Hynes Has Ticket to Run But Not on High Horse

After the hecklers chanting “Hynes must go!” had yielded to his appeal to “listen to what I have to say,” Brooklyn District Attorney Joe Hynes told the crowd gathered outside Borough Hall Oct. 8 that he had changed his mind about going quietly into that good night after losing the Democratic primary four weeks earlier for two reasons: not enough voters had rejected him, and the specter of Clarence Norman.

Only 18 percent of the borough’s registered Democrats had cast their ballots Sept. 10, the six-term DA said, and so while Kenneth Thompson had gotten 55 percent of their votes, that meant that just slightly more than nine percent of those eligible had made the choice to cast him off. The corollary to that, of course, was less than nine percent of those registered with the party with which he has been affiliated for his entire adult life wanted him to stick around for another four years, but that particular math wasn’t useful to the case the DA was presenting in this makeshift court of public opinion.