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their point of view, they wanted to draw a district as Republican as they could make it, and the more Republican it would be would depend on whether it was more east side than west side. The east side is more conservative and Republican than is the west side. And that's the way they ultimately drew it.

The way gerrymandering takes place in this town is: when the Republicans were running the show, as they were running it at that time -- they had both the Assembly and the Senate majorities and a Republican governor, so they really made the decisions -- the course of conduct as I understood it was: if an area was solidly Democratic and the Republicans had no chance of winning, they said to the county leader of that county (Democratic), “You cut up this district any way you want it.” If a county had Republican seats within a larger Democratic area, then the first thing they did was to carve out their Republican seat and then say to the county Democratic leader, “The rest of it's yours. We can't win in those other districts, so carve them any way you want to.”

Well, that was helpful to me, because in the borough of Manhattan -- and maybe one of the few in the whole city where they might have a chance some day of taking back the seat, if I'm not the Congressman, hopefully -- it would be the east side of Manhattan. That is the major Republican seat in a normal year. Well, there hasn't been a normal year for the Republicans in that area for at least seven and hopefully for another seventeen. So I benefitted by that kind of regular tactic employed by the county leaders, and the seat ended up more on the east side than