Though the evening centered on McCarthy, the occasion was the Nassau Democratic Committee’s annual spring dinner. Pelosi and Gov. Andrew Cuomo garnered top billing for the event, but Cuomo did not show. Instead, Cuomo addressed the hundreds of attendees in a phone call that was broadcast over loudspeakers. He apologized for his absence, explaining that he had to remain in Albany so he could sign the state’s 2014-15 budget into law if the Legislature authorized it before a midnight deadline (the Legislature later did so).

Cuomo missed a group of 70 or so environmental protesters who gathered on the sidewalk of Jericho Turnpike outside Crest Hollow to publicly call for Cuomo to take a stand against hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, a form of natural gas drilling that involves injecting water and chemicals deep underground to fracture bedrock. They stood in front of Cuomo re-election campaign signs that Democrats had planted near Crest Hollow’s entrance before the governor canceled his appearance. There was also a small handful of people who showed up to air grievances with the state’s New York Rising storm recovery program or to protest abortion.

Inside Crest Hollow, most of the fundraiser’s speakers — including Pelosi; Schneiderman; Cuomo; Steve Israel, a congressman from Huntington and chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; Thomas DiNapoli, comptroller of New York State; and Jay Jacobs, chairman of the Nassau County Democratic Committee — used their time to heap words of praise on McCarthy as well as make rallying calls around the Democrats’ platform and 2014 election prospects to the party base present.

Israel and Pelosi both went on the offensive against House Speaker John Boehner.

“No immigration bill, no infrastructure bill, no nothing, no jobs, no plan,” Israel said of Boehner’s record. “… He did give us a 17-day shutdown of the federal government. That’s the only thing that John Boehner did.” Israel also introduced Pelosi as “our former and future speaker.”