And it was the “caught red-handed” campaign Seeman helped organize that weakened Sweeney’s base that year, he said.

“Move-On sent us boxes of these big red hands. We wore them and they ran national ads on TV, showing Sweeney signing legislation for the war,” he said.

Coming in on the heels of Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s progressive but unsuccessful run for president and a huge anti-war sentiment sweeping the nation, local Democrats had been looking for a few years for a good candidate to run against Sweeney.

“I had been following her (Gillibrand) coming out of the Dean campaign,” said local author Larry Dudley. “We were frustrated with our inability to get a good candidate for Congress to defeat Sweeney. We had a long string of miserable and incompetent candidates.”

Dudley, who was with the Dean for America group that evolved into Democracy for America, said he was first aware of Gillibrand in 2004 when she was traveling as part of then-state Sen. Hillary Clinton’s entourage.

And a closed group Dudley founded, 20 TrueBlue, reached out to Gillibrand.