Outer circles - New York, New York conservative mayoral candidate George Marlin

National Review, July 5, 1993 by Richard Brookhiser

THE ONLY difference between David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani is the way they part their hair," says George Marlin, Conservative candidate for mayor of New York, speaking of the incumbent and his Republican-Liberal challenger.

Marlin, forty, parts his hair very strictly. He looks every inch an investment portfolio manager, which is what he is, and he is 6 feet 6 inches tall. When he was young he saw in the papers a picture of Dean Acheson, wearing a necktie puffed over the top of his vest, which so impressed Marlin that he wore his ties the same way--until he decided to run for mayor, when democracy obliged him to appear in two-piece suits.

The first speech of Marlin's campaign, after declaring his candidacy, was at a tiny public library in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Marlin's introducer told the audience that the candidate was Brooklyn born, but that he now lived in Queens--"He deserted us."

"But I haven't moved to Manhattan," Marlin pointed out when he began his remarks. Most Americans think of all New York as Hell, but, as in Hell, there are descending circles, and to residents of the outer boroughs, Manhattan is the circle where Satan dines with Brutus, Cassius, and Judas. For Marlin, Manhattan is specifically a symbol of ambitious bureaucrats and trend-surfing social engineers.

"What got me to run was a seventy-year-old grandmother, Mary Cummins, who looked Joe Fernandez in the face and said, I will not compromise with evil." By now, the showdown between Mrs. Cummins, chairman of the school board of District 24, and Joseph Fernandez, Chancellor of Schools, has become a tale told at campfires wherever social conservatives gather. Neither of the mayoral frontrunners, Marlin said, "came to the neighborhoods and said, I'm with you" when the fight was on. Marlin didn't have to go anywhere: he lives in District 24, and Mrs. Cummins seconded his nomination at the Conservative Party convention in May. "We spoke up and we won; we can take them on."

Marlin's second theme was dollars and cents--too many of them being scooped up by taxes. He called the roll of business taxes: the unincorporated business tax, the commercial rent tax, the sales tax, the hotel taxes that keep conventions away. In extreme cases, big business can wring abatements from City Hall; taxes hurt most the small business whose customers, especially in this part of Brooklyn, can cross the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and Staten Island, and do their shopping in Jersey.

Last came crime, which is former prosecutor Giuliani's strong suit. Marlin, the son and grandson of New York cops, believes Giuliani's reputation is undeserved; before the meeting, he told me that as a prosecutor Giuliani had been "a bully and a headline hunter." Why not put convicts in work gangs? he asked the audience at the library, getting his one burst of applause of the evening.

The Marlin speech is not a control panel of separate hot buttons. Marlin is an amateur student of city history-- he and journalist Joe Mysak are writing a book on the last century of New York politics--with a special interest in neighborhoods as a social unit. Neighborhoods like present-day Sunset Park are "economically poor, but not behaviorally poor"and even in economic terms, they are not destitute. Why? Culture and economics are "all interconnected. We are turning out cultural illiterates who don't have the ability to hold jobs. Every year we pay more to get less. This is the treadmill to oblivion." Liberals read "neighborhoods" as code for "whites," but that is not what Marlin means. Thirty-seven per cent of the city's Hispanics are evangelical Protestants; "that is where I intend to spend most of my time."

The present occupant of the treadmill to oblivion is Mayor David Dinkins. His notions of fiscal responsibility lurch between generous deals with the municipal unions, his main supporters, and complaints that Albany and Washington don't give him enough money. His record on race relations has been equally bleak. Last year saw a Dominican riot in Washington Heights, caused when a cop killed a popular local drug dealer (Dinkins paid for the drug dealer's funeral); the year before that was the black riot in Crown Heights, when mobs roamed the streets chanting "Heil Hitler" (Dinkins took three days to respond in full force); the year before that, blacks conducted a months-long boycott of a Korean fruit stand in Flatbush (Dinkins kept mum-one of the ringleaders of the boycott had been on his campaign payroll).

Dinkins's woes attracted City Council President Andrew Stein to the Democratic primary. With the help of Barbra Streisand and Frank Sinatra, Stein raised millions, and without anyone's help he spent them. But, apart from a few economic ideas borrowed from the Manhattan Institute, the local conservative think-tank, Stein's positions were little different from Dinkins's. By May, polls showed Stein trailing the mayor by 36 points, and he dropped out.

That left Giuliani. Four years ago, the former prosecutor, who had sent crooked borough presidents and high-flying arbitrageurs to the slammer, seemed like God. He campaigned like God, too, or at least like a Deist's version, keeping a profound silence on any issue save "lawr and order." With nothing else to go on, voters were guided by ethnic atavism: blacks went for Dinkins, white Catholics for Giuliani. Jews split. Giuliani lost by less than two percentage points.