“There was a time when I thought I could win,” Fernando Ferrer is saying. “It was immediately after the primary. Sense of momentum. Our own internal polls had led me to believe it. The very quick coming together of the Democratic Party … .”
A few moments later, he adds: “It felt very good.”
Ferrer is sitting at his dining room table in the Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale. He was once the city's Great Latino Hope; a career politician whose rise mirrored the growth of the city's Hispanic community into a major ethnic bloc alongside blacks, Jews, and Italians, among others; a one-time shoe-shine boy who was expected to make history by becoming the city's first Puerto Rican mayor. But now he's alone, save for a reporter, his wife Aramina, who's carefully watching him speak, and his dog, Winston Churchill, who's far more preoccupied with getting taken for a walk than with his owner's barely-concealed swings of emotion.
Ferrer has invited the Prospect here for his first extensive interview in English since his landslide loss to Michael Bloomberg's $85-million campaign three months ago. Ferrer's case is this: Bloomberg's astronomical spending, left unchecked by the failure of the civic elites to seriously criticize those record expenditures, helped create an atmosphere in which press coverage of Ferrer's campaign was relentlessly, at times comically, unbalanced -- all but assuring that his historic candidacy was doomed to defeat. In the two-hour interview with the Prospect, Ferrer went considerably farther in criticizing coverage of the race than he did a few months back in a Spanish-language interview with El Diario that turned heads in New York political circles.
Indeed, asked by the Prospect to diagnose his loss, Ferrer for the first time singled out specific stories and editorial decisions by The New York Times, the New York Post, and the Daily News, which he says show that editors at these papers treated his campaign far more harshly than Bloomberg's. This is extraordinary, as losing candidates rarely offer specific after-the-fact analyses of their losses, particularly ones that include detailed criticism of specific media outlets. In the interview, Ferrer -- who was sharply criticized as a flawed candidate who had a major charisma deficit and committed many glaring missteps -- also shared new details about life inside the campaign and acknowledged that there were some things he could have done better. But he saved his harshest criticism for the press overage.
“Our campaigns were treated differently,” Ferrer says. “The press was more interested in atmospherics than policy. If I had changed the way I parted my hair, I would have to have had a full-blown press conference about it.”
Bloomberg's $85 million in campaign expenditures rendered the city's campaign finance system meaningless. One might have expected that this would have been unacceptable to the city politicos and civic groups who take pride in the system, one of the strictest in the nation. Yet many staunch defenders of the system -- the Times' editorial board, the civic group Citizens Union -- backed Bloomberg. Although such groups were careful to tsk-tsk a bit about Bloomberg's spending, their hand-wringing meant little, since it didn't cost Bloomberg their support, Ferrer argues.
“We have a campaign finance system that really is the envy of the nation,” Ferrer says. “The $85 million just blew up the platform for any kind of reasonable debate. I was astounded … the people who defend our campaign system the most vigorously were the ones who turned themselves into pretzels by tipping their hats to their previous statements while they endorsed Bloomberg.” Ferrer declined to name who he was referring to.
During the campaign, Ferrer says, the lopsided spending imbalance led to some black humor inside the Ferrer camp. For instance, Ferrer aides took to cracking jokes when they read accounts in newspapers of Bloomberg's big spending on things like food for his staff. “Every time we'd read one of those things about how many pizzas they ordered, we'd say ‘You think Bloomberg can send over the stuff they're throwing away?'” Ferrer says. He added that at one point, his top fundraiser, Leo Hindery, sent over about 10 dozen Krispy Kreme donuts as a way of poking fun at the Bloomberg expenditures and to right the caloric imbalance between the two camps.
But the Bloomberg spending onslaught also created strains in the Ferrer camp, Ferrer allows. For instance, he concedes that Bloomberg's well-funded opposition research team was very successful in getting the press to question every assertion Ferrer made. The result, Ferrer says, is that his aides would insist on getting ironclad proof of everything he wanted to say, no matter how inconsequential -- and while Ferrer agreed that his aides were right, it frustrated him that he had to provide proof of, say, long-ago details of his own life. For instance, Ferrer recalls, when he wanted to talk about his childhood shoe-shining, his aides said, “Can anybody come forward to say they saw you on the corner shining shoes?”
“They honestly asked me, ‘Do you have the shoe shine box?'” Ferrer says of his advisers with something approaching a laugh. “I said, ‘This is 45 years ago.'”
Some observers have argued that if Bloomberg's team was better at getting out its message than Ferrer's was, the blame lies with the Ferrer campaign. Counters Ferrer: “Did they do a much better job of getting their message out? Yes. But of course their principle was a fabulously wealthy man.”
“They had a 25 member oppo team,” Ferrer adds, referring to Bloomberg's opposition researchers. “Every day, we were answering questions that were essentially posed by Bloomberg's oppo staff. [Reporters] were reading [questions] off of opposition memos.”
Ferrer argues that the relentless pressure that the Bloomberg campaign's research operation brought to bear on the press set the tone for much of the coverage -- and that editors at the major newspapers were all too willing to let this pressure tip their coverage against him. “I have nothing against individual reporters,” Ferrer says. “What happened was the Bloomberg campaign shoved a daily load of opposition tidbits down the throats of everyone in the press until it was coming out of their ears. My campaign had to be completely defensive … The story got told their way.”
Ferrer points to several examples of what he sees as unbalanced converage. One he cites is a front-page New York Times piece headlined, “Clintons give Ferrer a hand while staying at arm's length.” The piece, which reported that the Clintons were subtly distancing themselves from Ferrer's floundering candidacy, infuriated some in Hillary's camp who argued that she'd done far more for Ferrer than any other Dem. And Ferrer points out that not a single Ferrer adviser or supporter was quoted complaining about the Clintons' supposed distance-keeping -- either on or off the record.
“How a piece like that [which] doesn't cite one shred of credible evidence makes it to the front page -- that's strictly an editorial decision,” Ferrer says. “It was incredible. Hillary called me about [the piece]. She says, ‘We're just amazed by this.'”
Another Times piece Ferrer denounces as grossly unfair was an August 2005 article that reported that investigators had looked into a former Ferrer associate who'd solicited contributions for Ferrer in exchange for promises of government contracts. Ferrer argues that a fair amount of the story was old news, that prosecutors had already concluded that none of the charges against the associate had anything to do with Ferrer, and that the supervising prosecutor gave a statement completely exonerating him, but The Times ran the nearly 2,000-word story anyway, creating an appearance of impropriety that Ferrer's rivals, Bloomberg included, quickly exploited. “It was a non-story,” Ferrer fumes. “There was nothing there.”
Ferrer also took issue with what he said looked like a constant effort by The Times to choose photos of him that made him look silly. “A good friend of mine who lives down the block wrote me a note during the campaign [saying], ‘Can the Times manage to get worse camera shots of you?'” Ferrer says.
Asked for comment on Ferrer's criticisms, Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis emailed: “It is not uncommon that a politician, especially if he or she has been unsuccessful in an election bid, believes that the media was unfair. In this particular case, we are proud of the fairness and appropriateness of our coverage.”
Other members of the press, too, have defended the coverage of the race as even-handed. But Ferrer asks how one can make such an assertion in a city where a top tabloid -- the Post -- printed a huge altered picture of him wearing a dunce cap on its front page. That happened after Ferrer's campaign blog said that Ferrer had gone to public schools when in fact he went to Catholic schools. Although the mistake had been made by a young campaign assistant and Ferrer hadn't ever tried to hide his Catholic school background elsewhere, the error somehow created a media firestorm, and Ferrer found himself pummeled on the front page of both the Post and the Daily News. “The Post left good taste behind quite a long time ago -- it's irretrievable to them,” Ferrer says. “The News surprised me.”
By contrast, when Bloomberg campaign volunteers were caught posing as disinterested bystanders at a campaign stop in a restaurant -- arguably a greater offense than the Ferrer blog snafu -- the reaction was decidedly more muted. “There were no screaming front-page headlines,” Ferrer says. “Why were we treated differently?” And Ferrer also says that the media refused to ask tough questions when Bloomberg issued a terror alert on the same day that a debate that he was skipping was scheduled to take place. The alert distracted the city from the mayor's biggest campaign misstep, raising questions about its timing that Ferrer maintains should have been pursued more aggressively. “The press wouldn't go there,” he says.
Asked repeatedly whether his own political abilities or decisions made by the campaign had contributed to his loss, it was clear that the question wasn't one Ferrer likes to entertain. “You make a lot of mistakes -- campaigns do all the time,” Ferrer says. “Candidates do all the time.”
But when pressed, Ferrer did concede that stating that the police shooting of Amadou Diallo wasn't a crime was a serious misstep. And he also accepted responsibility for the fact that another proposal of his -- a new tax on stock transfers that was vigorously opposed by the business community -- turned out to be politically explosive. “I knew that would be controversial, that Wall Street would go crazy,” he says. “My carelessness about the Diallo case? My fault.”
And though Ferrer says he remains proud of the policy proposals on housing and poverty his campaign put forth, he concedes he could have done a better job presenting them. On policy, he says, “I can't think of a thing we did wrong. Could we have done it better? Sure. Could I have done it more effectively? Probably.”
Still, Ferrer rejects the assertions by some critics that he didn't articulate a populist message forcefully enough and that he was never able to dispel the sense that he was an old-style machine pol. “People say, ‘He came from the Bronx organization,'” Ferrer says, his irritation with the charge still fresh. “Hell, I transcended it.”
In the end, Ferrer's defeat had many causes: lingering fears of terrorism, which made New Yorkers less willing to change course; the erosion of partisan loyalties New Yorkers feel in local elections; the tenure of Rudolph Giuliani, which made voters more receptive to outsider candidates and less patient with traditional pols; and the readiness of some New Yorkers to let bad memories of former Mayor David Dinkins color their view of other minority pols like Ferrer. Whatever the cause, Ferrer is now finished for good with elective politics, he says, adding that since the race he's started two businesses which he plans to discuss in more detail down the road.
And Ferrer is left pondering a set of political accomplishments that, though worthy, fall short of his long-harbored dream of becoming the city's first Latino mayor: 15 years as Bronx borough president; the first Latino Democratic nominee in city history; and a mayoral campaign against Bloomberg which, though absurdly unbalanced, did manage to force at least a bit of discussion about housing, poverty, and other issues.
“I think we moved the debate,” Ferrer says. “I'm not a fool -- I knew these were daunting odds. I had to do this.”
Greg Sargent, a contributing editor at New York magazine, writes bi-weekly for The American Prospect Online. He can be reached at greg_sargent@newyorkmag.com.
