contract. Some of those folks have had enough of it. As you may have read, he has lost a third of his television audience from last year, and that might be just people who are disgusted about hearing how much money he’s made. But yeah, on the Right, extreme wealth is not like it is on the Left, where sometimes it’s seen as a sign of shame or proof of having exploited other people or gamed the system. With a certain kind of Calvinist worldview, it’s a sign of either being chosen by God or success with the capitalist system, which is perfect and also a gift from God.

The first thing I hear from people who like Beck is that he’s entertaining.

That’s a direct result of him being in radio. All these props, like, “We got a special phone here in studio. We’re waiting for the president to call!” It comes directly from, “We have a phone here in the studio, and we’re gonna call up Hooters!” It’s pranks, it’s jokes. The red phone is a prank, like “Where are ya, Mr. Obama?” Standard Top-40 radio was like, “Here’s one song, here’s the next song.” What the zoo did, which Beck helped pioneer, was say: “No, we’re gonna give you a party; we’re gonna give you bells and whistles.” He basically lost all shame in the Top-40 zoo world. He’s not afraid of being embarrassed. He’s willing to look like an idiot. And that’s priceless.

Do you think that the Left is too much on him, picking out every falsehood?

Yes! They completely fall for it. Too many people fall for it, but they should be going after the bigger concern that is the dead-serious conservative agenda that he pushes by dishonestly scaring the hell out of people, or trying to. I think there is an opportunity cost of going after every little thing that he, Sarah Palin or [Minnesota Congresswoman Michele] Bachmann says, and I think those costs add up. We could have been having really serious conversations, but instead we are picking apart every clown performance. I might be a weird messenger for that, but I was thinking about it constantly during the year of writing this book.

So what do you think of someone like Olbermann? Does he have his finger on the pulse?

He’s a little more shticky than other liberal hosts, but not by much. I don’t think there’s any competition with Beck in the clown category. Can you imagine if Olbermann came out and said that God had given him this message? Or that one book “held the key”? He’d be done. You can’t get away with that.

It’s also a book about media. You explore the “morning zoo” radio format, deregulation and consolidation of the industry.

That was an interesting subplot. Luckily, Tampa was a very important city for that transformation. Clear Channel came in and it was a great Petri dish to look at how Clear Channel transformed radio, especially AM radio. It’s really sad, because this town, Tampa, is just a mid-market city and, God, it had this fucking awesome radio. Totally unpredictable, people coming from all directions. It was funny, it was diverse, and now you turn it on and it’s like Walmart and McDonaldsonly you’ve put them on the radio: Levin, Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck. You just want to blow your brains out. And it was just sad to realize what was lost. The same thing happened to FM radio, where now it’s just the same five Led Zeppelin songs on every classic rock station. It’s all Clear Channel sending it out from one centralized play list.

Why do you think people call MSNBC talking head Keith Olbermann the Rush Limbaugh of the Left?

Olbermann is someone who’s a hard-charging liberal. He’s not afraid to serve up red meat and make very strong statements that confirm liberal bias, very powerfully. Olbermann might throw a Molotov cocktail every once in a while, but he doesn’t sit there with a flame-thrower. Again, no contest. The comparison is wildly unfair to Olbermann.

I feel like it’s not half as zany or silly, slap-your-forehead stuff like Hannity and Beck.

No matter how prejudiced a liberal may be there is no contest. There is no equivalent figure to Beck on the left. Can you imagine if Rachel Maddow held up Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States and said, “This is the Bible. You must buy this book immediately. It has everything you need to know”? She would be laughed at. She would be done. No one would take her seriously. Nobody on the Left says those things.

But why not? Wasn’t that why Air America went off the air: there wasn’t a lighting rod?

That’s a lot more complicated than people realize. There were a lot of bad business decisions made. The Left just didn’t get the purpose of radio. They thought it was about getting judges selected and not entertaining people.

What do you think is one of the biggest misconceptions of Beck?

The biggest mistake people make is trying to put him in one basket. He’s crazy. He’s a businessman. He’s an actor. He’s right-wing nutcase and a threat to the republic. It is very possible to be all of those things at once.

What do you think is the future of conservative media?

Well, I definitely don’t see it opening up. The trend is moving in Beck’s direction, closer and closer, into this kind of insular death spiral. The fact that they’re having this big debate over “epistemic closure” shows that the more sophisticated conservatives are not terribly pleased by it, because they know it’s a recipe for disaster, and they don’t feel like having a conversation limited to people who are in kindergarten, intellectually.

Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance, by Alexander Zaitchik. Wiley, 288 pages, $25.95.

For most of her seven-year career as a nanny, Anna has been fortunate to work for two families that have paid her a decent wage for roughly nine hours of work a day. Her duties usually include taking the children for a stroll or to play dates, cooking dinner in the evening and cleaning.

But even with good employers, Anna (in all cases, names of the nannies have been changed to protect their identity) has still been denied something as basic as proper time off. The first family that hired her, she explains, never provided paid sick days. Luckily for her, they weren’t needed. In fact, she was unaware that such perks were common until she interviewed for a position with a woman—a lawyer—who promised one a month. “There’s no right to complain,” she says.

While many domestic workers talk lovingly of the families that hired them, others grumble on playgrounds around the city about simple annoyances—like being barred from eating inside the boss’ home, or having to take the children outdoors every day. Still other grievances are more serious:The family goes on vacation and refuses to pay the nanny for time away, or the nannies are denied paid sick days. For people on a tight budget, this lost work adds up and can force them to look for consistent employment elsewhere.

Domestic workers are guaranteed the federal minimum wage, but there are no guide lines for working conditions and rights, and few avenues to complain. Given that most of the metropolitan area’s 200,000 domestic workers are undocumented immigrants, and with job opportunities becoming scarcer, few are willing to voice an objection. A coalition of domestic workers, labor unions and human rights organizations await the State Legislature to finally change the law this session.

Domestic Workers United, a group started in 2000, has been lobbying Albany for a bill to provide basic labor rights to these employees. Since the bill’s first introduction in 2004, the legislation got little traction. But last year’s Democratic takeover of the State Senate brightened prospects when Staten Island State Sen. Diane Savino, a former labor leader, became the main sponsor. Nevertheless, the coup this past June and month-long stalemate that ensued have shelved progress until the next session this September, at the earliest.

Patricia, a Caribbean immigrant who has been a nanny for just more than a decade, says she has been a victim of physical and verbal abuse, and was denied overtime pay and much-needed time off. And because every major labor law fails to cover domestic workers or splits hairs between those who live inside and outside the family’s home, it is near impossible to recoup money. That’s one reason she became involved with Domestic Workers United.

She sees great value in her job. “We make other work possible,” she says proudly, explaining that if she is late to work, so is her boss. She is currently unemployed and has worked for families in New Jersey and the Upper West Side.

Depending on which bill makes it to the governor’s desk—the meatier Senate version, the basic legislation proposed by the Assembly or a combination of the two—the law aims to drastically change working conditions for a majority of nannies in the city and surrounding suburbs.The state’s labor department and the attorney general would have enforcement power over these new laws, and could prosecute employers who stiff their nanny.

The bill legally defines a domestic worker as a person of legal age who cares for a child or elderly person in someone’s home, so as to not inadvertently cover babysitters and minors. Rights outlined in the legislation will likely include a guarantee of at least one day off a week, sick days, a yearly weeklong vacation, paid holidays and time and a half for overtime.

“We’re not asking for more than any other worker,” Patricia explains.

Actually, they are not asking for anything more than the rights already given to the small percentage of legally documented nannies who are placed through agencies (a Domestic Workers United study found that only 16 percent of those surveyed were placed through an agency). The New York Nanny Center, Inc., for example, screens both the families and the nannies and draws up an agreement between the two before the match is made.This agreement spells out the number of days the nanny will work with a maximum of five days a week, responsibilities, two weeks paid vacation and major holidays, plus any other conditions the nanny and family want to make.

“I think that in most licensed agencies, there is an expectation that there is a fair job description for the nanny,” said Carol Solomon, director of the New York Nanny Center, Inc. “Agencies are trying to establish what’s fair for everybody so nobody is taken advantage of in these situations.”

The change would be a significant one for non-agency nannies. Domestic Workers United released a survey that showed that the majority of nannies interviewed don’t get overtime pay, health insurance or contracts that outline their responsibilities.The survey is one of the few glimpses legislators in Albany have into this profession, because the government provides so few statistics.

“The workforce isn’t registered anywhere,” said Ai-Jen Poo, lead organizer for Domestic Workers United. “All this invisible labor…is not accounted for and makes it difficult for us to advocate for protection because it’s not even seen.”

Domestic Workers United, the lead group lobbying for the law, also plans to launch an education campaign with help from the state’s justice department.

“We have to do creative outreach.We have to work with churches and synagogues,” Poo said. “The industry is very decentralized.”

Perhaps it is unfathomable for famously liberal Manhattanites to deny supporting paid time off and overtime for their nannies. There are many that do so already.While the new law would hit families in the wallet at a time when they may be evaluating if they can afford such help at all, the benefit would be clear rules on paying and treating nannies, decreasing reliance on parent blogs, forums and neighbors for second-hand, unverifiable advice. Online communities are rife with questions about paying a nanny on the books, when to give raises and compensating nannies who accompany the family on a vacation.

“There are people—Mr. and Mrs. Smith who hire a housekeeper and nanny—who feel the work they do is so vital to their family and that they deserve basic protection under the law,” Poo said. “People won’t have to go to friends or chat rooms to find out what is fair.”