William Kennedy's Greatest Game

Atlantic, The, February, 2002 by Thomas Mallon

One can only imagine what secret pleasure Michael Dukakis took from the defeat of Mark Green in New York's recent mayoral race. Another overage whiz kid who gives brains a bad name, Green ran a campaign of such spectacular, extended ineptitude that he has made Dukakis seem, in memory, a kind of FDR.

Even with his five-to-one Democratic advantage in voter registration, the unlamented Green—labeled "obnoxious" by that gold standard of abrasion, Ed Koch—couldn't make it in the absence of the old Democratic machine. There is now only a "coalition," and even that, politically, is hardly the "gorgeous mosaic" once invoked by Mayor David Dinkins. It's an ethnic-racial quilt that gets unraveled or repaired largely at the whim of Al Sharpton, an ever more respectable fraud who equals...

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