As Aswini wrote this morning, Rep. Peter King's hearings on radicalization are a jarring contrast to the images that have flooded in over the past few weeks of peaceful, democracy-seeking Muslim communities around the world. But King doesn't seem to care, and I think it's because he believes his constituents don't care.
A few weeks back, Capital New York (to which I contribute) published this long story by Steve Kornacki on King's rise to power. It's a fun piece, full of local political intrigue, and it shows how King has long been caught up in the hustle of making his constituents happy, whatever the political trends in Washington. To maintain his seat during Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution, for instance, King had to chart his own path:
He didn't share his Republican colleagues' blind devotion to free markets; how many times as comptroller had King defended the county's high taxes as essential to providing quality services? His was more a conservatism of the gut: reverence for the flag, the church, the military, and the cops, and deep suspicion of anyone who would criticize anything about any of them. He was as opposed to abortion, flag-burning and affirmative action as any Republican. But a government program that would help the church-going family down the street—well, that was a different story…. And when Gingrich and Armey ratcheted up their rhetoric against unions, a favorite conservative punching bag, King fought back. Union support had been at the heart of the Nassau G.O.P.'s success, and King prided himself on his kinship with working-class voters.
At the same time, King was still a conservative, after his own fashion….King also waged a one-man crusade against Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam, claiming they were profiting from federal housing contracts. This was the Peter King that the cops and firefighters in the 3rd District knew and liked.
At the end of the piece, the local Republican machine that launched King into office in the first place sputters and dies, but King is still standing strong. That sort of experience is enough to make any politician trust his own instincts over the media's nagging or the Muslim community's complaints, however legitimate.
