NYC's Mayoral Muddle

In our August 20 issue we endorsed Mark Green, a lifelong liberal who has been running as a liberal centrist, for mayor of New York City. Two weeks before a runoff election against Fernando Ferrer, a lifelong centrist who has been running on behalf of what he calls "the other New York," Green accepted Mayor Giuliani's proposition that he be allowed to stay in office an additional three months. If Green's ill-advised cave-in were all we knew about him, we'd drop him like a cold potato, the mayor's idea being unwieldy, unwise and possibly--even if the state legislature went along--illegal. But given Green's long and valuable service as a public interest activist, his anti-Giuliani credentials, his anti-police brutality, pro-public safety stances, we regard this as one bad decision in a career replete with the right ones, and our endorsement stands. --The Editors

As political insiders in New York City got back to talking politics after September 11, people asked one another: How did the World Trade Center attack change the mayoral election? No one had any idea, but everyone agreed that, somehow or another, things just had to be different.

It turned out that they were and they weren't. On the no-change front, it appears that the greatest calamity in the city's history proved no match for old-fashioned ethnic politics. Bronx borough president Fernando Ferrer finished first in the Democratic primary, riding the wave of an unprecedented Latino turnout (Latinos represented 23 percent of the Democratic electorate and voted for him against four white opponents by a three-to-one margin). The vast majority of white observers, I among them, assumed that after the attack Ferrer's campaign mantra about "two New Yorks" would wind up buried under the lower Manhattan rubble. The problem was, as we were dismissing Ferrer, we forgot to ask his voters. That those voters sent the message they did, especially at a time when rhetoric about unity and coming together as one had become the only permissible lingua franca of municipal political life, should remind us--and, one hopes, the next mayor, whoever he may be--that as urgent as the need to rebuild may be, the legions of homeless families and children without adequate healthcare are still out there.

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