When the mayoral race for New York City is over, the considerable number of aspirants to that office will have spent themselves, to say nothing of their fortunes, proving which among them can do most for the citizens of the city; the citizens, on the other hand, will have been deciding which among the candidates can hurt them the least. The difference in the two emphases is substantial, but to the aspirants Left, Right, and Center before whom the Mayor's mansion leans so intimately into the mind, the distinction is immaterial. One can hardly blame them; the power of Gracie Mansion is believed to be second only to that of the White House. Whoever supposes that the Governor's post is more desirable need only look at Governor Rockefeller's poignant efforts to recreate some semblance of Manhattan up in the state capitol by constructing, at a cost of millions of dollars, a mall and some surrounding office buildings whose utility puzzles even those legislators who have been persuaded to use them; the Governor himself spends as little time as possible in Albany. The mayoral candidates, even the simpler among them, do not underestimate the rewards of a job whose power is roughly that which accrues to a small White House, to say nothing of the house itself: the high fences, the grounds, and the noble architecture which go with the territory.
To be sure, it has always been part of an unwritten law in city politics, as any other, to make less of its rewards than meets the eye. The crisis of the cities, as the media call it, has been with us for years; it is only of late that the present, lame-duck occupant of the mayor's mansion has gone about so haggard. There are some to whom his demeanor is proof of the impossible strains the city puts on her servants, but their numbers are few among political people. “Everyone Else Is Tired: He Is Fresh” went the campaign slogan once, over a set of handsome features, and a pair of shoulders on which rested the unfair burden of so much more than the usual quotient of energy among men. Local wit has lately reversed the respective terms of the slogan, in view of the fact that eyes which once flashed progressively about the city are now inclined to coldness. Time and office have worked their changes. Yet, not the riots in Harlem, the transportation workers' strike, the sanitation men's strike, or the teachers' strike could do to the present occupant of Gracie Mansion what an unflattering foray into Presidential primaries did. There is a kind of adversity in political life which is wholly personal and thus smashing; which sets off, for a moment, that difference between politics and governance which will persist, even in the face of the modern wisdom which has pronounced the two indivisible. It is politics, not governance, which thins the hair and darkens life for politicians.
Those strains have barely begun to appear in this year's contestants, for whom running and losing is so much less serious a trial than that which falls to the incumbent. In addition, the pre-primary period of any important election always consists of an uncountable number of candidates, of half-announcements and threats to announce, the rewards for which activity may range from media attention to a miraculous shuffle of the cards in which one's name is placed in the third spot on the ticket. Big-time politics is full of names in secondary place on the ticket whose presence can no more be accounted for than the atmosphere, and which owes as much to chance as to political practicality. The urban blight had already taken hold of political consciousness when the late Congressman William F. Ryan ran for mayor in 1965; the middle class threatened to depart and businesses were leaving the city in earnest. In accordance with political need he chose as his candidate for comptroller a man who was a liberal, a Jew, and a successful businessman no one knew much about. It emerged soon after the man's designation that the acumen which distinguished his business affairs had led him, not unreasonably, to move his own factory out of the city. It was not, as sins go, a terrible one but to the Reform constituency on which his ticket largely depended, it was held to be cardinal, betokening as it did to them a lack of that very faith in the city's health to which politicians are pledged. Of course, the ticket on which he ran provided disaster enough to go around without his help; but in Brooklyn, many years later in a relatively obscure contest, the former candidate for comptroller on the mayoral ticket found the principal issue raised against him was still his mislocated factory.
These fates aside, only to appear on the ticket in an important race is tantamount to being put before the voters in a fashion which no private political endeavor can hope to match. For this, an unseemly large number of candidates are willing to spend their fortunes and the fortunes of their friends and families in pre-primary runs whose hopelessness is clear to all, if not to them. In the New York City Democratic primary this year, which will be held early in June, the names of all the candidates for the mayoralty nomination will come before the enrolled Democratic voters. If no candidate gets more than 40 per cent of the votes, there will be a run-off later in the month to select the party's candidate for mayor in the general election of November. It is possible that one or more of the serious candidates now in the running may drop out before the primary in June, but that, by the nature of the psychology which governs primary campaigns, is unlikely, at least in most of the cases here under consideration. However clear it is to everyone else that he will lose, there is, for the candidate and his friends, always the chance that he will win. Neither friends nor aides are likely to credit evidence to the contrary, much less bring it to the attention of the candidate. When the candidate loses on primary night, the evidence is still not such as to contradict the chances he had. What he does is to count the votes garnered by those competitors in the primary who are nearest him in the political spectrum, and subtract them from the total he should have gotten had they not run—in which case he would certainly have won the primary. An even stronger reason for not dropping out is the large amount of money which is spent early in the campaign. All of the serious candidates have had full-paid staffs and rented campaign offices since the fall. At the half-way mark some of them will already have spent $50,000 of the money raised by their families and friends, with more being raised all the time. Even the candidate taken by an unlikely bout of hopelessness cannot well announce that he is withdrawing, and thus squandering all the money and the time committed to him. Indeed, the whispers of imminent withdrawal about one candidate or another are usually found to originate with his nearest competitor. The New York City Democratic primary is thus bound to remain almost as crowded in June as it was in February.
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Yet, neither crowds, political tradeoffs, nor levity can preserve the election process from the stiffness which surrounds politics now. Prior to the citywide elections of 1965 there was an air of moral readiness among politicians, if not of brashness, which is now only a recollection in those of them running this year. It was John Lindsay, a liberal Republican. who captivated the great and the small in the political organizations of the city. not to say those Democrats who were prone anyway to look upon loyalty to the traditional Democratic party as reactionary. They viewed him in contrast to the Democratic candidate, a party loyalist, a budget director—John Lindsay versus Abraham Beame. It was the voice of moral transcendence against the gray accountant's mind. If John Lindsay spoke to the largeness of spirit in them, his opponent, it was evident, spoke to the small. The very difference in their physical size was suggestive. The sight of the pale, gray-haired accountant who blinked a lot, who looked to be barely over five feet, poised against the lines of his opponent, was a gift to the moral imagination of the sort nature provides only from time to time.
On the night in 1965 when the two opponents came before the largest Reform-Democratic club in Manhattan (and, by all the evidence, one of the most active arms of the Democratic party in the city) the atmosphere was not dissimilar to that happy defiance of organized religion which is occasioned under the tents of evangelists. When the candidate of the Democratic party appeared before this audience of Reformers and the liberal-progressives who shared their beliefs, he was greeted by a rolling thunder of boos. They wished to dissociate themselves from the drear accountant's mind; from the bosses (he had been supported by the regular Democratic party machinery for all of his political life); from the smallness and the pallor which nature visits on the backward looking whom those in the audience had set themselves to expunge from public life.
To be sure, there were Democrats in the corners of the room horrified at this display of rudeness to the candidate. (He had, in addition to his other disqualifications, just defeated the Reform candidate in the Democratic primary, but to no avail. These Democrats would lead his opponent's campaign and win.) Later that night, John Lindsay strode in to an audience which stood and cheered him in a sound of unanimity rarely heard in such environs. It was a reception which expressed a longing for that which transcended the mean and the petty in political life; a response to the wit and the grace of visage which nature has been known to confer on those worthy to go forth and be tested by the adversary. Eight years later the majority of those Democrats who rose when John Lindsay entered the hall can scarcely bear to hear his name, whether sitting or standing; those who reviled the accountant's mind speak longingly now of fiscal responsibility.
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The stiffness of the city campaigns this year is the sort which settles on politicians who have learned well the lessons of the last few years, but who must, nevertheless, pay a certain homage to that portion of the past in which they took part. The candidates for mayor, and for every other office in the cities and the states, have heard the voice of the electorate in which there is now as much affection for the transcendent moral stance as for the plague. Still, something in the nature of politics makes it impossible to turn one's back on once vaunted beliefs. It is true of the Old Politics; it is true of the New Politics; it is true of matters of high moral principle as of ordinary affairs in governance. There is something healthy in the polity which demands that the word spoken not be denied, as though it had never existed. Deep in the soul of the polity is a resistance to nihilism which ordains that it, which tolerates so much else, will not bear outright nullification of the politician's words; though hedging, withdrawal, and quiet evasion of those words are among the benefits traditionally accorded him. And the electorate's vengeance, when it is forced to it, is considerable, as witness the response to McGovern's 1000-per-cent support for Thomas Eagleton.
The candidates in the most unpleasant position today are those whose careers were founded in the Left-liberal constituency. If the bulk of that constituency is now turned around, the candidates it once nurtured have a hard time turning with them.
Consider Albert Blumenthal, a well-known leader of the state legislature, whose Liberal-Reform bailiwick in upper Manhattan once packed the highest density of political activity in the world per square foot. It was an urban, educated Jewish bloc for the most part; they voted heavily in primaries, carried petitions, and came, straight after their suppers, to work on social-action committees in their clubs. The crime rate is so high in his district now that all citizens are reluctant to take part in political activity which would require that they go out at night. They voted for John Lindsay a second time, rather than for a candidate who was wholly repellent to them; they are not likely to have to make such a choice this time. Blumenthal, who has a distinguished reputation in the legislature, and who led the fight to legalize abortion, now finds himself face to face with an issue which the years of his political career have trained him to treat in the way that urban, educated Jews are wont to permit. He knows, as all the candidates do, that the issue of the 1973 campaign is the safety of citizens, neighborhood preservation, and plain law-and-order. He would be hard on criminals, of course; but he has always been able to discuss these matters with his constituents with the understanding between them that he need not talk of clapping all criminals in jail, or of arming police with shotguns. There were certain root causes of crime that he and his constituents understood implicitly between them, even if they spoke less of these things now than they used to: that the jails were overcrowded, that there was no opportunity for the proper rehabilitation of prisoners, that the criminal-justice system bore almost as much blame as the criminals for the crime rate. They understood these things in the way that friends do who have gone to the same school at the same time in history, among whom certain premises in life remain the same, whatever other disagreements the years bring.
This is the politician who will now have to tell the voters in the rest of the city his program for the alleviation of crime. It will be a brave candidate who goes among the Italians of Brooklyn to tell them that the jails are overcrowded and prison conditions disgraceful. He has undoubtedly learned by now that the voters of the city want—in the absence of more immediate hope—to know not so much what the candidate is going to do about crime, but how he feels about criminals. Blumenthal does not know how to talk about such things; he does not know because it has been the premise of his political life and of his habitat not to have to talk of such things. There is a language for this sort of feeling; every citizen is allowed to speak it and he does, if not in public then in private. The liberal candidate of Blumenthal's type (he is the choice of the New Politics-New Democratic Coalition) can pay that language no heed himself but must, to begin with, find a way of not saying those things which political habit has by now made second nature. Saying and not saying, he will have a hard time in the talk department. In the climate in which he works, nothing a politician utters can be perceived as other than a code; every part of the political spectrum attributes the same meaning to the same words, whether the speaker is describing a social condition or a social position. If Blumenthal says, as he does, that the liberalism of twenty years ago is inappropriate to the problems of the 70's, everyone understands the same thing by it; he has only to mention the word “Attica” to lose more than he wins.
Herman Badillo, a second candidate, may wish but cannot afford to sound like a man of the future either. He is running as the representative of the blacks, the Puerto Ricans, the poor, and, possibly, of some other citizens as well. Badillo is also deemed to have a power base in circles which were once more powerful than they are now, such as the New Politics element in the Reform clubs. He is a handsome Puerto Rican whom former Mayor Wagner raised to prominence in short order, and who later ran against his former mentor for the mayoralty. He is a Congressman now. He has been active in Jewish affairs, in black as well as in Puerto Rican affairs; he is, one might say, the minority candidate. Yet it is not easy for him to sound the note which minority constituencies have learned to know as their own in the past decade: there are no angry promises, no talk of a new future for the disenfranchised. He points out, in fact, that he was one of the first opponents of school decentralization. Of course, he explains that he always knew decentralization was a weapon that the white majority might use to preserve segregation; aside from which, decentralization is chaotic. The words are minority, but one hears in the music the renunciation of passion one hears everywhere among the candidates. Badillo has fewer problems of identification than Blumenthal, having been able to isolate clearly the segment of the population to which he connects: the blacks, the Puerto Ricans, and at least some of the liberal Jews of the New Politics. His chances are nevertheless deemed poor by most politicians, despite hopes of liberal money and endorsement from important quarters. For, in any primary contest, if roughly 70 per cent of the registered Democratic voters turn out, not more than 6 per cent of them are black and Puerto Rican. Every politician knows that, whatever hopes are pinned on their favor, blacks and Puerto Ricans do not come out and vote much in primaries; they do not even come out and vote as substantially as they might in regular elections. Badillo hopes in any event to address himself in so unspecific a manner to them that other groups will not find him too narrow for their concerns.
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Edward Koch has turned on his old constituency and thrown himself at the head of the politically disaffected. He is in part allowed to do this because he has always been known as something of a lone wolf, the sort of lone wolf, to be sure, who attracted a considerable following among liberal-Reform elements in the days when lone-wolfishness was a primary source of appeal to them. It spoke to the isolate image they treasured in themselves, and the capacity to strive against odds which pleased them as much as any victory they might thus obtain. It was in the period before they took on issues of war and peace that Koch won the first great victory against the candidate of the Bosses. The boss, Carmine De Sapio, was a nationally known figure among Democrats and his demise at Koch's hand was a boost to insurgent liberal elements of the party whose effect was felt for years. Koch continued an unbeatable favorite among his constituents in the ensuing years, which brought issue after issue on which they might pronounce themselves with no discord. He opposed the Vietnam war with as much ardor as any of them, and did so early enough in time to pass the most stringent standards of a constituency which saw that plain opposition to the war was not so crucial a measure of a candidate's fitness for Congress as the hour of his opposition. He still shows signs of having knocked about in so hard a school. This year's campaign literature carries the information: “He Fought Against Nixon's War When It Was Still Johnson's War.” Some of his constituents are to be seen now, at the end of the war in Vietnam, wearing a button: “Protest Now More than Ever.”
The last years have brought an end to the harmony between Koch and some of his old supporters, as the idea of a beleaguered middle class, the problems of scatter-site housing, and crime in the streets became more obviously the issues of the time. He took himself out alone, the first candidate of his political origins to do so, and stood with the residents of Forest Hills who were threatened with a massive low-income project in the midst of one of the few intact Jewish middle-class communities left in the city. Colleagues brooded that he had turned to the Right. When a close political ally—a Jew like himself—called Koch after his stand on Forest Hills to express distress, and to tell him that, whatever the social cost, “the Jews of Forest Hills have to pay their dues,” Koch retorted that his caller owned an elegant brown-stone and sent his children to private school, and that the Jews of Forest Hills were being asked to pay not only their dues but the dues of people like his caller. He made public his retort. As is the case with all but the most cynical of men, candidate Koch's native inclinations blend reasonably well with the requirements of a stance. Those inclinations currently visible have been helped along by years of association with liberal-Reformers of whose temper his telephone caller on Forest Hills is a fair example. In their company, Koch prospered because he was more stubborn than they, a qualification which could not but have pleased them. Out of their company he prospers, having retained the stubbornness which won a constituency, along with a memory of that constituency and its relation to the world which has sent him willingly into the embrace of its enemies. Nevertheless, he claims to have renounced none of the ties of liberalism, and his behavior is thus well within the bounds of propriety.
A fourth candidate, Jerome Kretchmer, is a product of similar environs in politics. His position is that while he comes from roughly the same liberal constituency as Blumenthal, Badillo, and Koch, he has never paid any attention to ideology. And indeed, his service to that sophisticated political wing of the Democrats which promoted the banning of the H-bomb, and drew up the peace planks, has consisted of appearing at their functions and saying little. He is the sort regularly to be found among the products of a lush political growth, busy in its busyness, a man well rooted in the political climate in which he finds himself and wholly immune to any of its persuasions. He would have operated as well under other political flags, among oldline Regulars, Democrats or Republicans, had it been his fate to have to do so. Now he enjoys something of an advantage in a contest where, the contestants understand, the very name of ideology is to be avoided at all costs. For him it is no strain on the truth to look puzzled when ideological questions are put to him by the press. Years of habit at the dais of liberal-Reformers and New Politicians make it possible for him to nod and murmur the word or two which passes for assent among one's kind. Of late he is more given to brusqueness; he deals with practical matters in the city. He was until recently the city's Environmental Protection Administrator, a title comparable in simpler times to the sanitation chief. What with air pollution and consciousness-raising on environmental control, his duties were far more elaborate than those of his predecessors in sanitation. Still, Kretchmer knows the general origins of the job he held, and is not loath to impress upon his audiences the pragmatism which work among the garbage removers exacts from a city official. His position is that he has delivered essential services; all the other candidates can do is talk about it. He is the man of action, they are the debating club. He has decided that he does not have to talk about crime; he knows about garbage, and he knows moreover that of the six or seven other Democrats who have boned up to expertness on crime, not one of them knows a thing about garbage. He has also decided to talk about crookedness in government, which is not, this time, as unprofitable a subject as it was during the Presidential election. As the Watergate fizzle proves, the idea of corruption works on the public mind when there are not more important issues worrying it. But when political fury combines with the notion of crooks in government, as is now the case, the issue of corruption can be devastating, as Kretchmer has not alone begun to note. Though he will not emerge among the front-runners, and may even drop out altogether, Kretchmer's campaign will have told much about the place ideology is thought to occupy in the hèart of the electorate today.
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But it is Abraham Beame who is the acknowledged front-runner. The city comptroller occupies a special place in the consciousness of the voters as the man they rejected in favor of John Lindsay in 1965, the short, gray-haired accountant who seemed so ill-equipped, comparatively, to ride the waves of the future. Nature's favors have not been transfigured by time; Beame is still short and gray-haired, and gives evidence thus far of profound involvement only in the city's fiscal affairs. Yet, some sturdiness in him speaks to a part of the polity which comes closer to the surface every day. It is, in addition to a wish to have someone tend capably to matters of money, a wish to escape the bonds of passion, to be free both of its ineptitudes and its language, two things of which the new political style has given it an ample taste. These feelings have extended so far among the Democrats of New York as to cause Beame to be regarded as a financial wizard; others see in him that endurance and stability, that consciousness of being a public servant which is now only a memory in politics. It is the post-charisma era insofar as a certain brand of the charismatic is concerned, and Beame is the beneficiary of the times. He is also a remarkably good specimen of the traditional Democratic-party organization. Its loyalties are powerful and enduring among its members, perhaps now more than ever. The traditional Democratic leader is still not apt to look upon labor unions as the enemy of the people, as his opposite number in the New Politics was ever wont to do. In matters relating to style and culture, he is apt to be repelled, rather than impressed, by the evidence of the sexual revolution he sees around him, as he is repelled, rather than impressed, by draft-evaders and by the contempt for America he has seen circulated from universities and convention halls.
Corruption in government is not a new idea to him; fiscal mismanagement, misappropriation of funds, collusion and bribery among city officials are sins for which tradition has prepared certain clear-cut responses: these things are bad to do, not to say get caught at. He is not thus prepared for the corruption in the city's super-agencies, whose pervasiveness is clouded over by a patina of social concern. Beame's associates among the old-line Democrats have always been held by Reformers to be unsavory, back-room types, though he himself is known to be impeccable. In response, he observes: “When a fellow is with you, he's a leader; when he's against you, he's a boss.” Leaders or bosses, there are a considerable number of them behind him. He is, like Blumenthal, Koch, and Kretchmer, a Jew. None of them likes to talk of an ethnic vote but he has the best reason. Experience has given him some cause to believe that being a Jew would be of no significant help among Jewish voters; in 1965 Jewish districts went overwhelmingly to his opponent. When he pays any attention to candidates Blumenthal, Badillo, Koch, and Kretchmer, it is largely out of politeness; they, on the other hand, regard his candidacy as the end of their hopes and pay his comings and goings the kind of attention usually reserved for the warder on Death Row.
Beame's nearest contender is thought to be Mario Biaggi, whose support ranges from Center to Right in the political spectrum. He will probably have the endorsement of the Conservative party as well, which has traditionally been something of a handicap in the city, though that does not promise to be the case this year. His supporters advertise him to be the most decorated policeman in America. (He has a Jewish counterpart, also a former policeman, president of the city council, Sanford Garelik; because Garelik has virtually no support from any quarter, he is not quite a serious candidate and will probably drop out of the race. Another candidate, Councilman Robert Postel, has similarly slight prospects, though not as slight as those of former Harlem rent-strike leader, Jesse Gray, who has also announced that he is in the running.) Biaggi is, in fact, a Congressman now, like Badillo and Koch, and one whose record is far from that of a conservative. A representative of labor who works on the Congressional labor committee with him can scarcely remember the time when his vote and that of Biaggi have diverged. He has few of the links to the traditional Democratic organization that Beame has. He is, in the language of sociology, a white-ethnic phenomenon, an Italian policeman who rose through the ranks and performed deeds in the line of duty which won him the medal of honor, along with the attention of a New York University law professor who offered him a scholarship to law school. When he graduated he was well into his forties, and from there went on to Congress, to make something of a distinguished service record for himself there. Something in. his demeanor spells out a loyalty to his experience which no requirements of a political nature can invent: to the civil service through which he rose, to the law professor who changed his life, to the effrontery with which he performed as a policeman. Though he is the law-and-order candidate to perfection, a certain chic attaches to his candidacy in some liberal circles, notably among journalists. What is left of the year of the ethnic and the hard-hat has accrued with a kind of residual sentimentality to Biaggi, who is agreeable. There are rumors in other circles that he did too much trigger-pulling in the line of duty, though he has several times been cleared of these charges; there are even those who actually believe such rumors will discredit him with the public, but they are few, if hopeful. As for Biaggi's connections to the right-wing, they are so slender that his opponents have taken to reciting his name, as a kind of code word, in the absence of more elaborate charges.
In American politics of the big time the Center usually holds, however often politicians test it; the mayoralty contest gives every sign of following the pattern. This is a condition which must confuse those politicians whose perceptions of the world were forged in the New Politics, by whose sights the Center has always been perceived as the Right. Indeed, the politicians of the Left feel uncomfortable in the Center: it is this discomfort as much as any which denies their vitality this year, when the Center is the place to be. The politician is as unhappy as a man can be who operates under the strain of inhibition. The state of mind of the Left-liberal candidates is therefore not pleasant now, nor is their dilemma surprising. They were the servants of a movement in American politics whose distortions of reality would fall everywhere, and not least on them, by the hand of that patient justice which looks down even on city elections.
