Since the “30 Rock” episode aired in 2012, the “fellow kids” line has become a catchphrase tossed out when someone pretends to be part of a community that they are clearly unfamiliar with — someone they, patently, are not. East Hampton Village Mayor Jerry Larsen’s square-peg-in-a-round-hole bid to position himself as a Democrat fits the scene perfectly. He’s Buscemi.
The question is whether East Hampton Democratic Primary voters, who need to choose a candidate for supervisor, will be as skeptical as the “30 Rock” teenagers.
One can agree or disagree with Mr. Larsen over policy, but one thing that should matter in our town’s highest elected office is integrity. To be clear, Mr. Larsen isn’t running as an independent. He isn’t saying political parties don’t matter. He has — quite skillfully — harnessed voters’ understandable dissatisfaction with Town Hall to initiate a self-serving raid on the Democratic Party.
Politicians may fudge or pad their résumés from time to time but to wholly pretend to represent long-established Democratic policies and values they have never genuinely espoused is another thing altogether. Note that during the primary candidates’ debate, when Mr. Larsen was asked to articulate the local Democratic Party’s principles, he awkwardly struggled to name a single one beyond “environmental protection.”
This long and strange campaign has been conducted very aggressively by the Larsen team not as an opportunity to honestly represent who he is and what he actually believes but as a zero-sum game — victory by any means necessary. Among Mr. Larsen’s early moves in his quest for the nomination was encouraging his fans to change their party registration to Democratic to be able to vote for him in the primary. And, in an almost comical act of Buscemi-ism, Mr. Larsen’s campaign website and postal fliers have pictured him alongside major Democratic figures, including Presidents Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, taken during his time on the village police force — even though he celebrated Donald Trump’s 2016 election and ran for East Hampton Town Board the following year on the Republican ticket.
In a similar vein, while we applaud the energy that Mr. Larsen’s hand-picked candidates for the Democratic Committee have brought to the primary and are glad to see more residents involved in the process, we have fielded multiple reports from readers who say that some of them, while out collecting petition signatures, have neglected to indicate they are part of the Larsen team, leaving signers feeling hoodwinked.
We understand the challenge faced by current and former Republicans in East Hampton Town. Not all that long ago, the Grand Old Party enjoyed at least parity with Democrats in our elections; its registration numbers have now slipped to the point where the local Republicans can scarcely field viable candidates. For Mr. Larsen, a man of ambition, this means his long-sought path to higher office must take a detour through a Democratic charade.
It is a shame that we don’t have a true “team of rivals” on the Town Board, to borrow the phrase about Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, standing on principle for contrary views and pushing back against group-think. But all the pictures in the world of Mr. Larsen shaking Joe Biden’s hand, when he publicly celebrated Donald Trump’s election, don’t make him a Democrat. That he is willing to seek office on a falsehood should be all East Hampton voters need to know about him.