A Do Nothing Politician

Colin Campbell at Politicker has a long inside-baseball piece on the race for District Leader in 50th AD. A good piece, and well worth a read.

The race itself pits incumbent Lincoln Restler against Community Board 1 chair Chris Olechowski. I know both well, and both are genuinely good people. But this bit jumped out at me:

[Olechowski] declined to overly criticize the incumbent [Restler], simply saying he hasn’t heard much from Mr. Restler during his short tenure in office… “I don’t know what Lincoln has really done,” he opined.

Seriously? Campbell is right, “[the] irony, of course, is that despite all [of Restler’s] talk of accomplishment, district leaders aren’t really supposed to be doing things”. But Lincoln has taken a genuinely do-nothing job and used it as a bully pulpit for a lot of effective advocacy (and a lot of bashing of the Kings County political leadership). Chris, of course, does know what Lincoln has done, and he has heard a lot from Lincoln – Lincoln is at every event Chris attends and many, many more.