It’s been a rough few months for Republicans on Staten Island. In May, Vito J. Fossella, a five-term Republican congressman, announced that he would not seek reëlection, after a drunk-driving arrest unearthed evidence that he had a secret family. The Party, struggling to find a replacement for Fossella, settled on Frank Powers, a retired Wall Street executive with no political experience. As of two weeks ago, the Republicans, who have dominated Staten Island politics for decades, remained optimistic that their formidable machine could hold on to Fossella’s seat, but first they faced the job of helping the public learn the name Frank Powers. At which point, Fran Powers, a forty-seven-year-old carpenter and punk rocker, decided to enter the race.
Fran Powers is the oldest of Frank Powers’s five children from his first marriage, which ended in divorce thirty years ago. (Powers, Sr., has since remarried, and has two more children.) As Fran Powers explained last week at Duffy’s, a firemen’s bar in West Brighton, he had been thinking of running for political office for years, but couldn’t figure out how to get started. “I’m a guy, like, if I walk down the street I sound like ‘The end is nigh!’ ” he said. “Nobody’s going to listen to me.” After hearing that his father had been nominated—the drummer from his band, Box of Crayons, called from the bus to tell him the news—he recalled, “I made some jokes with my wife, like ‘What if two guys with the same name were running in the same race?’ ”
That afternoon, Powers said, “I called some friends in the Libertarian Party, and they said, ‘Sure, go ahead.’ They hadn’t picked a candidate yet.” He went on, “I like the Libertarians. I like their basic tenets. I love the Declaration of Independence. It’s on the inside of our record.” He held up a CD titled “As American As . . . ,” featuring songs like “Backyard Camelot” and “Fireworks & Beer.”
Powers looks like one of the good guys in “Braveheart,” a brawny warrior with terrifying hair. Growing up in Brooklyn and Long Island—the family moved to Staten Island in 1987—he often clashed with his father. “My dad was pissed because I got an earring,” he recalled. “And in my gay ear!” Powers played with various hardcore bands (Ultraviolence, Modern Clix) in the eighties; today he supports himself, he said, “fixing up rich people’s apartments.”
At Duffy’s, Powers drank lightly from a pitcher of sangria. The week before, his father had issued a statement to the Times saying that his son had, for many years, “rejected everyone’s help to live a healthy life style.” (Fran replied that he was “flabbergasted,” and that the statement “sounds like a Republican campaign tactic.”)
“I don’t want to talk about my dad—I mean, Frank Powers,” Powers said. “I want to talk Staten Island politics.”
Since announcing his candidacy, Powers has struck a fiery tone suggesting less a party line, or even a reformist line, than an everyman’s annoyance with government in general. He says he wants to abolish tolls on the Verrazano Bridge for city residents, increase the number of hospitals on the island, and improve public transportation. “I don’t want to rag on Staten Island, but we’ve got too much development here, crap development there, mismanagement all over the place,” he said. He was pleased by the government’s role in redeveloping the fishing pier down on Midland Beach: “I love that place. They’ve got cleaning stations and everything. And, you know, the people there eat the fish. I’ve seen it myself.”
Powers pronounced himself inspired mostly by music—the Pistols, the Stooges, dub reggae—and that brought up the subject of his mullet hair style, which some observers have deemed less befitting a politician than a seventies keyboardist. (“Someone tell Flock of Seagulls I found their hair,” one commenter wrote on the Web site of the Staten Island Advance.) “Everyone hated me for my look when I moved here, twenty years ago,” Powers said. “Punk rock is about being original. The kids here dress rap style. That’s ten years old, man. Do something new!”
Last Monday, Powers put his bid before the annual Libertarian nominating convention, and lost to Susan Overeem, a former receptionist at WABC radio. Reached on the phone the next day, he was disappointed but reflective. “I have to be more personal, I have to be more myself,” he said. “The Libertarians just want to talk dogma. That was my undoing.” But he had no intention of dropping out of the race. He was planning, he said, to start a new party, called the Free Party, “as in, the free party—get it?” ♦