\u201cIs it your quincea\u00f1era?\u201d asked Saritha Komatireddy, the Republican candidate for New York attorney general, during a campaign stop at a pizzeria in the Bronx last week.<\/p>\n
A Hispanic teenager wearing a sparkly headband and a floral dress stared back blankly. \u201cUm, no,\u201d the girl replied politely.<\/p>\n
The encounter was Komatireddy in miniature: earnest, but slightly awkward\u2014as though she were still getting the hang of the whole shaking-hands-and-kissing-babies part of campaigning. She had just introduced herself to the teenager\u2019s parents, explained her plans to get repeat offenders off the street, hospitalize mentally ill homeless people, and prosecute government fraud.<\/p>\n
A former federal prosecutor who brought successful cases against ISIS terrorists and Mexican drug cartels, Komatireddy, 42, is in an uphill battle to topple incumbent Letitia James, who Komatireddy accuses of \u201ctotally failing\u201d to keep New Yorkers safe. If Komatireddy wins, it will be because she was able to weave together several threads\u2014homelessness, subway violence, and locked-up store shelves among them\u2014into a tapestry of urban dysfunction and persuade voters to blame them on James.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cIs it your quincea\u00f1era?\u201d asked Saritha Komatireddy, the Republican candidate for New York attorney general, during a campaign…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367764,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,24,55,54,56],"class_list":["post-367763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}