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A Gay US Senator to Replace Clinton?
By: PAUL SCHINDLER
12/30/2008




Daniel O'Donnell: another Irishman for the seat once held by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Robert Francis Kennedy?


In the competition for appointment to New York's all-but-certain US Senate vacancy, the candidates most frequently discussed publicly are the daughter of a president and the son of a governor.

To be sure, Daniel O'Donnell, the out gay Democratic assemblyman from the Upper West Side since 2003, has, in sister Rosie, one heck of a famous relative, but he cannot boast in any conventional sense the gilded political lineage of a Caroline Kennedy or an Andrew Cuomo, the New York attorney general.

Still, on December 29, O'Donnell met privately with Democratic Governor David Paterson to discuss the position that will open up when Senator Hillary Clinton resigns her seat upon confirmation as President-elect Barack Obama's secretary of state. The governor has the sole authority to appoint Clinton's successor, who would hold office through the November 2010 election, at which time it will be up to voters to decide who will serve the final two years of the six-year term.


Beyond Clinton and Cuomo, speculation as to whom Paterson might favor has focused on Democrats in the state's US House delegation as well as the Democratic mayor of Buffalo, Byron Brown. As a state legislator representing a portion of Manhattan's Upper West Side, O'Donnell can fairly be characterized as someone with a considerably lower profile than the other names mentioned.

Still, it is worth remembering that until January 2005, the president-elect's highest political office was representing a State Senate district encompassing a portion of Chicago's South Side.

In a December 30 interview with Gay City News, O'Donnell, who in 2007 successfully steered the marriage equality bill -- not yet taken up by the State Senate -- through the Assembly, said that the initiative for the meeting came from Paterson, but that he first heard the idea floated more than a month earlier by his Assembly predecessor, Ed Sullivan. Shortly after pundits began speculating that Clinton would be nominated for secretary of state, O'Donnell said, Sullivan told his successor that he ought to be considered if the vacancy opened up and asked O'Donnell if he minded him adding his name to conversations going on between Paterson and leading Democrats statewide.

On November 21, a story on foxnews.com quoted Sharyn O'Halloran, a political science professor at Columbia University, as mentioning several possibilities for the appointment -- including Independent Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Harlem Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel, out lesbian City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, also a Democrat, and O'Donnell.

From O'Donnell's telling, it does not appear he gave much credence to that speculation. As recently as two weeks ago when he was chatting with Paterson about his search for an appointee, O'Donnell said he took that occasion to laud the governor for giving consideration to Randi Weingarten, the longtime city teachers' union president who is openly lesbian. The assemblyman said he emphasized to Paterson the importance of having openly gay and lesbian officials at all levels of government.

The call from Paterson's office came on Christmas Eve, asking O'Donnell if he were willing to sit down with the governor to discuss the appointment. Explaining that as a longtime Democratic activist and community board member in Morningside Heights, which Paterson represented in the State Senate, he has known the governor for many years, O'Donnell described the exchange between the two men as more "conversational" than a typical job interview might otherwise be.

Still, O'Donnell said, he highlighted aspects of his professional and personal résumé that might not be widely known -- that he grew up on Long Island, where many from his large family still live; that he worked as a Legal Aid lawyer in Brooklyn; that his longtime partner grew up in upstate New York; and that the couple owns a weekend farmhouse, "not a home on Martha's Vineyard."

Should O'Donnell beat out his better-known competitors, he would be the first openly gay US senator. But he is making no predictions on what the governor will do, except that he will wait until he has to act -- after Clinton is confirmed and makes it formal that she is leaving the Senate, which will come no sooner than Inauguration Day, and perhaps weeks later.

"He'd be crazy to do anything other than that," O'Donnell said.


©GayCityNews 2009