Mayor Daley Is Alive and Well in N.Y.C

Newfield, Jack, The Nation

MAYOR DALEY IS ALIVE AND WELL IN N.Y.C.

New York City's corruption scandals are now intheir second year. A borough president has committed suicide. A city official has been convicted of taking bribes next to the urinals of the best yuppie restaurants. A failed quack sex therapist has admitted to being a bagman. A Democratic Party leader has been revealed to be an intimate friend of a mobster who murdered a police officer. A former Miss America has taken the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions about how her lover obtained $150 million in city contracts. The crime rate among Democratic Party bosses in New York, 50 percent, is now higher than for any other identifiable grouping in the world.

The time has come to try to understand how itcame to pass that a "reform' Mayor has presided over a government that resembles a parody of Dallas or Dynasty, and to suggest a few remedies to the chronic corruption that has afflicted one-party cities like Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey.

Since the age of television and the rise ofmedia consultants like David Garth, political scientists have been composing the epitaph for big-city political machines. But at least in New York the machine has proved to be durable and adaptable. It elected Edward Koch as Mayor in 1977, and its alliance with City Hall is the principal cause of the present scandals.

Koch announced his candidacy for Mayor asan underdog reformer. He campaigned against the machine and for the death penalty, a double message that helped him win Manhattan and the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. His slogan was, "After eight years of charisma [John Lindsay] and four years of the clubhouse [Abraham Beame], why not try competence?'

The machine backed Beame, but Beame finished thirdand there was a runoff between Koch and Mario Cuomo. Party bosses. They all endorsed him in exchange for promises of patronage and access, and Koch defeated Cuomo.

The machine made Kochcome to it even after it had backed the losing candidate, because the machine is an infrastructure of permanent institutions. It contains law firms, landlords who make contributions, judges who channel judicial patronage to clubhouse lawyers, printing companies that get all the petition and literature business, community newspapers that receive judicial advertising, and friendly unions. In the Bronx, it controls the community school boards and picks principals on the basis of politics, not education.

The machine is rooted in the values of power and greed,just as Wall Street is rooted in the values of greed and power. The inside traders in both subcultures are natural products of their environment.

Mario Cuomo refused to ask Brooklyn Democratic bossMeade Esposito for the machine's backing in 1977 because he understood that it would compromise the independence of any future government. Cuomo had a family, his religion, his law practice and a rich interior existence. He knew his …

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Publication information: Article title: Mayor Daley Is Alive and Well in N.Y.C. Contributors: Newfield, Jack - Author. Magazine title: The Nation. Volume: 244. Publication date: April 4, 1987. Page number: 417+. © 1999 The Nation Company L.P. COPYRIGHT 1987 Gale Group.

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