NYC Red
I read The American Prospect. I like The American Prospect. I even subscribe to The American Prospect. But I have to say that this article by Greg Sargent that just went up on their website, “Mad in Manhattan,” is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen in a political magazine of any ideological leaning.
Sargent suggests that re-electing NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is running as a Republican, serves the interests of Karl Rove, and that New York Democrats should fall in line behind the challenger, Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer. This is unexceptional partisan cheerleading, except for one little detail.
Bloomberg is doing a fine job and deserves re-election, while some of my closest pals in NYC – hardcore Democrats all – are convinced that Ferrer would be a disaster.
Yes, Bloomberg has his critics. Yes, Bloomberg has been gratuitously supportive of national and NY state Republicans in ways that discomfort his constituents. But guess what? It was Republicans who let him use their party line to run for, and win, the mayor’s office. In the meantime, opinion is almost unanimous that he has run an honest and effective administration, has kept a uniquely unruly city under control, and has largely avoided the divisiveness of his contentious predecessor, Rudy Giuliani. Even the Prospect article concedes these points.
As for Ferrer, he has apparently done little to inspire confidence. I haven’t been a resident New Yorker for more than 15 years, so I can’t say for sure, but my last experience of full-time residency was during the Dinkins years. I am suspicious of a candidate whose main selling point is his ethnic identity and his ability to rise to the top in the sketchy world of Borough administration. Maybe he’d be worth taking a chance on if Bloomberg were a disaster. But he isn’t.
So what Sargent is asking New Yorkers to do is to roll the dice on day-to-day quality of life issues for the most starkly partisan reasons. He writes:
There’s another reason Dems should care if Bloomberg wins re-election: The success of Republicans like Bloomberg in Democratic strongholds is extraordinarily helpful to Karl Rove’s strategy for building an enduring Republican majority.
This sentence is half-true. Democrats make up an overwhelming majority of voters in New York City, but the mayor’s office has never been a lock. For much of its history, the New York Democratic party has been synonymous with urban corruption and ethnic machine politics of the very worst sort, dating back to the days of Tammany Hall. In the 20th century, Democrats elected exactly two relatively honest and effective mayors: Robert Wagner, Jr. and Ed Koch, with “relatively” being the operative word, especially in their later terms. The rest have been either luckless ciphers like Dinkins, Beame, and Impellitteri, or flamboyant criminals like Jimmy Walker and William O’Dwyer.
Indeed, in this “Democratic stronghold,” the three (four if you count Bloomberg) most significant administrations were all Republicans: Giuliani, Lindsay and the finest of them all, LaGuardia. How did Republicans win? With the exception of Giuliani who ran as a straight-up partisan against the ineffective Dinkins, reform Democrats joined with Republicans in a “Fusion” ticket, producing a sort of liberal Republican nearly unrecognizable beyond the Hudson. John Lindsay, for example, was to the left of much of the national Democratic party in the 1960s, which is saying quite a bit.
This could have happened this time around. Bloomberg, by all accounts, was a Democrat right up to the minute he decided to run for Mayor. The only reason he switched is because he didn’t stand a chance of surviving a party primary without the support of the local organizations and the identity-politics interest groups who make up the majority of the NYC Democratic establishment. He cozied up to Giuliani not out of personal affinity or ideological ardor, but out of basic necessity – the same reasons he’s wheeling and dealing with odious national Republicans. But for the sorry state of their own operation, NY Democrats could have run and win with Bloomberg in 2001 or in 2005. What is now seen as this huge problem could have been an equally huge advantage.
So don’t blame the voters of New York for abandoning the Democratic candidate for mayor. Blame instead the Democratic party of New York City for not producing a candidate worth voting for.
8:00:46 AM 
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