Mayor Koch's wrinkled brow - Edward I. Koch, New York - column

National Review, March 10, 1989 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

EDWARD KOCH is clearly distracted, as one must assume he will continue to be for much of the time between now and the New York mayoral primaries in September, when it will be decided whether he will have critical endorsement for a fourth term. His problems are, really, three. In the first place, New York after a while tires of everyone, and Ed Koch has been in Gracie Mansion for about as long as 42nd Street was on Broadway, and it closed, finally, last month. Second, he has been surrounded by chiselers. Municipal graft is as America as apple pie, but although no one has laid a finger on Ed Koch, whose personal habits have always been conspicuously frugal, he is held responsible for the density of graft among his backers and associates, some of whom escaped conviction by a hair's breadth.

But above all, Koch faces the determination of the black community and the Left-Jewish community to punish him for his chrarcteristically frank rejection of Jesse Jackson in the primary last spring, when Rabbi Koch lectured his fellow Jews to the effect that they would be crazy to vote for Jesse Jackson. Since a fair number of them proceeded to do so, they are determined to go after the man who called them crazy. Ed Koch saw that what he had done had hurt him greatly in the polls and accordingly retreated, with an endearing simplicity, from the formulation he had usedthough not from the substance of his case against Jackson. But this has not served to shrive him. "They" are going after him.

Now, it makes a great deal of difference to Koch, as it does to New York City, whether the contest shapes up as a Test of Toleration. Professor Arthur Schlesinger, who is the arbiter elegantiae of liberal fashion, wrote a few months ago that only bigots would vote against Jesse Jackson. If that were true, the nation is very full of bigots. But since in New York the thing most feared in life, outside of a few enclaves in Queens and Staten Island, is to be called a bigot, the danger is that the voters will come out against Koch so that they can look in the mirror at night and see not a trace of bigotry. In fact when a campaign is set up on that basis, bigotry is inevitably encouraged, even as it was in Chicago when Harold Washington was elected mayor notwithstanding his conspicuous disqualifications, as a convicted felon among others (the day after his election, someone hung a sign outside Chicago's city jail: "Washington Slept Here"). Koch makes the point persuasively that a fight to succeed him shouldn't be a fight to bring in as mayor someone who is black for that reason only. And he further argues that others running in the Democratic primary should declare themselves on this major point by announcing that if Koch wins the primary, they will support him.

Meanwhile, Ed Koch the liberal reformer has, inevitably, learned from his many experiences. Recently he was visited by Bishop Paul Moore, the reigning Episcopal loony in New York, who demanded that Mr. Koch receive the bishop and his delegation to talk about the plight of the homeless. The bishop arrived with many times the pre-stipulated number of accompanists, and it made no difference that Mayor Koch explained to them a five-yearold program to try to cope with the homeless, the protests were already written out, and were handed to the press. Among the bishop's demands were that Mayor Koch find separate apartments for single people who were homeless. No, said Koch, for them we have dormitories. The bishop found this utterly humiliating, which will surprise anyone who has ever served in the army or has been interned in a boarding school. While fighting to make room for the homeless, the mayor faces a $400million reduction in the city's share of the state tax pool, a tribute to the extravagance of Governor Cuomo, who is a wonderful manager in the same way that Michael Dukakis is a wonderful manager. Both their states are going broke.

It is in his nature to head to where the protestors gather, in order to talk to them. But nowadays Ed Koch, Reformer, makes a simple stipulation. Either the protestors will talk, or else they will scream and yell. If the latter, the mayor shrugs his shoulders