Dan Senor: In or Out?

By Gal Beckerman March 24, 2010

I’ve been finishing up work on a profile for this week’s paper on Dan Senor, who is reportedly getting ready to run for a U.S. Senate seat from New York. Multiple sources have been reporting that the former Bush administration appointee is set to throw his hat in the ring against Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the Democratic incumbent appointed to her seat last year by Governor David Paterson. Yesterday even brought news that the Republican Party was trying to convince him to take on Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, the big dog of New York politics, whose seat is also up in November.

My reporting for the most part bore this out. A number of Republican consultants told me he had been in touch with them. There was no doubt in my mind that Senor was going to announce—and according to some reports, before the week was out.

But then, last night I got a call.

A highly regarded Republican consultant with deep connections in the inner circles of the party’s New York establishment told me that Senor was definitively out.

The source cited an individual who had initially said he could not work with the source on a rival Senate campaign because of his close connection to Senor. That person, my source told me, was now free to work for the rival effort because Senor was no longer in the running.

First Mort Zuckerman and now Dan Senor? Where do we look next for the great Jewish hope?

Gal Beckerman was a staff writer and then the Forward’s opinion editor until 2014. He was previously an assistant editor at the Columbia Journalism Review where he wrote essays and media criticism. His book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review and Bookforum. His first book, “When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry,” won the 2010 National Jewish Book Award and the 2012 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, as well as being named a best book of the year by The New Yorker and The Washington Post. Follow Gal on Twitter at @galbeckerman

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