Miranda Devine: How Lee Zeldin’s Wife and Two Miracle Daughters Taught Him How to Defy the Odds

He is the man to save New York but Lee Zeldin comes across more like Clark Kent than Superman as he butters muffins with wife Diana and their twin teenage daughters at the kitchen bench of their modest Long Island home.

The Post spent a sunny Saturday with the Zeldin family in Shirley, the working-class town where the aspiring governor and congressman grew up, to find out if he has what it takes to rescue the state from its downhill spiral.

Amiable, down to earth, unflappable and slightly reserved, Zeldin is the sort of man who has been underestimated all his life — and he likes it that way. He has a Gary Cooper-esque humility and inner toughness that used to personify the small town American male, starting small and dreaming big.

In grade school, while shuttling back and forth between his divorced parents’ homes, the native Long Islander earned his black belt in Taekwondo and won a world championship. Straight out of William Floyd High School in Mastic Beach he joined the ROTC, a boyhood dream which paid for college. At 23, he was sworn in as the state’s youngest attorney, after graduating from Albany Law School.

As an Army paratrooper he was deployed to Iraq with the elite 82nd Airborne Division, in the war’s deadly summer of 2006, serving in military intelligence and the legal corps, parachuting out of planes and helicopters, helping capture terrorists, and commandeering civilian vehicles at the point of an M4 carbine.

After four years of active duty, he and Diana opened a successful law practice back home in Smithtown, a town bristling with law enforcement families that boasts it is the reddest patch of Long Island.

Previous

1 of 3

Next The Zeldin family enjoys breakfast together. Matthew McDermott The Post joined the Zeldin family in the working-class town of Shirley. Matthew McDermott Lee Zeldin said Gov. Hochul is running a “dishonest and disingenuous” scare campaign against him when it comes to abortion. Matthew McDermott

At 30, he was elected to the State Senate, and re-elected. At 34, he was elected congressman for New York District 1 and served four terms. He would have been a shoo-in as chairman of a prestigious committee when Republicans take back the House. Instead, at 42, he has taken on what looked to be an impossible challenge, running for governor of New York — and coming within two points of Kathy Hochul in a poll last week.

Along the way he cheated death in Iraq and then again two years ago when he won a battle against cancer.

He is a man whose time has come, and come again, and the times could not suit him any better now with New York on its knees,

*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases