Council Candidate Evan Thies Rages Against the Machine

Twenty-eight-year-old City Council candidate Evan Thies of Williamsburg thinks the local 2009 races are a fight between two factions of the Democratic party.

“The truth is, even though everybody is a Democrat, there are essentially two parties,” he said when I sat down with him yesterday. “There are the progressives and then there are the machine people.”

Thies went on to say, “We have a real shot in the next election of putting the progressives ahead, finally, and making this a truly progressive city as opposed to one that’s tied to an era of machine politics and just government inertia that we’ve suffered through for years and years, since Tamanny Hall.”

Thies is a former staffer for David Yassky and earned some fame in 2004 when he unfurled a huge banner from a window in the The Plaza Hotel to protest the G.O.P convention.