Hurt Feelings
Christensen has faced criticism even before officially declaring his candidacy to represent Manhattan’s 76th Assembly district, which stretches from 61st to 92nd streets east of Third Avenue and includes Roosevelt Island. He spent more than $2,600 on Lenox Hill dues for about 150 friends and colleagues to help him win the club’s presidency, the Daily News reported in January.
The explanation he gave in the interview last month about why he paid for friends to join the club, and how he feels after winning, had the long zigzag of testimony some of his former Wall Street colleagues have delivered in Washington.
“I didn’t come in off the street and, quote, buy this club,” he said at first, describing the support older members showed him. “Look, I regret how it played out, I regret how some people’s feelings were hurt,” he added. Then he described paying dues for some people to counter “moves that the other side had made to control the nominating procedures.”
Secret Republican
Sounding like a defensive banker is one thing; looking like a secret Republican is another. An audience member at a Stonewall Democratic Club meet-the-candidates talk last month asked him if he’d once been registered to vote for the rival party. Christensen said he didn’t believe he had.
“I fumbled the answer,” he said a week after the session, acknowledging that Board of Elections records showed he was registered as a Republican until early 2007.
He said he had forgotten about the registration because politics once mattered much less to him than work. All his donations have gone to Democrats, according to Federal Election Commission records. Still, he once saw himself as a fiscal conservative.
“I believed much more than I do now in the power, in the neutral goodness, of unfettered free markets,” he said. Loosened financial regulation had “real negative consequences that I certainly didn’t foresee when I was a young trader.”
Fashion Model