Don't mess with Lautenberg: 84-year-old Senator is ready for fist fight with labor leader
By Wally EdgeFrank Lautenberg may be 84-years-old, but he's still a Paterson boy who's not afraid of a brawl. And when a labor leader unhappy with his position on immigration reform balked at including the Democratic U.S. Senator's campaign literature in a New Jersey AFL-CIO GOTV program, Lautenberg had to be restrained from a physical altercation.
According to labor sources familiar with the incident, Don Capasso, the Assistant Business Manager of Plumbers Local 14 United Association of New Jersey walked his members out of the Boilermakers Local 27 hall in Bayonne just prior to Lautenberg's arrival there.
After Lautenberg gave his pro-union stump speech to around 100 union members, he tried to engage a reportedly agitated Capasso in a discussion outside the union hall. The debate became heated when Capasso accused Lautenberg of taking work away from his union members, and Lautenberg responding that he fought in World War II to protect the rights that union members now enjoy. Both parties dropped a few expletives - nothing out of the ordinary for a political event in Bayonne. At one point, Steve Lenox, Lautenberg's state director (and a former AFL-CIO staffer) needed to get between the octogenarian Senator and the union leader to make sure the argument did not escalate into a fist fight in front of about a dozen union members captivated by the debate.
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"Please. I wouldn't have enough paper. So let’s not even bother writing one. This is now about governing. I won. The one thing I could never understand about people in politics was winners who are sore winners." -- Gov.-elect Christopher Christie, on putting together an enemis list.
“He’s a nice man with good intentions, but in the end he’ll be remembered for timidity. Being a business titan and issuing orders from the corner office is a lot different than having to cajole and persuade people in politics and having the toughness and fortitude to see your vision become reality.”-- Ross K. Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University, on Gov. Jon Corzine.
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