When City Elections Were Fun
By LEE SIEGELSEPT. 1, 2013
IN 1969, in the midst of devastating strikes, rising racial conflict, sinking finances, terrifying crime rates and an expanding, dysfunctional city bureaucracy, the pugilistic writer Norman Mailer made a quixotic bid for mayor of New York. The columnist Jimmy Breslin campaigned alongside him for City Council president. Far from being a gimmick, the pair electrified the electorate with bold plans and even bolder political theatrics.
“People,” Mailer said, explaining his plan to harmonize the city’s neighborhoods into self-ruling municipalities, “are healthier if they live out their prejudices rather than suppressing them in uniformity.” Imagine any of the current candidates talking like that.
Back then, the race for mayor was fueled by the outsize talent that powered New York itself. In contrast, in the current campaign season we have the spectacle of figures whose substance consists of embarrassing character defects, fiery (yawn) rhetoric and patient waiting for a rival’s implosion. The race embodies the worst sin you can commit in Gotham’s infinite niches of sin: it’s boring. Galvanizing visions? Hey, maybe there’s an app for that.
New York used to produce mayoral candidates like Mailer, figures who exemplified the city’s vaunting dimensions.
There was James J. Walker, the glamorous delinquent of Prohibition. Fiorello H. La Guardia, the funny-papers Machiavelli. John V. Lindsay, the bleeding-heart patrician. Edward I. Koch, the Coney Island tout. Rudolph W. Giuliani, the law-and-order hood. Even the unassuming Abraham D. Beame could quip, in 1965, that William F. Buckley Jr., a rival candidate, was “the clown prince of politics.”
But then Michael R. Bloomberg slipped into office, in the numb wake of 9/11, with all the spirit of a hostile takeover. Technocratic micromanagement and passive-aggressive triangulation became the norm.
Commanding personalities have been replaced by apologies for having a personality and mechanical parroting of reformist ideas. New York, that breeding ground of idiosyncrasy, has become crowd-sourced. Today’s mayoral hopefuls are transparent products of handlers and flash polls. The city’s synthetic politics roll on blandly, surreally out of sync with its furiously contradictory realities.
In 1969, however, Mailer and Breslin, unrestrained by image-makers, caught Gotham’s imagination. We can look back skeptically at the sight of a novelist-turned-politician, but what’s striking is how liberating it seemed in its moment. As Gloria Steinem, one of the organizers of Mailer’s campaign, wrote at the time, “The possibility of inserting any ideas at all into the primary seems better than leaving it to the professionals.”
Mailer’s ideas were as ambitious as the city itself. His platform’s central plank was making New York the 51st state. He wanted to put free bicycles in city parks and to ban cars from Manhattan. He proposed subsidized day care, giving methadone to addicts, requiring the police to live in the neighborhoods they served and converting dilapidated waterfronts to affordable housing.
But of course, just as New York was still New York, he was still Norman Mailer. He began to approach his concrete, common-sense ideas with a novelist’s unbridled flights of fancy. He spoke grandly of ivy and stained-glass windows on all public buildings, an annual Grand Prix in Central Park, a zoo in every neighborhood — even medieval jousts in parks, to alleviate juvenile delinquency.
The virtues of an unconventional imagination had carried the campaign; the vices created by an imagination untethered to convention undercut it. In the Democratic primary Mailer finished next to last. But death-by-imagination was a fitting, even inspiring, New York demise. In the eyes of a declining city, it had a valiant air about it.
That decline stopped long ago, for numerous reasons, and thanks to several different mayors. Now subtler pathologies have replaced more explicit ones. And the candidates drone on, carefully recalibrating their positions until they all seem to be speaking in a single voice.
Their timid uniformity reflects the city’s general atmosphere. In Mr. Bloomberg’s hyper-rational New York — control the citizenry and let the bankers run free — standing out has about the same status as cigarette smoke.
It would be obscene to pine for the urban agony that fomented Mailer’s run. But imagine if the present-day city, so bright and neatly quantified on the surface, so excluding and unequal just underneath, were to produce even one candidate with his brio and originality.
“Fresh air and ideas are floating into New York nooks and crannies where they’ve rarely been before,” wrote Ms. Steinem, appraising the effects of Mailer’s campaign.
If only.