[Mb-civic] New York is about to play host to an alien species

Mon Aug 23 12:27:10 PDT 2004

 Articles by subject: Topics: US Election 2004

UNITED STATES

 Lexington 

Red alert

Aug 19th 2004 
>From The Economist print edition

New York is about to play host to an alien species

IN THE last week of August, New Yorkers will leave their city in droves.
This is not because they fear that the Republican convention will provide a
lure for terrorists. The real reason is an even greater fear: meeting a
Republican.

 Although America has two large political parties, each with about half of
all eligible voters, New York City falls almost entirely into the Democratic
camp. One in eight voters registers as Republican and, despite the meagre
number, this vastly overstates their significance. Only three of the 51 city
council members are Republican, plus two of 65 state assembly members and
one of the 14 congressmen. Staten Island, the city's smallest borough, is
perceived by the rest of the city to be a Republican refuge, but even in
this stronghold they amount to little more than one-third of the voters.

 This antipathy toward Republicans is not new. Since the second world war,
Republicans have sent to the White House two George Bushes, Ronald Reagan,
Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower. None won New York City's
vote. The last Republican to do so was Calvin Coolidge, whose legacy was the
economic bubble leading to the Depression.

 Being a New Yorker was never any help in gaining the city's approval.
Thomas Dewey achieved fame for bravely prosecuting local mobsters and then
served ably as governor; he lost the city's vote to Missouri's Harry Truman.
Dwight Eisenhower led the Allied forces to victory in 1945 and then became
president of Columbia University on Manhattan's Upper West Side (though some
say that this was a mistake, and that the illustrissimi of the university
had meant to dial up his brother Milton instead); after going on sabbatical,
he was drafted to run for the White House, but New Yorkers voted for Adlai
Stevenson of Illinois. When Nixon returned from Washington, he failed to
persuade even the board of an apartment building to approve his residency.
He subsequently moved (kiss of death!) to New Jersey.

 How the Republicans found themselves in this wretched state dates back to
the party's founding 150 years ago, and reflects its virtues at least as
much as its failures. The party was started with vital backing from a number
of New Yorkers, including Horace Greeley, the editor of the Tribune; its
creed was anti-slavery, and the city's Republicans provided the crucial
platform in 1860 for Abraham Lincoln's famous speech at Cooper Union. ³Let
us have faith that right makes might,² intoned Lincoln, in words that would
capture the heart of the nation. But not New York, at least back then. In
the election that followed, Lincoln was trounced in the city by a Democratic
opponent, Stephen Douglas, who championed a more nuanced approach to slavery
that let states set moral standards of their own. In 1863, the Emancipation
Proclamation was put into effect, declaring that ³all persons held as slaves
are, and henceforward shall be free.² The signatories were Lincoln and his
secretary of state, William Seward, a New York Republican. New Yorkers were
not impressed by this, nor by a forced draft, and riots ensued.

 For much of the 19th and 20th centuries the city's local politics were
dominated by Tammany Hall, as the local Democratic organisation was known,
which provided modest services for the poor in exchange for votes and at the
cost of massive corruption. Typically, when Republican mayors have managed
to come to power, it has been because their independence provides them with
some credibility in promising reform and taming big government. This has
been the case with both the current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and his
predecessor Rudolph Giuliani (both former Democrats). The problem with
independence, however, is that it does not lead to a large, enduring
organisation. Neither man created a machine to register new voters and
support new candidates, let alone hand out patronage jobs. Mr Giuliani has
gone on to defend in public the foreign policy of the Bush administration.
Anywhere else, local Republican support for a Republican president would
seem to be inevitable. In New York, it has been front-page news.

Rockefeller's legacy

If independence has done little to build a large vibrant party, playing to
the crowd has proved to be even worse for both the city and the party. In
the 1960s, Mayor John Lindsay and Governor Nelson Rockefeller drew
Democratic votes by loving big government as much as any Democrat. Their
legacies include massive construction programmes for housing, highways and
higher education; huge pension obligations to public employees; the highest
minimum wage in the country; vast entitlement programmes; and an
extraordinarily sophisticated approach to municipal finance through a
Byzantine network of semi-autonomous agencies that allows the surreptitious
issuance of ever more debt. After their spells in power, both city and state
had become financial basket-cases. Ruinously high taxes undermined the
solvency of businesses. Jobs disappeared. Growth expired. Worse still,
Republicanism ceased to be ideologically distinctive. Not surprisingly, both
men are remembered fondly by many Democrats.

 Given the sorry record, many think it is a huge mistake for the Republicans
to have chosen New York for their convention. This, however, ignores how
much politics has become a business of expectations. If John Kerry got
little bounce from having his convention in Boston, it is because he had
long since been crowned a local prince. There was no bounce to get. In Mr
Bush's case, expectations are so low that they can only be exceeded. If the
president finds one New Yorker who, unable to catch a ride out of town,
discovers that Republicans are not only human, but likeable, it will be one
more vote than history would suggest he could get. If he does not, he can
console himself that even his most illustrious predecessors did no better.