August 12, 2006
Big City, Small World II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:20 PM EST I agree with Joshua Zeitz that Herman Badillo’s best chance to be elected mayor of New York was in 1969. And I agree that he would have been had it not been for Norman Mailer. (Badillo agrees with that assessment, by the way.) Mailer’s ego trip masquerading as a political campaign took just enough votes away from Badillo to give Mario Procaccino the edge. Whatever his talents as a novelist, Norman Mailer has a place right next to Bella Abzug in my personal Hall of Human Horror Stories. At least Ms. Abzug never stabbed her spouse or campaigned—successfully, alas—to spring a homicidal sociopath from jail so that he could murder yet again. In 1973 Badillo came in second and forced a run-off with Abe Beame, who won. A card-carrying member of the city political establishment, Beame just continued fiscal business as usual until the banks—intervening like a family with an alcoholic—finally said no more borrowing. I also agree that John Lindsay was as incompetent as he was handsome. However, he at least had the saving grace of wit now and then. When a reporter asked him about a slightly politically embarrassing remark that his wife, Mary, had made, Lindsay just shrugged and said, “Bedfellows make strange politics.” About all I remember of Mario Procaccino is a New Yorker cartoon that summer of 1969 showing two businessmen walking down a Midtown avenue. A few blocks away King Kong is raging through the streets ripping skyscrapers out by the roots. “That does it!,” says one of the businessmen. “I’m voting for Procaccino.”
I didn’t know that he coined the term “limousine liberal.” It was a prescient remark, for that’s about the only kind of liberal left these days. It is interesting that Joe Lieberman took 55 percent of the votes in working class Stamford, while Lamont took 68 percent in superaffluent Greenwich next door. Much of the trouble of modern-day liberalism, I think, is that so many of its adherents live, both intellectually and often physically, in gated communities. They genuinely want to help the poor and the downtrodden; they just don’t care to actually encounter any of them. Spending a summer in the South Bronx, Bed-Stuy, East Harlem, and Corona would be an enlightening experience for them. But, alas, they go to the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, and the Cape instead.
As for my becoming a fabulously wealthy PR man, while I could accept the burdens of being fabulously wealthy with my customary good grace, I prefer writing history to writing press releases. History after all deals with the truth.
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