Wednesday, January 30, 2008

A Lady From Queens Is Running For Huckabee

Yes we are indeed everywhere :) Nice story from the New York Times. There is a pic of her at the link. Looking at her I bet she could put a whooping down on her fellow New Yorker Katheryn "Huckabee is a Christian Socialist" Lopez if they met up at tone of those National Review cocktail party events. Ahh I would pay to see that. :)

In a relatively liberal bastion of western Queens, Alice Lemos said that she has found it hard to find like-minded, socially conservative New Yorkers. And to find kindred Republican spirits, she explained, she must sometimes travel outside of her neighborhood of Woodside, Queens, to other parts of the city.

“The area where I live in Queens is the City Council district represented by Eric Gioia,” Ms. Lemos said. “And he is a pretty liberal Democrat and a lot of the people here are, too. I have conservative friends that I visit on the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I go to Republican club meetings around the city. As conservatives, we’re spread out around the city. But we’re here. We do exist.”

Ms. Lemos is running to be a delegate for Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who is running for the Republican nomination for president. Mr. Huckabee has courted conservative Christian voters and is seen as having appeal in areas far less urban than western Queens.

But Ms. Lemos said that Mr. Huckabee’s message appealed to her, a Jewish, lifelong New Yorker, because of its uncompromising conservative bent. In particular, she said, Mr. Huckabee’s views on abortion appealed to her.
“I’m pro-life and I’m socially conservative,” said Ms. Lemos, a 53-year-old legal secretary at a firm in Manhattan and a frequent contributor to a Web site called
“Jews for Life.”

“The fact of the matter is that I don’t like establishment Republicans in New York — I don’t like the track record of Joe Bruno or George Pataki,” she said, referring to the State Senate majority leader and the former governor. “Also, I think Rudy Giuliani did nothing to really build up the party at the grass-roots level. I believe in grass-roots politics.”

Although she was born in Trenton, her parents left New Jersey when she was 1 and moved to Brooklyn, to East Flatbush and later to Flatlands. She graduated from Brooklyn College and earned a Ph.D. in Spanish from Brown University.

“I was always interested in politics,” she said, explaining that she became a frequent writer of letters to the editors in local community papers. “I became interest in the right-to-life movement in the late 1990s. And I wanted to make sure that my point of view was reflected in the local papers.”

By 2000, she had become involved in local politics to a point where she ran unsuccessfully for an Assembly seat in Queens, opposing Assemblywoman
Catherine T. Nolan, a Democrat.

She said she might run for office again, perhaps for the Council seat now held by
Mr. Gioia. (He is running for public advocate in 2009.)
But in the meantime, she plans to work for Mr. Huckabee in advance of next week’s primary.


“He reminds me a lot of Ronald Reagan,” Ms. Lemos said. “He is positive and upbeat and comes from a humble background. I hope that I can help others get to know him
.”

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