{news} Joyce Chen in New Haven Advocate

[David Bedell]

http://newhavenadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:83670

When Progs Collide
Joyce Chen and Toni Walker butt heads in the 93rd District.

by Carole Bass - September 30, 2004

When you hear that New Haven Alderwoman Joyce Chen is challenging state Rep. 
Toni Walker, one question leaps to mind: Why?

Not "why" as in, why run an underfinanced, late-starting--Chen announced in 
August--race against a popular incumbent? There are plenty of reasons to do 
that: raising issues, raising one's profile, forcing an incumbent to get out 
and talk to constituents.

The "why" here is simpler: Why take on Walker?

Toni Edmonds Walker is a liberal Democrat, probably one of the most 
progressive legislators at the Capitol. She fights for health care for poor 
kids and old folks. She wants higher taxes for millionaires and 
corporations. She urged fellow Dems to take control of the legislative 
agenda away from corruption-soaked Republican Gov. John Rowland. She 
sponsored clean-air legislation and a bill to strip Yale University's "super 
exemption" from local property taxes.

And that was all just in the last session.

Chen is New Haven's lone elected Green Party politician. That progressive 
organization stands for taxing the rich, cleaning the air, providing health 
care to poor people, rooting out corruption, making Yale pay its fair share.

So why is Chen trying to knock Walker out of the 93rd District seat?

"A lot of the idea came from my own Ward 2 constituents," Chen says. "People 
feel Walker is not accessible."

In a way, the campaign is a classic insider vs. outsider contest. Walker, 
the incumbent, is middle-aged and middle-class, the polished daughter of a 
prominent politico, and she lives in the comfortable Beaver Hills 
neighborhood. Chen, a radical young Yale graduate, grew up in Harlem and 
recently bought a house on Kensington Street, which is synonymous with drugs 
and violence.

"This campaign is about two very different types of candidates," Chen 
asserts. "One opens up her home, has little kids running around at all 
hours, lets young people drive her car to learn how to drive, is always out 
on the streets."

That would be Chen, according to Chen.

"I cut down my work hours" to 20 a week to spend more time helping 
constituents, she says. If elected to the House, with its part-time 
legislative salary, she could afford to cut back even further, she says.

The Green candidate does mention some issues: state money to fix up rundown 
houses; universal health care; instant runoff voting, an electoral system 
that, she says, "gives voters more voice." (Chen doesn't mention her 
unfortunate history of opposing pro-gay legislation.) But her main talking 
point is that people in the district--a long, narrow slice of New Haven that 
starts in the upper Hill neighborhood and stretches northwest out to West 
Rock--don't see or hear from Walker.

"I've never gotten a phone call from her. She's never reached out to me," 
Chen complains. "A lot of people don't know what's going on in Hartford."

Walker sure sounds like a political insider when she talks about Chen's 
campaign. She calls the challenge "unfortunate." (Whatever happened to 
competition?) "Being a very active member and a part of the core group of 
the Democratic Party in Hartford," she says, "I can represent the community. 
Being a member of the Green Party or an independent, you don't have the 
support of the Democratic Party."

And Walker dismisses the charge that she's remote by saying, essentially, 
that she's supposed to be.

"The way that government works--I have to be in contact with the aldermen" 
and can't "supercede" them by going into neighborhoods, she says. "My job is 
to be in Hartford advocating. It's not necessarily being in every community 
meeting; that's what the aldermen are supposed to do."

Get her going on what she wants to accomplish, though, and Walker sounds 
like a progressive's dream.

She wants to reform the juvenile justice system--site of tragedies ranging 
from teen suicide to staff beatings--so that kids, especially poor kids, 
don't keep getting "bounced" around.

She wants to restore the health coverage for poor people that got cut last 
session.

She wants to eliminate corporate welfare and move away from Connecticut's 
heavy reliance on property taxes for funding schools.

And without realizing it, Walker demonstrates why having to actually run for 
re-election is good for her--and her constituents.

"It was a slow startup, because I didn't realize I had to go out and 
campaign," she says. "Now that people heard I'm being challenged, I got 
calls from all over the state from people saying they would like to help. 
All the hard work I have been doing, people have actually noticed."

And she's actually started to visit people in her district. Now that's 
democracy--with a small "d."

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