By Henry J. Stern

Ten days ago Mayor Bloomberg was re-elected by a 3-2 margin, remarkable in a city with predominantly Democratic enrollment.  The election, whose outcome was widely predicted, did not stir the enthusiasm on either side that has accompanied prior mayoral contests.
 
For one thing, this was a re-election, and second terms have, more often than not, been awarded by the public to successful mayors of New York.  Since 1934:  WINNERS: LaGuardia, (2), O'Dwyer, Wagner (2), Lindsay, Koch (2), Giuliani, Bloomberg (Total – 10). LOSERS: Impellitteri, Beame, Dinkins: (Total - 3).

Mayor Koch won his first term in 1977 in a relatively close (50-38) race with Mario Cuomo, who ran on the Liberal line.  When he was re-elected in a landslide in 1981, Koch had the Republican nomination as well as the Democratic line.  In 1985 Koch swamped Council President Carol Bellamy, the Liberal nominee, who won second place over Republican-Conservative Diane McGrath, who later headed the Taxi and Limousine Commission under Mayor Giuliani.
 
Yet Koch, who had won three substantial victories, lost the 1989 Democratic primary to David Dinkins, an event he now (sixteen years later) credits with saving his life.  Dinkins went on to defeat Rudy Giuliani in the general election by 47,080 votes, a relatively modest margin for a Democrat.  Four years later, carrying the legacy of the Korean grocery boycott, the Crown Heights riots and other significant problems, Dinkins lost to Giuliani, but the margin was again close.  Aided by a referendum on Staten Island on the proposed secession of that borough from New York City, voters on the island turned out in record numbers and provided Giuliani with 115,416 votes to Dinkins’ 21,507, a borough plurality of 93,909 which was substantially more than his city-wide margin of victory of 53,367.
 
Koch's predecessor in City Hall was the century's second one-term mayor, Abe Beame of Brooklyn.  Beame, an organization Democrat, entered city service in 1946 as an assistant budget director in the administration of William O'Dwyer, who had previously served as Kings County District Attorney.  Beame rose to become Budget Director and then was elected Comptroller in l961, running with Mayor Wagner on a reform slate with Sanitation Commissioner Paul Screvane, who was elected Council President.  In that very important political year, a watershed for the Democratic reform movement, Wagner, blessed by Eleanor Roosevelt and Herbert H. Lehman, handily defeated State Comptroller Arthur Levitt (DeSapio's choice, as the defaced wall posters advised) in the Democratic primary, and Republican Attorney General Louis J. Lefkowitz in the general election.
 
The third term turned out to be Mayor Wagner's last, he did not seek re-election in 1965, becoming the last mayor to leave office voluntarily until term limits took effect in 2001.  Giuliani was the first mayor limited to eight years, Bloomberg will be the second, his second term will end in December 2009.  That year, the mayoral election will be for an open seat.  That usually leads to greater competition and excitement.  The Democrats will try to break their losing streak at four, and the Republicans may seek to find another savior, preferably with sound judgment and deep pockets.
 
There do not yet appear to be portents of great change in the Bloomberg Second Term.  Bush 43 fired nine out of fifteen cabinet members after he was re-elected in 2004.  It was done relatively graciously and with a minimum of fuss or recrimination.  Republicans are usually more genteel in dealing with these matters than Democrats.
 
“The leopard does not change his spots” (Rule 31-L) and it would be unlikely for the mayor, now a young 63, to change his style or attitude, especially since the polls say that the public now approves of him in record numbers.  In about two years he went from 32 to 75 per cent approval which indicates either that the public is forgiving, that it pays to advertise, or that when confronted with a human alternative, New Yorkers preferred the Mayor they knew to the distinctly unstylish and untested challenger. Many of the Mayor's programs turned out to be effective.  For example, thousands of lives were saved by the ban on cigarette smoking in indoor public places, an unpopular measure when it was imposed by the City Council at the mayor's request.  Unfortunately, no one knows if he or she is among those saved.  If people knew, the bill might have been an easier sell.  (In 1982, as a Councilmember, I introduced the first Clean Indoor Air Act for the City of New York.  It passed many years later, under the sponsorship of Manhattan Councilmember Stanley Michels.)  
 
Apart from lack of money, the Diallo blunder, and the usual rivalries, the Ferrer campaign did relatively poorly because it was based on three themes which had limited appeal.

1) I am a Latino, and it's our time. (The blacks had Mayor Dinkins for four years, why shouldn't we have our chance to govern.)
2) I am a Democrat and the Democrats are the party of the people, the poor and a lot of the middle class.
If you are poor, or poorer than you would like to be, identify with me and vote for me.
3) Bloomberg is spending enormously on his campaign, and your sense of fairness should compel you to vote for me, the undisputed underdog.  I am more like you than he is, and therefore I am the man with whom you should identify.  The fallacy here is that although it is true that many voters are more like Ferrer than Bloomberg, if they had a choice, they would rather be like Mike.
 
The problem with a campaign of lamentations is that the public looked at the election as if they were hiring a man for a job, a CEO for a fifty-billion dollar a year enterprise.  Which of the two men, in the normal course of events, would you think of as more likely to manage your property competently and honestly, protect your home and your personal safety, and be mindful of your taxes?
 
If selecting a person for a job is your frame of reference, as distinguished from identity politics, ethnic bonding, the theme of two separate and unequal cities, and the injustices and indignities which the less fortunate suffer in America (and everywhere else), you would be inclined to support the Mayor.  If not, you would most likely oppose his re-election, as 38 per cent of the electorate did.
 
The surprise of the 2005 primary was the separate collapses of two campaigns originally regarded as promising:  Speaker Gifford Miller's and Borough President Virginia Fields'.  Miller started as the insiders' choice, with the most endorsements, the most money, the most valuable experience in city government (as speaker, he had done rather well in keeping the Councilmembers from making fools of themselves and compiling a reasonable package of legislation, usually vetoed by the Mayor and challenged in court).  He foundered on an ethical issue, sending out a massive $1.5 million mailing to almost every council district at public expense.  Yes, it was legal, by adding up the mailing expenses allowed to each member, but it was also legal for Cablevision to hire Kenneth Bruno as a six figure lobbyist to influence his father, the Senate majority leader, to oppose the West Side stadium.  These transactions fail what is called the nose test.
 
Ms. Fields crumbled over the vacuity of her campaign, her principal distinction being that she grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, when the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was active there.  She was unfairly tormented by the press over a minimal issue - in a piece of campaign literature intended to show the diversity of her support, the faces of Asians had been pasted over the faces of non-Asians.  When this petty deception was exposed, the campaign went into a frenzy of accusations of blame, with Mrs. Fields dismissing her campaign manager, who proceeded to trash his former boss in public.  That is inappropriate behavior for a campaign staffer, unless he/she had been molested or defamed by the nominee.  The kerfuffle over the picture also masked the press' skepticism of the Chauncey Gardiner quality of the campaign.
 
The competition was highlighted by the meteoric rise, followed by the apparent self-immolation, of the brash but bright Congressmember who has followed his constituents from Brooklyn to Queens, Anthony Weiner.  He was the quickest in debate, evoking images of Koch in the 1970's, before moderate Democrats became an endangered species.  Weiner carried Gifford Miller's home district on Manhattan's east side, and appeared to the public to be the candidate who best captured the New York spirit, part cab-driver, part policy wonk, part cheerleader.  In the primary, he polled an astonishing 29% of the vote, since he started as unknown.  In fact, he almost denied Ferrer the 40% needed to avoid a runoff, but Weiner did not want to be viewed as a spoiler, dividing the Democratic vote (Although it seems to us that the voters make the decision as to whether they divide their vote. One reason the taxpayers pay for these campaigns, is that they have the right to choose the winners.)
 
One advantage a writer enjoys over a public official is that you can change your mind on an issue on the basis of new evidence, or closer scrutiny of existing facts, or you may be persuaded by a reasonable argument.  If you are elected, and you do this you will be denounced as a flip-flopper, because any change in position is considered pandering - either you were doing so originally or you are doing so now. 
 
Wiener explained that he didn't want the 2005 primary to resemble the battle of the hanging chads, (Florida, 2000) with every vote contested, and with bitterness developing so that either winner would end up the loser.  He will now have four years to show New York Democrats why he would be a better mayor than City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr., who is the obvious establishment choice.  Among other distinctions, Weiner's parents were school teachers.  Thompson's father was a respected Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York.  And don't forget Adolfo Carrion, the articulate Bronx Borough President, who will be term limited out of his job, or Marty Markowitz, energetic tub-thumper for Brooklyn.  It is assumed that Helen Marshall of Queens and James Molinaro of Staten Island will retire from public life in 2009.

Weiner's sport is ice hockey, which he played at SUNY Plattsburgh (that's near Canada).  Thompson's is golf, which he has played at some of the country's better courses.  The race will develop at its own pace, and it will be fun to watch.  The effort will be made by party leaders to sink Weiner before the competition sharpens.  Weiner’s critics will say: who needs another Schumer?  People like Al d’Amato will ask: who needed the first Schumer?  But when he was re-elected in 2004, Schumer won a record 71% of the New York State, a statistic which once induced the junior Senator from New York to refer to him as "Mr. 71%".  Will Weiner resist the enticements of the Washington Beltway, or yield to them as Schumer did when he decided to assume a more important role in the Senate rather than contest Eliot Spitzer for the 2006 Democratic nomination for Governor?
 
What's past is prologue.  In both politics and sports, people say: "Wait 'til next year.”  We look forward to what 2006 will bring us, and invite your comments on the efforts of those who would turn the wheel to their advantage.
                       


#264 11.18.05  1953wds