August 12, 2006
Mayor Lindsay and Me Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:00 PM EST Like Josh Zeitz, I was startled to learn that John Steele Gordon had been Herman Badillo’s press secretary in 1977, and I was intrigued by both posts. Josh’s post brings back a buried memory, for one of the events he discusses, the 1969 campaign between Lindsay, Procaccino, Marchi, and Mailer, was the only political campaign I’ve ever worked on. I find Josh’s post chastening, although in my defense, I was still a couple of weeks shy of my eighteenth birthday, so perhaps I can plead that I was not yet responsible for my actions. A friend at college in Manhattan had been recruited to work for Lindsay, he recruited me, and we were working for an advertising executive who was running Lindsay’s dirty tricks department. The only such trick I remember was a box of adhesive posters, smaller than bumper stickers but made of the same materials, each with a white letter i on a blue background. These were made to be placed over the letter e in the third word printed on Procaccino’s white-on-blue larger posters, which adorned buses, so after the alteration those posters read “For a Bitter New York for Everyone: Vote for Mario Procaccino.” I do not remember if the people who did this had to break into the city’s bus depots or were let in by a city employee. I somehow suspect the latter. At the age of 17 this struck me as a startlingly witty piece of invaluable political theater. We all “knew” that Mario Procaccino was a racist conservative, and we all “knew” that the handsome, classy Lindsay was a real liberal and the sort of gent you wanted running a city. I have no idea why we thought we knew either of these things, since on the strength of John and Josh, who rarely agree but in this case do, Lindsay had no more gift for being mayor of New York than he would have had for planning the logistics for Overlord. But I was certain enough about what thought I knew to commit what were admittedly petty crimes (conspiracy to commit vandalism?) on John Lindsay’s behalf. This makes me think a bit about politics in general. If in the fall of 1969 you had told me that my support for Lindsay, the son of a lawyer and investment banker, educated at the Buckley School, St. Paul’s, Yale (Scroll and Key) and Yale Law, was to a real degree predicated on the same basis that mid-nineteenth-century French peasants voted for the chap in the chateau—social deference to a local notable we had mistaken for our natural leader—I’d have been first baffled, then enraged, but I wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on. To a greater degree, my contempt for Procaccino was predicated on the same basis on which eighteenth-century Parisian mobs thought that Marie Antoinette was a bisexual whore who controlled the cuckold king in the interests of an enemy state, or pro-Vichy Frenchmen thought that Jews and Freemasons led by the Jew Roosevelt were on a campaign to mongrelize and defile France, which is to say scurrilities spread by rumor, without a scrap of reliable evidence. The difference, I think, is not to my credit. Unlike those eighteenth-century Parisians or twentieth-century Vichy partisans, in 1969 I was both highly literate and able to consult a very free press. Growing up and taking those how-a-bill-becomes-a-law classes in grade school, I got the reassuring impression that democratic politics worked because rational agents consult the available evidence and after mature deliberation reach reasonable conclusions. How much democratic politics works that way seems open to dispute. Every so often I read something by apparently competent political scientists arguing, with some evidence, that very large numbers of citizens make political decisions with the same exhaustive deliberation I displayed in the fall of 1969. Then I banish those arguments, and that evidence, from my mind. They are apparently too disconcerting to happily retain. When I do remember them, I fall back on Churchill’s reflection that electoral democracy is the least defensible system of governance we know about—except for all the others.
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