What Does a Huge Win by de Blasio Portend?

If you haven't been following New York City's mayor race all you need to know is that a progressive Democrat, Bill de Blasio, an advocate for the Sandinistas in his youth, is poised to wallop the Republican candidate, Joe Lhota, by a margin not seen since Ed Koch won his third term in 1985 by 68 percentage points. De Blasio will be the first Democrat elected mayor since David Dinkins in 1989 (when I lived in the Big Apple).

Here's a good snapshot of the race from this morning's story, "De Blasio in Position to Win Mayor’s Race by Historic Margin, Poll Shows," by David Chen and Megan Thee-Brenan:

Mr. de Blasio won the Democratic primary by running as the most liberal of the major candidates in the field; he has proposed raising taxes on high-income New Yorkers and has supported greater oversight of the Police Department. Nonetheless, one in five Republicans are supporting him for mayor, suggesting in follow-up interviews that they are looking for change after eight years with Rudolph W. Giuliani as mayor followed by 12 years with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. 

“I think de Blasio’s policies will be a change for the better from the Bloomberg era,” said Duane Dowden, a 33-year-old Brooklyn Republican who is a student in social work. Oswald Ramotar, a 51-year-old Queens Republican, agreed, saying, “I’m voting for de Blasio because I think he would bring better changes than Lhota would, like creating more jobs.” And Erick Washington, a 59-year-old Brooklyn Republican, said, “I’m not voting for Lhota because I feel that would be the same as voting for the Giuliani administration.”

Exhaustion with twenty years of Republican executive leadership is not the only issue motivating New Yorkers; the recent Tea Party contrived federal government shutdown is also a factor: "The recent federal government shutdown did not help Mr. Lhota: 47 percent of likely voters said that the shutdown made them more likely to vote for a Democrat, while only 6 percent said it prompted them to back a Republican."

To find answers as to how de Blasio's New York City strength plays nationally check out Thomas Edsall's opinion piece from last week, "Bill de Blasio and the New Urban Populism." As I've said frequently, Thomas Edsall's online column for the New York Times is one of the best sources available for divining the shifts underway in our national politics. I don't always agree with his conclusions and forecasts, but I think that his chosen areas of focus -- income inequality, the gradual diminishing of whites to minority status in the electorate, the war in the GOP between organizational elites and the Tea Party -- are on the money.

Speaking of money, the money passage in Edsall's column on the New York City mayoral election is as follows:

DEMOGRAPHICALLY, New York City is already where the nation will be sometime in the latter part of this century. Whites are 33.3 percent of the city’s population. Hispanics are close behind, at 28.6 percent, and blacks are at 22.8 percent. This demographic profile,as shown in Figure 2, is significantly different from what it was 1990, a year after the last mayoral victory by a liberal Democrat, David Dinkins. In 1990, whites were the clearly dominant plurality group at 43.2 percent, with roughly equal numbers of blacks, 25.2 percent, and Hispanics, 24.4 percent. 

More important in terms of both election outcomes and policy making, the city’s electorate – the people who actually go out and cast ballots – shifted from a 56 percent white majority in 1989 to a 46 percent minority in 2009, during the last mayoral election. If that transition continues at roughly the same rate, about 1 percentage point every two years, the 2013 electorate for the mayoral election will be 44 percent white. 

Among the reasons the electorate in New York has a higher percentage of whites and a smaller proportion of minorities than the city’s population as a whole is that a higher percentage of whites are of voting age and a higher percentage of minorities are not citizens and are thus ineligible to vote.

As whiteness evaporates nationally the country will become more progressive. Why? Because blacks and Hispanics are not as reflexively conservative and individualistic as whites:

By almost every measure, whites are more economically conservative than blacks and Hispanics. Surveys conducted over 36 years by American National Election Studies have found that blacks, by margins of 2 or 3 to 1, believe that government should “see to it that every person has a job and a good standard of living,” while whites, by margins nearly as large, believe that “government should just let each person get ahead on their own.”

The A.N.E.S. surveys did not break out Hispanic responses to this question. A Pew Research Center report from April 2012, “Hispanics and Their Views of Identity,” did compare the views of Latinos to the general population. It asked the question “would you rather have a smaller government providing fewer services, or bigger government providing more services?” A majority of all voters favored smaller government by a 48-41 margin, but Hispanics preferred a bigger government decisively, by 75 to 19 percent. 

There is a fundamental disagreement along racial and ethnic lines about what causes poverty. This is demonstrated in a June 2012 Pew survey that asked, “In your opinion, which is generally more often to blame if a person is poor, lack of effort on his or her own part, or circumstances beyond his or her control?” Whites were split, 41-41, but strong majorities of blacks and Hispanics answered “circumstances beyond his or her control,” 62-28 and 59-27, respectively. The premise of the de Blasio agenda is that people are poor because of circumstances beyond their control and therefore government intervention is essential. How you responded to the Pew question is likely to correlate strongly with whether you support or oppose de Blasio and how deeply felt your choice is.

The Supreme Court rulings on campaign finance -- the 2010 Citizens United decision, the upcoming decision on Buckley -- as well as its striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are attempts to keep the progressive hordes at bay. But the progressive hordes are coming. They already elected an Obama twice. And even though Obama governs as a Clinton New Democrat he campaigned and won his elections as a progressive.

Edsall sees trouble ahead for the Democrats. He thinks that while there is a fraction of wealthy progressives who will stick with a de Blasio progressive Democrat through thick and thin even when he raises their taxes substantially, soon down the road as the national Democratic Party tilts more and more to the left the wealthy will abandon the organization:

In addition to the growing leverage of minority and low-income voters in the Democratic Party, the center-left coalition includes many upscale, well-educated social liberals, who have found common ground with their less fortunate allies in shared animosity toward the Republican Party. 

The stronger the pro-government poor-to-lower-middle class wing gets, the more likely the coalition will fracture along class and economic fault lines. 

As many affluent progressive-leaning voters move to the suburbs (by 2010 New York lost 129,165 residents who had been between the ages 25 and 34 in 2000), have children, buy homes and pay significant property taxes, they are more likely to join the ranks of those who oppose a political party that seeks to increase their tax burdens. They will become legitimate targets for recruitment by a Republican Party that is reasonably conservative — if that stops being an oxymoron. 

Will de Blasio and the new urban populism alienate the party’s upscale wing? In New York and other major American cities, there are many affluent liberals who are willing to support policies redistributing their income to those struggling to make ends meet. But they don’t make up a majority of the affluent voters who are currently alienated by Republican extremism — and these voters are an essential component of the coalition Democratic strategists plan to use to map out their political future. The growing leftward tilt of the national Democratic Party reflected in political trends in New York is as likely to provoke intraparty conflict as it is to usher in an era of revived liberalism. There are risks and benefits to standing foursquare in support of the least advantaged.

I think, yes, Edsall is right. Intraparty conflict is coming down the pike, much as it is the norm now in the Republican Party. It will be on display as Hillary gears up for a run in 2016. The organizational elite will trot out corporate Democrats who are progressive on social issues like gay marriage -- look at Seattle's mayoral race -- but hew to the same old exhausted neoliberal nostrums. At best this is only a strategy that buys a bit of time. Change is coming. The current paradigm is broken; we need a shift.

Tawana Brawley Retrospective + Lemonheads' Creator

The day after famous former mayor of New York City and confirmed bachelor Ed Koch died I read his obituary and posted my comments, which drew attention to the Tawana Brawley controversy as a factor in Koch's failure to win a fourth term.

The other day a video -- decent, but not stellar -- was posted on the New York Times web site recapping the case. It's the twenty-fifth anniversary. The video, which is 14 minutes, is heavy on the investigation and on the incendiary aspects of some of Al Sharpton's statements and light on the social milieu that produced all the race crimes; it doesn't even mention the murder of Yusuf Hawkins.

The archive-project post from this past Sunday was written at a time when Tawana Brawley was probably on the television in the next room. At the time I was addicted to the Lemonheads' Creator (1988). Here's "Postcard," with Ben Deily on vocals:

Ed Koch is Dead

Ed Koch, the famous confirmed bachelor and former three-term mayor of New York City, died early Friday morning at Columbia-Presbyterian. In reading the lengthy obit by Robert McFadden the role of the shooting death of black teen Yusuf Hawkins a month before the 1989 Democratic primary is cited as a factor in Koch's loss to David Dinkins.

As residents of the East Bay for the five years prior, and therefore not unfamiliar with black-on-white animosity, my wife and I arrived in New York City the summer of 1988 at the height of the Tawana Brawley case.

Though Tawana Brawley's alleged rape took place in Wappingers Falls 75 miles up the Hudson from New York City, it played out every night on the local news and on the streets of the five boroughs. Al Sharpton, along with lawyers Maddox and Mason, represented Brawley and argued her case in televised jousts with Attorney General Robert Abrams. It was intense. And the way that it was presented you found yourself having to choose sides. And what made it more intense is that it came on the heels of Howard Beach.

Then after Howard Beach and Tawana Brawley you had Bensonhurst and Yusuf Hawkins. And that was it for me. Teenage kids who go to look at a used car should not be beaten with baseball bats and shot to death as Yusuf Hawkins was. Sharpton helped organize a public response in all three cases.

Koch was a shrill, acidic, pompous Bozo who ruthlessly attacked any critic of the city. Maybe he hadn't always been this way. Certainly 12 years in elected office, let alone mayor of New York City, could embitter anyone. But the Ed Koch I saw in 1988 and 1989 was offensive, and I was glad to see him go and Dinkins take over. One could argue that it was Al Sharpton who cost Koch his fourth term as mayor.

Joe Nocera's column today looks at Koch through the lens of the recently released Neil Barsky documentary Koch. Nocera sees the strength of Koch's three terms in the housing built in the city:

What was most striking about “Koch,” however, was the extent to which, for Hizzoner, it was always about, well, Ed Koch. He needlessly picks fights, calling people “schmucks” and “idiots” when they disagreed with him. He takes actions designed to win him praise in the media. One of his former aides recalls him saying, after reading the paper, that nothing of note had happened that day. What he meant was that he wasn’t mentioned. “How’m I doin’?” wasn’t just a trademark phrase; it was an expression of a deep psychological need. On the other hand, if that is what drove him to spend $5 billion on new housing, who can complain?

The last few years the only time I saw Koch on TV -- then again I largely stopped watching television news about three years ago -- was when he was acting as an automatic apologist for whatever Israeli act of aggression was being debated at the moment.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #1

Prior to the Internet communication at a distance was for most either telephonic or epistolary. Since coast-to-coast calls were pricey, and because I liked to drink and type, I preferred writing letters.

My ex-wife and I moved to New York City in the summer of 1988 so she could attend medical school. We drove across the continent in a 1971 VW bus, leaving Berkeley at the end of July and stopping off in Reno to get married in a commercial wedding chapel; we did this in order to qualify for the married student housing provided by Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

While she was in class during the day I worked a series of dead-end clerical jobs downtown. In the evenings she would hit the textbooks sitting at her big metal desk in one corner of the living room and I would sit not too far away in front of an AT&T personal computer and drink beer and type letters (using WordPerfect word-processing software) to friends on the West Coast.

It was an interesting time politically and socially in the city. Mayor Koch held shrill, haranguing press conferences that seemed to be on the TV local news every night. I had never seen anything like it. Crack cocaine, which had started on the West Coast, was beginning to flourish in Upper Manhattan.

The complex of buildings which made up the medical school spread west from Broadway down to Riverside Drive and the Henry Hudson Parkway; it was a relatively safe area compared to other parts of Washington Heights.

There was a large men's shelter on 168th Street across from the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital emergency room. One evening our first summer in Manhattan when we were returning from downtown with some good friends who were visiting from Berkeley we came upon a guy stretched out flat on his back on the sidewalk in front of the men's shelter a big knot the size of large egg growing out of the top of his forehead just like you see in old Warner Brothers cartoons. His pants pockets were turned inside out and he was moaning. I remember thinking, "Oh, this is what is normal here." I guess it was a Friday, a payday, and this guy, an older black man, had been rolled. Someone ran across the street to the ER to get help.

By the time I typed the epistle below to my friend back in Oakland I had been a year and a half in New York City. I was an old salty dog compared to the newlywed who had arrived with his bride in a beat-up Volkswagen with a "The Strength of the Brave is the Tribe" bumper sticker. Koch was gone, dethroned by David Dinkins in a bitter campaign.

Why post old letters? What's the point? I think there is a historical value, not only to provide social insight into what life was like before the advent of the World Wide Web but also as a project of personal illumination; it was a prime motivator to start a blog in the first place, knowing I had all these heartfelt missives of a young man's first contact with the megalopolis. So bear with me.

I had a bad habit of not dating my letters. When my wife and I split and she got the computer I had the good sense to print hard copies of all my correspondence; I scribbled in pencil on top of each letter the approximate time that it was written. The one below reads "Winter 1990." If my memory serves me it was late January, the week leading up to the Super Bowl in New Orleans. How fitting. As you can see I was enamored, as are most schoolboys and hipsters, with Jack Kerouac.

Winter 1990

Ben,

Thanks for the parcel! I just polished it off tonight -- plenty good. As it turns out, Ginsberg's introduction to my McGraw-Hill paperback edition of VISIONS OF CODY, entitled "The Great Remember," is a cleaned up cut down and commercialized rendering of THE VISIONS OF THE GREAT REMEMBERER.

I liked the introduction a lot, rereading it twice; but, needless to say, it doesn't come close to doing the things that the Denver-set (early 70s Ginsberg going back to old haunts of the late 40s, all torn down) ampersand-ridden plaintively analytic prosepoesy original does; -- in particular, the last two pages: a discription of the 1967 meeting between Kerouac Cassady Kesey and the Merry Pranksters "all together at last under unofficial mock but real Klieg Lights with microphone reverb feedback wires snaking all over the electrified household living room floor 86th St. upper east side -- An American Flag draped over the couch, on which shocked Jack refused to sit -- Kesey respectful welcoming & silent, fatherly timid host, myself marveling and sad, it was all out of my hands now, History was even out of Jack's hands now, he'd already written it 15 years before, he could only watch hopelessly one of his more magically colored prophecy shows, the Hope Show of Ghost Wisdoms made Modern Chemical & Mechanic, in this Kali Yuga, he knew the worser death gloom to come, already on him in his alcohol ridden trembling no longer sexually tender looking corpus" wow! that says it all. But Ginsberg doesn't stop there; he goes on to talk about the last words of VISIONS OF CODY -- "Adios, King." -- (the ending of VISIONS OF CODY is probably the greatest ending of any book I've ever read; if you'd permit me the last three sentences: "Goodbye Cody -- your lips in your moments of self-possessed thought and new found responsible goodness are as silent, make as least a noise, and mystify with sense in nature like the light of an automobile reflecting from the shiny silverpaint of a sidewalk tank this very instant, as silent and all this, as a bird crossing the dawn in search of the mountain cross and the sea beyond the city at the end of the land. Adios,  you who watched the sun go down, at the rail, by my side, smiling -- Adios, King." Ouch, it makes me cry; it makes me feel proud for having chosen such a true hero to be my hero). And, once again, Ginsberg is right on top of it(he really must've loved him) and says exactly what should be said, namely, "'Adios King!' . . . a nameless highest Perfect wisdom, a humility in the face of 'the necessary blankness of men' in hopeless America or hopeless World, or Hopeless Time Heaven  . . . a compassionate farewell to Love & the Companion" -- yep, that's it. Thanks again Ben.

The letters included in THE VISIONS OF THE GREAT REMEMBERER are pretty good too. Ginsberg's wordy intellectual bitchy 1947 ultimatum love letter to heterosexually-prone Cassady is something else (embarrassing) . Cassady's letters, a total of four, are better -- more informative; a lot of 'em are about
the difficulty he has with writing and about his mind becoming empty from smoking too much weed; in the last letter, written in 1952, he waxes about the sane staid masculine beauty of Kerouac, something I'm not used to, seeing it's usually Kerouac who's saying it about Cassady.

Well, let's see, what's new to report. -- I quit my job two weeks ago, and Colum, who has been around for most of January, left for Guatemala on Monday, and shit I guess the 49ers are buying beers on Bourbon Street. (I wouldn't mind buying a beer for Terry Bradshaw; he's absolutely right -- fuck Elway, he's a fucking shit-assed brat sequestered and protected in Ginsberg's aptly perceived sterile and commercial war-machine Denver (it's true, I've driven through Denver, right through, and you know where I ended up? at the gates of a big military base -- big cyclone barbwire fence -- that borders the suburbs, in fact the suburbs blend into the military base, very scary; I was promptly told by a fatigued and helmeted pimple-faced corporal to turn my Volks around and go back whence I came); and I was thinking last night while watching the 11 o'clock news that if you had to characterize Bradshaw's heart/soul it'd be a football field, while if you had to do the same for Elway it'd be an egg carton -- really, I mean come on, at least Bradshaw, a four-rin€ged hall of famer who has nothing to gain and everything to lose (i.e., his CBS job) by shooting off his mouth, has the juevos to get drunk and speak his honest mind, giving the reporters something real to talk about: that there's no comparison between a Montana and an Elway, that it's all a con job, that Elway is not fit to lace Montana's cleats. 'Nuff said. It'll all be old news by the time you get this anyway. (Niners over Denver 37-12, my prediction; and I'm mailing this tomorrow, the 26th, so it's on the up and up.)

The night of the day after I quit my job I got on the A train at West 4th Street. Colum and I had been at a boring bar on Bleecker Street. Colum had had two beers -- a Molson and a Becks -- I had had a Guinness Stout and a Jack Daniels. I got on the uptown A and Colum was over on the other side of the track getting on the downtown A. At 14th street a guy got on, a kid, probably about 20 years of age, blood spots on his dirty warm-up pants and grease under his fingernails. I thought I recognized him from somewhere before, maybe a long lost cousin: thick brown-blond hair complete with sprinkles of dirt pebbles and crums from the hot dog bun. He sat down next to me, right next to me -- on purpose, I thoug€ht. The train shook uptown. He was right next to me; I felt him there --a young tough, a white hispanic cousin; I loved him.
At 81st street he asked for the time. I told him, coldly. He was warm, but I was cold.

At 125th Street he pulled a thick gold chain out of his parka pocket, a gold pendant was attached to it; he turned and asked me if I thought the pendant was gold. I told him, "I don't know. Is it heavy?"

"Why, is gold supposed to be heavy?"

"Yeah."

He moved the necklace up and down in his upturned palm.

"I thought gold was soft and light."

He handed it over to me; it was an ugly barbaric fucking butter yellow rope; I took it and said, "No, soft and
heavy."

I lifted it a few times and then told him, "The chain's probably gold, but I doubt this is," pointing to the pendant.

"Really? I thought gold was supposed to be light," he repeated.

"I don't think so. But I guess I can't really say for sure."

At that point he dropped his handsome young urban elf jaw down to my left hand and the wedding band thereon. All of sudden I started to worry that he was going to roll me for my ring (ugh, small petty refractory city-dwelling paranoia rearing its knobby head), that the necklace chat was just a set up to get me comfortable so that he could bonk me on the skull and run off with the goods. But I decided that I'd rather do battle with a long lost cousin (I was bigger and feeling surly with bourbon on breath and under brow, though weapons hidden in his parka weren't out of the question) than cower to my own inner illnesses.

So I took off my wedding ring and said, "I don't know; this is gold, but it's too small for me to tell whether it feels heavy for its size."

"How much did it cost you?" 

"Sixty I think."

"Something like that must have a lot of personal value though."

"Sure."

And that was it; we were already at 168th street. Both of us got out. He gave me a respectful "Take care," and I returned him a dutiful "You too."

I loved him because he was me. All that fear and for what? Nothing; it was just me. At least I had given him/myself some hardheart advice though when I admitted that I just didn't know (which is the hardest thing to admit to anyone, anytime, anywhere).

I left the subway station and walked home down deserted inky streets, rats whispering in shadows.

Earlier that evening I had heard a fat woman mumble over a platter of chicken tandoori that "It's not a question of craving, it's a question of time." At first I'd thought that she was discoursing on artistic production or philosophical ontology but then I figured out that what she was really talking about was dieting. Oh my gosh, it's all the same.