Different things make different kinds of people tick. No better example can be provided than by the personality contrast between Manny Nneji and Mike Kavanagh, the competitors in the November 7election for Ulster County’s next district attorney.
Both men have served as the county’s chief assistant district attorney. Both are proud fathers, Nneji of two boys and Kavanagh of two girls. Their electoral platforms have more in common than not, though they differ in emphasis. Neither contender had serious trouble securing their major-party nominations. And they are both involved with coaching and teaching young people.
Both are highly qualified. But only one of them will be elected Ulster County district attorney on November 7.
They’re very different people.
In 1950, sociologist David Riesman wrote a best-selling book, “The Lonely Crowd,” that drew a contrast between what he termed inner-directed and other-directed people.
Each ideal type had different advantages and faced different problems.
Inner-directed people, he wrote, tended to be more rigid and confident. They embodied certain Protestant-ethic values and were motivated by individual aspiration and ambitions.
The other-directed personality type aspired to be loved rather than esteemed. They wanted to feel in harmony with the opinions around them.
We tend to like the people we admire, and to admire the people we like.
Nneji is a classic inner-directed person. Kavanagh is clearly an outer-directed one.
In a political popularity contest, will Ulster County voters choose a district attorney they really respect, the inner-directed person, or one whom they really like, the outer-directed person?
Inner-directed people don’t necessarily lack people skills any more than outer-directed ones lack non-people skills. Both styles of persons make for effective leaders, setting examples for their peers. Manny Nneji, a perfectionist and an achiever, has earned admiration through his single-minded case preparation and presentation. Mike Kavanagh, a compassionate and likable realist, has won support for his balanced and humane outlook.
New York State’s district attorneys are the chief law-enforcement officers of the counties in which they serve. They prosecute all crimes and offenses. Adds the DA’s office on the Ulster County governmental website, “We evaluate each case on its merits to ensure that justice is administered fully and without bias or favoritism.”
The disclosure laws
At the beginning of 2020, New York State put into effect a new statute requiring the sharing of evidence between the prosecution and defense on an accelerated timeline. Facilitating the ability of defendants to prepare a defense, discovery reform protected constitutional rights. The U.S. Constitution requires the prosecution to disclose to the defendant all evidence that proves guilt as well as all evidence that proves innocence. Documentary evidence of all kinds needs to be shared with defense lawyers.
Such a major sea change in the legal system has dominated their lives of DAs across the state for the past four years. At first an unfunded mandate, the changes in required New York practice gave prosecutors major headaches.
The pressure was on at a time when the pandemic made life difficult enough for the legal system. The scales of justice wobbled just a bit.
DAs had to hire considerable additional staff — Ulster County’s discovery team consists of seven people.
There was a learning curve. Some cases became virtually unprosecutable. Others — including some as serious as murder — were settled by admission of guilt to a lesser offense.
As might be expected, bottlenecks in the discovery process were common. Of particular concern were the rules of evidence for laboratory reports. Backed up from vastly increased workloads, labs struggled to keep up. Lab delay caused many a case to be plea-bargained down from felonies to misdemeanors.
The state now funds counties for the additional costs required by the new discovery law. This year, the Ulster County discovery unit received a state grant of $750,000 for its additional expenses in 2022.
Politics and personality
Two weeks ago, reporter Jesse Smith of Kingston Wire wrote an article addressing “what had been an open secret in political circles for months.” Manny Nneji has had big personal financial problems. These problems involved a divorce, family debt, bankruptcy and a home foreclosure. Nneji also took a substantial pay cut to come back to Ulster County from Albany in 2016.
The way politics works, Nneji’s opponents may well have saved a few juicy details to reveal the week before the November 7 election.
The inner-directed Democratic candidate heatedly bristled at the thought introduced by Kavanagh at the chamber of commerce debate in Kingston last week that Nneji’s personal problems might negatively affect his handling of the district attorney’s office budget. True to his personality, however, he declined to respond directly. A response would have distracted him from his work.
Kavanagh had told Smith he did think that personal financial issues were fair game. The DA’s annual budget of six million dollars required prudent management.
“I think it’s very relevant that the candidate seeking the position has filed for personal bankruptcy recently,” Kavanagh had told Smith. “He thought it was significant enough to disclose [to the county Democratic Committee], and I happen to agree.”
Nneji bristled at the inference that his personal financial problems, a large part of which he attributed to his spending on his ill insurance-less younger brother in Nigeria, whom he said spent many months in a coma before he died.
The shadow of the past
Mike Kavanagh hasn’t seemed eager personally to pile up on Manny Nneji, a Nigerian immigrant who worked his way up from humble roots, distinguished himself in school, and was hired as an assistant DA by Kavanagh’s father, the five-time-elected county district attorney.
In a previous interview, Nneji had said he appreciated the work ethic of Kavanagh senior’s office, recalling that its personnel came in early and worked late. He shared that kind of dedication. If the senior Kavanagh were running for district attorney now, Nneji had said, he himself would not be.
Kavanagh’s face didn’t change. There was a pause. He thought carefully before responding.
Since Nneji had said that, Kavanagh finally answered, he himself had two points he wanted to make.
The first was that the county police chiefs’ association had interviewed both candidates separately and, though they liked Nneji, they had decided unanimously to back Kavanagh. Why? Because the DA’s office hadn’t contacted the local police who had initiated arrests when they were preparing cases for trial, said Kavanagh.
Nneji heatedly denied that lack of contact. Immediately upon being named first assistant DA in 2021, he had reinstated the practice previously practiced of gathering all the prosecutorial forces for a thorough case discussion prior to trial. Though a small number of police chiefs might prefer Kavanagh to him, he said, he was convinced he had the support an appreciation for his work of most police officers.
The second point involved the changed state disclosure laws. Though Kavanagh realized Nneji’s difficult position, he felt some of the more serious charges shouldn’t have been plea-bargained down to lesser charges. Nneji countered that Clegg had found no records of ongoing investigations when he took office, and that Ulster County had a better record than most counties in adapting to the new laws despite the legacy of problems with which it had been left during the change of administrations.
“Ulster County is good at discovery,” claimed Nneji. “The record proves it.”
As the chamber breakfast underlined, the legacy of Holley Carnright, also chosen as assistant DA by Kavanagh’s father 35 years ago, assistant DA for 20 years, and then DA from 2008 through 2019, is one of the defining issues of this year’s election. Kavanagh thinks Carnright, who has been extremely critical of the Clegg team, was a much more effective DA than his successor, Clegg, has been. Nneji has termed the Carnright era “an incompetent administration” characterized by unequal justice and a lack of transparency.
A tough row to hoe
This year’s DA race is taking place within a dynamic political context caused in part by population movement during the pandemic and by an increase in the number of young voters. Democratic and Working Families Party registrations in Ulster County jumped over the previous DA election year by more than 6000 to 53,656 this February. Meanwhile, Republican and Conservative registrations decreased by seven to 30,952 in the same four-year period. Registrants who didn’t enroll in any party numbered 35,889 this February.
Those numbers make it tough for a Republican to win a 2023 countywide election, especially because newcomers to an area tend to vote straight-party-line more frequently than do longer-time residents.
Mike Kavanagh, himself not enrolled in any party, is running as a Republican, Conservative and Libertarian. Due to a state elections rule preventing a candidate’s appearance on more than two lines, Kavanagh’s Libertarian designation appears in tiny letters in the boxes of the Republican and Conservative lines.
Manny Nneji has the Democratic and Working Families lines.
If every registered person in Ulster County voted for their party’s nominee (they won’t, of course), the Republican-Conservative standard-bearer would have to take 82 percent of the vote of those not enrolled in any party to win.
For the smaller major party, that’s a tall but not impossible order, as Mike Kavanagh, who knows the numbers, is well aware.
There were a few surprises back in the 2019 election. Though the odds seemed stacked heavily against him four years ago, Kavanagh came within a whisker of defeating the present incumbent DA, Dave Clegg. In that race, Clegg received 26,333 votes to Kavanagh’s 26,255.
Clegg ran on the Democratic (22,975 votes), Working Families (2949), and Libertarian (409) tickets. Kavanagh was on the Republican (20,433), Conservative (3553), and Independence (2269) lines.
In that election, the core of Kavanagh pluralities came only from the towns in the southern part of the county, and he made substantial inroads among the riverside municipalities from Esopus north to Saugerties — his normally Democratic-leaning home town which he carried by more than 300 votes. Meanwhile, Dave Clegg received sufficiently strong pluralities in the other Democratic strongholds to eke out his very narrow victory.
Through the past four pandemic and post-pandemic years, new Democratic enrollment has exceeded new Republican enrollment by at least 160 enrollees in every single municipality in Ulster County with over 1000 population except Wawarsing, Shawangunk and Plattekill.
The demise of the Independence Party as a third force and the support of the Libertarians may help Kavanagh to some degree on November 7. The presence of unopposed Democrat Jen Metzger for election as county executive could help Nneji to some degree.
A partisan divide
As the chamber breakfast underlined, the legacy of Holley Carnright, also chosen as assistant DA by Kavanagh’s father 35 years ago, assistant DA for 20 years, and then DA from 2008 through 2019, is one of the defining issues of this year’s election. Kavanagh thinks Carnright, who has been extremely critical of the Clegg team, was a much more effective DA than his successor, Clegg, has been. Nneji has termed Carnright’s “an incompetent administration.”
Kavanagh has insisted that the district attorney’s office is non-partisan. Perhaps the office is, but those who work for it have in recent years been anything but.
A delay in the evolving relationship of the community and its law-enforcement apparatus may have been the most unfortunate — hopefully temporary — casualty of the changed state discovery laws.
Ulster County has been in the midst of a transformation to a more collaborative relationship between law enforcement and the community. The central tenet of community policing is that the police are no longer the sole guardians of law and order. All members of the community are encouraged to participate in the effort to enhance community. According to experts in the field, creating a constructive partnership requires the energy, creativity, understanding and patience of all involved.
According to the county government’s website, the duties of the Ulster County DA’s office include but are not limited to: prosecutor, community educator, victims advocate, aid in improving criminal-justice legislation, advisor to police agencies, and investigator.
The mission of the office is to provide equal justice while focusing on those crimes and individuals that threaten the safety of the people of Ulster County. It is committed “to building resilient partnerships with community organizations, recognizing that a united and cohesive effort to prevent crime and heal harm allows us to achieve the highest level of public safety for our community.”
A matter of commitment
Inner-directed people and outer-directed people march to different drummers. There’s an extensive literature on the differences between their behaviors.
“Inner-directed negative emotions like guilt, embarrassment, and shame often motivate people to act ethically,” explained Colin Campbell, a writer on psychology. “Outer-directed negative emotions, on the other hand, aim to discipline or punish. For example, people often direct anger, disgust, or contempt at those who have acted unethically.”
Gideon Lewis-Kraus provided his interpretation in an article in The New Yorker a decade ago. He wrote:
“The inner-directed character is concerned not with ‘what one does’ but with ‘what people like us do.’ Which is to say that she looks to her own internalizations of past authorities to get a sense for how to conduct her affairs. On [the other] end of the spectrum is a ‘tradition-directed’ community, where we all understand that what we’re supposed to do is what we’re supposed to do because it’s just the thing that one does …. and there’s neither the room nor the desire for autonomous action.”
Neither candidate for district attorney of Ulster County on November 7 would acknowledge this pejorative description as their behavior — and it isn’t accurate. But the definition of the two ideal types does provide greater understanding of the gulf between the candidates.
The word “committed” has two radically differing meanings, according to the dictionaries. Merriam-Webster’s first meaning is negative: “Placed in confinement, as in a mental institution.” Its second meaning is usually positive: “Having made a pledge or commitment to someone or something.”
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