COMMENTS: Ed Koch & the Spirit of the Times
Sleeper, Jim
It's not a bad idea to remember that there are New Yorkers politically to the right of Ed Koch, a fact often obscured by the mayor's own penchant for flailing his erstwhile liberal allies....
...Shaken like other New Yorkers of his generation by crime, the welfare- and povertyprogram battles, the white Canarsie school boycott, and minority demands for community control of the schools, he denounced elitism in liberal social engineering, nowhere more evident than in the Forest Hills plan itself...
...And yet whatever was best in the promise and vision of the Village movements of those years seems to have eluded him...
...A lot of them love it...
...Koch came blinking into the sunlight of postwar Greenwich Village with others in flight from everything stunting in their outer-borough immigrant family past...
...He joined a Reform Democratic club and gave streetcorner speeches to defeat former Tammany boss Carmine DeSapio in a 1962 race for local party leader...
...The speaker is barely finished before the mayor raises his eyebrows in mock astonishment and amusement and quips, "Have you ever seen a fivefootfour Puerto Rican with a gun...
...Nor is it to excuse the hypocrisy of his rationalizations for inaction on real-estate regulation in the face of the unchecked, unscrupulous disinvestment schemes and upscale conversions that cause homelessness...
...And as the proud liberalism of their time in the sun opened paths to professional advancement, they marched to Montgomery and summered on Fire Island...
...Koch may be a bit crazy, they say, but after him, the center cannot hold...
...SHAKING THEIR HEADS after the publication of Mayor, some of Koch's defenders found in the book the disconsolate rantings of a tragic hero who'd squandered virtue and good fortune in the hubris of his own 1982 gubernatorial bid...
...273...
...The broad mass in the middle, including hard hats who clubbed antiwar demonstrators, homeowners protesting new public housing, and schoolteachers terrified of community control, were . . . well, grubby and uninspiring...
...Ed Koch has made himself that broad middle's avenger, but he did not acquire that honor without sojourning awhile in Lindsay's "silk-stocking" congressional district and, indeed, in his congressional seat...
...Koch might counter that the city's white ethnic and middleclass nerves were so far gone by the time he took office in 1978 that only his vaudeville holds the body politic together at all, coupled as it is with his traditional reformer's probity in appointing capable judges and administrators who are generally more liberal than he...
...Nor can there be much democracy and justice...
...At its fitful best, it would pass some regulations hamstringing capitalist development, without demonstrating either the intention or ability to press convincingly for real alternatives—leaving us, in effect, with the worst of both worlds...
...And much of what scandal there's been in the delivery of social services reflects a decimated supervisory staff overwhelmed by increasing demand...
...Reformers now dabbled in real estate, their social agenda narrowing to those liberties protecting their own peculiar upward mobility...
...Watch him, for example, fielding questions at a community meeting of politically conservative Orthodox Jews who oppose his affirmative-action policies, his support for gay rights, and, sotto voce, his stinginess with patronage...
...Koch's mayoral bid fizzled...
...Koch is more complex than that, in ways we'd do well to understand...
...He is insecure enough to continue to resort to it, but good enough to know better...
...Unlike Philadelphia's Frank Rizzo and Boston's Louise Day Hicks, Koch did not come roaring out of the bowels of Bunkerville...
...one can quibble about statistics and abuses of power...
...And most of the city's minority residents accept the paradigm of individual responsibility for success that the mayor sincerely if abstractly holds out to all New Yorkers, regardless of race...
...artists and visionaries were working full-time with the words and symbols that consolidate corporate power...
...They know what they've become—and failed to become...
...I had said I loved them and no one else," he wailed, referring to the city's voters, playing dutifully according to his part...
...When all is said and done, however, 70 percent of the city's budget is mandated for expenditures from welfare to debt service that are utterly beyond the mayor's control...
...Ed Koch is Bernie Goetz," said a political consultant recently, also with some justice...
...Watching him savage Bella Abzug, you could forget that he really isn't the Lester Maddox that Jody Powell thought he was...
...But it is precisely that diverting and blaming that seems to have lost its savor for him...
...People sense this...
...Ed Koch became the Village Voice's lawyer...
...The real scandal remains the way Ed Koch covers for these scarcities by diverting attention from them or blaming their victims...
...Of such shabby paradoxes is Ed Koch's mayoralty built...
...Typically, Koch refused to grant official holiday status to Martin Luther King's birthday, except as a $23-million trade-off against municipal union give-backs at the bargaining table, while giving away that much every month or two to developers and corporations taking advantage of his tax "incentives...
...And when the social agenda shifted from civil rights to economic redistribution, he wasn't alone in digging in his heels on the ground of individual responsibility...
...In the white heat of that awful recognition, the chastened hero is permitted to speak terrible truths about others...
...A man is complaining about new hiring standards designed to increase female and Hispanic representation in police ranks...
...He has tolerated a far too free-wheeling politicization of the city's housing agency's awards of subsidies to developers and contracts to "community" groups, and he has been slow to correct systemic abuses of those subsidies and contracts...
...The Village was the ideal crucible: rents could be covered by parttime work, the remaining hours given over to the pursuit of some art or political possibility...
...More to the point is that the increasingly insurmountable contradictions of the mayoralty leave it attractive only to those deluded enough to believe in magic, or cynical enough to believe in the worst sort of manipulation, or desperate enough not to know the difference...
...sensing this, Koch vents his frustrations against academics in "the battle of the studies...
...In 1973 Koch, the liberal Manhattan congressman, tried to float a mayoral candidacy by marching with the most demagogic opponents of the now successful public housing in Forest Hills...
...Then I told them that I no longer wanted to 272 live with them, that I wanted to take a new lover in Albany...
...And he is going to keep on unraveling with it for four more years...
...As Manhattan rents rose, the lockstep descended...
...Don't cry for me, Pelham Parkway," he croons...
...He gives them the theater of their bitterness...
...but the fact remains...
...Koch's new politics accommodated this too...
...By assuring frightened "outer-borough" ethnics that he shares with them a tissue of visceral understanding, Koch has won their grudging acquiescence in one of the more socially liberal, corruption-free, and, yes, even racially integrated administrations in the city's history...
...The cost to the civic discourse is tremendous...
...His compromise plan was adopted...
...Cuomo is not without his deceits, but he has generally played to the decency of those New Yorkers who can do without divisive hysterics...
...Whether it reflects some special vulnerability to the judgment of professors or a genuine concern for the deserving poor, one should not be too quick to say...
...When Professors Ray Horton and Charles Brecher noted in 1981 that the whole complex of decisions emanating from the fiscal crisis had balanced the budget on the backs of the poor, and a Daily News story inaccurately reduced the whole mix to Koch's own budget priorities, he summoned them to City Hall where, in the presence of all seven of his deputy mayors, he demanded they come to a press conference to set the record 271 straight...
...He is an ethnic comedian bored with his material but unable to transcend it...
...Koch has been accused, with some justice, of sowing the wind that left the city reaping the whirlwind of ghoulish applause for Bernhard Goetz...
...we may even be better off with him on that score than with them...
...But Koch overplayed his courtship of the outerborough burghers while a mediator appointed by Lindsay, one Mario Cuomo, soothed and cajoled frightened fellow homeowners back to civilized discourse...
...All that was left to him now, it seemed, was to bring down the curtain with an agonized confession of error that set the universe to rights...
...With just a few gestures borrowed from Boston's conciliatory mayor, Ray Flynn, Koch could have more minority support and more liberal white backing than he wants...
...Koch's wisecracks only temporarily defuse racist fear by stroking it, draining the political nervous system of resiliency in the long run...
...His complex odyssey is the secret of his success at translating fiscal constraints into a New York idiom that cows even liberals and their clients...
...270 In 1977 Koch was back, marketing the death penalty to voters more burdened and frightened than before, but still the earnest, sensible liberal to a Village and broader constituency that had itself begun to change...
...This is not to excuse Koch's failure to test the political limits of badly needed municipal tax reform by using his popularity to curb outrageous give-aways to developers and firms that don't need them...
...Koch and all his commissioners have boycotted Horton and Brecher's annual "Setting Municipal Priorities" conference ever since...
...In this, however, he is much less different from some of his most vociferous critics than might be supposed...
...Many remember him as affable, open, at times almost diffident...
...The audience roars appreciatively as aides wince...
...Local government is limited, Koch has convinced them...
...New York Times editor Roger Starr has written that Lindsay and followers were comfortable only with those who had so little money that they needed more of it just to survive, or with those who had so much that they needed to give it away...
...Modest prosperity came almost despite themselves...
...But while history won't absolve him of some responsibility for the gathering storm, he remains triumphant in its midst...
...Koch may disprove his own notion that one can be a liberal with sanity, but there cannot be Socialism in One City, either...
...Koch danced in and out of Goetz's cheerleading line in a shameless series of flip-flops that aped the public's reactions to the contradictory disclosures...
...Perhaps both...
...His most well-known campaign pitch in 1977 wasn't the death penalty— Herman Badillo was and is for capital punishment too—but, "After eight years of charisma, and four years of the clubhouse, why not try competence...
...They know Koch went South in the late 1960s to fight for that paradigm against the Lester Maddoxes of the world...
...He knows that he cannot transcend its principal contradiction, the disparity between the promises he must make to improve essential services and the fiscal impossibility of improving them, even with a budget surplus fueled, in the city's capital-sensitive economy, by the elusive glow of foreign investment...
...Yet he is trapped representing them to themselves, bodying forth their most intimate hurts with a penchant for self-parody some of them share...
...He knows this precisely because he's a good administrator who stretches his resources well...
...Yet he has conscientiously hired back most of the minority workers laid of during the 1975 fiscal crisis...
...Remember," he warns them in his shrill, pedantic sing-song, "you can always vote me out...
...Ed Koch's is not a classical tragedy, but a Bronx one— the unresolved, festering hurt of a generation of New Yorkers whose liberal social compact is coming undone...
...Before he could get the bruised, grasping mentality of the hard-pressed Bronx and Newark hat-check clerk out of his system, he decided to return to it, catering to those he'd left behind and who'd moved up a bit themselves...
...For the truth is that Koch's public discourse appeals to a broader spectrum of voters than his critics admit...
...Eagerly he and his new friends merged their own struggles to break free with the period's larger struggle for civil liberties...
...Accept the parameters and constraints of capitalist urban development, and you're led inexorably to his conclusions...
...No one on the Bronx's Pelham Parkway was about to...
...Koch even pretended to do this...
...That may not be saying much...
...The tragedy Koch tried to escape by running for governor is that he doesn't really like the lowermiddleclass people he has played to so well...
...Some people counter that Koch is just vicious...
...We need policemen who are big and tall and command respect...
...When New York University's Emanuel Tobier projected that the 25 percent of New Yorkers living below the poverty line might swell to 30 percent by the end of the century, the mayor called him an "arrogant, ivory-tower academic...
...the dirty little secret on the left is that not a few minority New Yorkers have followed him...
...PEOPLE HAVE OFTEN REMARKED that Koch is the beneficiary of a liberal-left hubris in John Lindsay's mayoralty that botched the last real opportunity to renegotiate the urban social compact...
...It may even be that such triumphs have devastated his opposition far more 269 than the opposition's self-destruction has assured his triumph in September...
...The professors, feeling muscled toward a little more apologetics than they felt appropriate, demurred...
...Koch, why do you lower height requirements just to include these people...
...He has acknowledged as much and given us chapter and verse in Mayor...
...Minorities were as vocal as whites in the early returns for Goetz...
...The death-penalty mayor's first executive order banned discrimination based on sexual preference in city government as he straddled his old Manhattan and new outer-borough constituencies, a creature of both and of neither, an enigma to the excluded minorities, working stiffs, and unemployed—at least some of whom, together with upstate residents Koch also ignored, provided Cuomo's margin of victory in the 1982 Democratic gubernatorial primary...
...BUT THE CONFESSION IS suspect, the curtain does not fall, and the audience is embarrassed by the continuing self-absorption of a political hypochondriac too comfortably distant from death...
...happily for them, the media aren't present, sparing liberal New Yorkers the curious spectacle of a mayor using racism to defend affirmative action...
...Mr...
...Just look at the opposition...
...He won't bother, and he'll win anyway...
...A poor parody of Evita, Koch remains on stage and is running again, saying he's kept his promise...
...I'll get a better job, but you'll never get a better mayor...
...What's interesting, perhaps redemptive in all this is that it hasn't much to do with the political calculus guiding Koch's post-1973 career...
...He is generally thought to have lived up to it...
...Since even the most modest liberal redistributive compromises are often extracted disproportionately from the struggling middle class, they are ultimately no more successful than demagoguery...
...Koch IS TIRED OF HIS JOB for another reason...
...as Charles Morris has written, a city antipoverty program makes about as much sense as a municipal space program, and there is a difference between cleaning the streets and siting a public housing project in a middle-class neighborhood...
Vol. 32 • July 1985 • No. 3
