Knobel: ‘Asking for More’
With a handshake and a “Hello,” Tom Knobel, the Republican candidate for East Hampton Town supervisor, introduced himself to a few dozen folks on Tuesday morning at One Stop Market in East Hampton. His hope was to put a face to the name for those who had heard his radio advertisements on the air locally, and to get his name out to those who had not.
“I’m a walking billboard,” he joked to a reporter who joined him at about 7:30 a.m., in the thick of the morning rush hour at the mom-and-pop market.
Mr. Knobel, who began his career as a commercial fisherman on the East End in 1976 and now works for the Suffolk County Board of Elections, has done this before. He served one term on the town board before running unsuccessfully for supervisor in 1997, and also served four terms as a town trustee, not to overlook leading the local Republican Party on and off for many years. So he knows the rules of campaigning, like the one that says you should not try to hand a piece of campaign literature to someone whose hands are already full. Over the months since he earned the Republican nomination in May, he has heard his share of questions, compliments, and tirades.
“There will be days that are better than others, and sometimes people aren’t going to like what you say,” Mr. Knobel said. “You can’t take that to heart. . . . You can’t just back down and retreat, you have to keep pushing forward and asking for more.”
To that extent, Mr. Knobel said that if elected, he will keep pushing for “fair, effective, and open government that actually gets things done.” He will push for better code enforcement and stress policies that support job creation and affordable housing opportunities.
“Nobody has questioned my ability to do this,” he said. “I’ve kept it strictly to my priorities.”
Asked what those priorities are, Mr. Knobel simply said, “No one issue stands out by itself because they all affect each other.”
Unlike Mr. Knobel, his running mates in the town races, Margaret Turner and Lisa Mulhern-Larsen, are first-time candidates. “I have experience and name recognition, and it helps to balance the new faces who are coming in,” he said. “They’re bringing fresh insights that, frankly, the other people don’t have. They listen to me describe the mechanisms of campaigns and so forth, and it certainly helps me to hear things from their angle.”
As he handed out fliers promoting not only his campaign but also an oldies musical performance the East Hampton Republican Committee is sponsoring tonight, he recounted a story — one that explains why he has not given out “campaign swag” this time around.
In the mid-1990s, he said, “I gave out potholders during my campaign, but they were apparently too thin. It turns out I was burning people’s hands.” Not exactly the impression he wanted to give.
He recounted another campaign story, a more recent one in which he and Ms. Turner were walking door-to-door together when they met someone who knew his grandmother, who died in 1968. Walking the campaign trail can be tough, but moments like that are rewarding, he said.
“It doesn’t get better than that,” he said.