New York, like Los Angeles, now has its new mayor; that's the bad news. Seldom has a city elected a leader about whom it knew less or who seemed to know less about his city. Their mutual ignorance--New York's of Michael Bloomberg, Michael Bloomberg's of New York--seems almost total. In the course of his campaign, Bloomberg said nothing whatever to indicate how he'd govern, save that he'd try to follow in Rudy Giuliani's footsteps. And in Los Angeles, new Mayor James Hahn most certainly knows L.A., but L.A. knows less about him now than when he was a candidate. Five months into his term, ducking decisions and staying largely out of public view, Hahn has done virtually nothing to indicate how he's governing--or even that he's governing. Two blank slates now preside over America's two megacities.
The news goes from bad to worse. New York and Los Angeles had majoropportunities in this year's mayoral elections to inaugurate a new era of urbanprogressivism in America, and both cities came up short. For much of the pastcentury, cities have been a spawning ground of liberal policies and pols; butbusiness-oriented centrist mayors have dominated the urban scene for the lastdecade--presiding over a restoration of law and order and the revival of downtownlife, as well as a heightening of economic inequality and, in some instances, anincrease in racial tensions. This year, however, Republicans Rudy Giuliani andRichard Riordan were termed out of their respective city halls, and with thecandidacies of Democrats Mark Green in New York and Antonio Villaraigosa in LosAngeles, two smart, tested liberals seemed poised to take power and reinvent avibrant center-left urban politics. Only, they lost.
And--the worst news of all--they lost in no small part because of the racialtensions within their own coalitions, because leading Democrats in both citiesplayed the race card against them precisely to keep this new generation ofnon-nationalist liberals from coming to power. As a liberal activist for the pastquarter-century, Green had long been a champion of civil rights, and as NewYork's elected public advocate for the past eight years, a constant critic ofGiuliani's tolerance of racist police practices. Nonetheless, in the run-up tothe general election, four leading Democrats--Bronx Borough President FernandoFerrer, Bronx party head Roberto Ramirez, union local leader Dennis Rivera of theService Employees International Union, and the ineffable Al Sharpton--had soughtto portray Green as the new-age version of a white-backlash pol. Although Greenhad, in fact, aired one racially suggestive attack ad against Ferrer, who'd beenhis opponent in the primary, the charge was ridiculous. But by depressingnonwhite turnout and helping steer half the Latino vote to Bloomberg, it playedjust well enough to make him mayor. Even more ludicrous, some African-Americanleaders in Los Angeles--California Representative Maxine Waters, mostparticularly--accused former Assembly Speaker Villaraigosa, who'd founded thecity's Black-Latino Roundtable and headed up the local chapter of the AmericanCivil Liberties Union, of posing a menace to blacks. Villaraigosa would have lostthe black vote to Hahn in any event, but this scurrilous charge certainly widenedHahn's margin and helped to ensure his victory.
Los Angeles and New York, I need hardly point out, are vastly differentcities, but for the past dozen years, they have marched in woeful politicallockstep. In 1993, following terms in office marred by racial violence, thecities' African-American Democratic mayors, Tom Bradley and David Dinkins, weresucceeded by white Republicans Riordan and Giuliani. Emphasizing public order anda renewal of business confidence, both new mayors won wide backing, at least intheir first terms. They were handily re-elected in 1997; only African-Americanssupported their white liberal challengers--Tom Hayden in Los Angeles, RuthMessinger in New York.
The 1997 elections also registered a dramatic shift in the composition of bothcities' electorates. In Los Angeles, the number of Latino voters surpassed thenumber of black voters for the first time since the mid-nineteenth century; in NewYork, the number of Latino voters almost equaled that of their African-Americancounterparts for the first time ever. In both cities, the declining relative sizeand growing political isolation of the black communities meant that there were noserious black candidates for mayor in either 1997 or 2001. The liberal forcesvying to supplant Riordan and Giuliani this year would find their standard-bearerselsewhere.
In Los Angeles, that candidate was clearly Antonio Villaraigosa, whose staunchprogressivism was complemented by exquisite political skills that enabled him tocultivate supporters across the political spectrum. His support for unionorganizing, for an aggressive expansion of the city's living-wage ordinance, andfor greater civilian control of the police marked a clear break with city policyunder Riordan. And yet, Villaraigosa took pains to acknowledge Riordan's successin improving the city's business climate--eventually even winning Riordan'ssupport in his runoff against Hahn.
Villaraigosa was both the champion and the beneficiary of the city's burgeoninglabor-Latino alliance: a coalition of dynamic unions and economic-justiceorganizations that advocated for the city's largely Latino working class, with adistinctly class-based and nonnationalistic perspective. (County Federation ofLabor leader Miguel Contreras justly took pride in his organization's success atpersuading Latino immigrant voters to back white and black progressives overLatino centrists in several elections.) Villaraigosa's pre-primary endorsementsby the Federation and then the county Democratic Party signaled not just apersonal success but also the emergence of a coherent citywide progressive force.
In New York, no such force existed, but Mark Green began the race in a farstronger position than Villaraigosa had in Los Angeles, and it was by no meansclear that he needed that kind of institutional boost. By all appearances, he wasperfectly positioned to pick up the pieces of post-Rudy New York. Decades ofliberal activism, and eight years of blasting Giuliani, made him a known quantityto the city's myriad progressives (even if to know Green was seldom to love him),and he staked out enough of the center by campaigning incessantly with WilliamBratton, Giuliani's first chief of police. Green promised the consolidation ofGiuliani's achievements and the repudiation of Giuliani's bile, which had beendisproportionately directed at nonwhites. This was less of a message or a visionthan it was simply a position on the spectrum--left of Bloomberg and fellowDemocrats Peter Vallone and Alan Hevesi, right of Freddy Ferrer--but it seemedthe most advantageous position a candidate could hold.
In sum, both Green and Villaraigosa promised regimes of racial comity, minusmuch of the ethos of ethnic entitlements that had long crippled urban Democraticpolitics. Villaraigosa was much more the tribune of the working poor than Greenwas, but the working poor were at the center of Los Angeles's progressive agenda,while the New York version of that agenda had no discernible center at all.Still, taking their résumés as well as their policies into account,both candidates plausibly promised an urban-liberal renewal--albeit one thatincorporated the successes of the Riordan and Giuliani administrations.
And then--in strikingly similar ways--their candidacies crumpled.
Of course, a whole range of factors contributed to Green's defeat. Even bythe standards of New York at its most extravagant, the $70 million that Bloombergspent is a stunning amount of money; no nonpresidential candidate in Americanhistory has ever spent a remotely comparable figure. As well, the value toBloomberg of Giuliani's endorsement was magnified many times by Rudy's masterfulhandling of the city's September 11 trauma and its aftermath.
Green himself was more than a little complicit in his own demise. His campaignlacked the economic-justice focus that had enabled Villaraigosa to reach somewhatacross the lines of race. His arrogance--on suicidal public display in hisassertion that he'd have handled the city's September 11 crisis as well as orbetter than Giuliani--alienated thousands of potential supporters. And his attackad against Ferrer inflamed what proved to be a very inflammable constituency.
But none of these weak points would have sufficed to elect Mike Bloomberg hadit not been for one final factor--the very same factor that helped make Jim Hahnmayor of Los Angeles: identity politics.
For Mark Green did not lose Latino voters to Freddy Ferrer (much less to MikeBloomberg) because his opponents were better on Latino issues, just asVillaraigosa didn't lose black voters to Hahn because Hahn was the strongerchampion of black concerns. To the contrary, on the defining issue of concern toL.A. African-Americans--the racist brutality of the police--Villaraigosa had longbeen a champion of greater civilian control, while Hahn, who'd been cityattorney, had been at best a foul-weather critic of the Los Angeles PoliceDepartment, and at worst had defended L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates throughoutthe Rodney King controversy. In New York, Green's record of assailing the racialprofiling practiced by the Giuliani-era police force was longer and clearer thanFerrer's. In the primary campaign, Ferrer morphed into the champion of the "otherNew York," but little in his record as a leader of the Bronx Democratic apparatsuggested a notable commitment to improving the lot of the poor.
But Ferrer's appeal to New York Latinos and Hahn's appeal to Los Angelesblacks wasn't really based on performance or ideology. Ferrer was simply "one ofus"--an impression reinforced by his lack of interest in winning whiteprogressives to his column. Hahn was almost "one of us" (his father, the lateCounty Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, had been the white godfather of L.A. blackpolitics for four decades), and just as important, he wasn't "one of them"--theLatinos who, by sheer dint of numbers, had altered the identity of long-blackcommunities and diminished the political power of black Los Angeles.
Indeed, it was the threat to the old-guard nationalists within Los Angeles'sAfrican-American political elite that fueled their attack on Villaraigosa.Belying her image as a principled progressive, Maxine Waters not only falselydisputed Villaraigosa's long record of working in and for the black community butattacked the younger black leaders who supported him as insufficientlyAfrican-American. Support for Hahn became a measure of one's blackness.
In New York, a Green misstep triggered a similar dynamic--though, likeVillaraigosa, he was surely more sinned against than sinning. His anti-Ferrerprimary commercial questioned whether "we" could trust Ferrer to manage thecity--an ad that Ferrer supporters and more-neutral observers alike viewed asracially tinged. But even placing the worst possible interpretation on this ad,to suggest that it negated the differences between Green and Bloomberg wasdelusional.
As it happened, though, some of New York's most adept political figures are inthe business of peddling delusions. Al Sharpton, whose affinity for race baitingand the Big Lie has been clear since his bogus defense of Tawana Brawley,attacked Green as though he were Jesse Helms. Ferrer and his political capoRamirez, who are attempting to shape and lead a Latino-black coalition that theybelieve will eventually dominate city politics, made clear that Green's electionwas a matter of utter indifference to them and their city; on election day, theBronx organization took the day off. Dennis Rivera, whose hospital workers' unionnormally mobilizes more nonwhite voters than any other group in the city (and whoincreasingly is allied with Republican Governor George Pataki), declined to turnout a single voter.
The result was a collapse of Latino support for Green. He polled just 49percent in the Latino community to Bloomberg's 47 percent--well below the levelsof backing for his Democratic predecessors David Dinkins (64 percent in 1989, 60percent in 1993) and Ruth Messinger (57 percent in 1997). Turnout plummeted aswell: Latinos constituted 20 percent of the electorate four years ago and 24percent in this year's primary, but just 18 percent in the November runoff.Sharpton, meanwhile, took his toll in the black community: Green's 75 percentbacking was down from Messinger's 79 percent four years previous, and the blackshare of the electorate, 23 percent, should have been larger given the Latinoquasi-boycott of the polls.
New York emerges from November's election with a political culture that'shard-wired for racial resentment. Outgoing State Democratic Chair Judith Hope hasactually suggested that one of the two aspiring Democratic challengers to Patakiin next year's gubernatorial election--State Comptroller H. Carl McCall, who isblack, and former U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo, whois white--should drop out, since the ability of the party to cohere after aprimary between these two moderate candidates of different races is now presumedto be nil.
The situation in Los Angeles is not this dire. Villaraigosa made substantialinroads among younger African-American political and community leaders. Thestructural difference between the two cities is that Los Angeles has one powerfulinstitution that bridges, however imperfectly, the gap between races in theDemocratic coalition, espouses a nonracial politics of class, and wins realvictories under that banner: the County Federation of Labor. An omnibus groupingrepresenting a very diverse 800,000 workers, the County Federation isoverwhelmingly the dominant progressive force in local politics.
New York's Central Labor Council, unfortunately, is less than the sum of itsparts. It's the individual unions--the teachers, the city workers, the hospitalemployees, the public-safety workers, the building trades--that dominate New Yorkelections, often on behalf of parochial agendas and not-particularly-diversememberships. No concept is more foreign to New York's unions than solidarity atelection time; they scattered their endorsements almost randomly during the firstround of this year's primaries. As New York Democrats polarize along lines ofrace, New York unions offer hardly any countervailing pressure at all.
The best that can be said for Los Angeles is that there is at least a battleof class politics against race politics. Recently, a Latino organization sued thestate for its new reapportionment, since it diminished the number of Latinos inthe district of longtime Democratic Congressman Howard Berman. Berman's old SanFernando Valley district was home to a number of Latino nationalist pols eager tooust this very non-Latino (in fact, white Jewish) member. But County Federationleader Miguel Contreras rushed to Berman's defense, noting that Berman has fordecades been the chief congressional champion of both the United Farm Workers andLatino immigrants generally. The vast majority of L.A.-area Latino pols (whoseseats, it should be noted, were also protected by the same reapportionment thatprotected Berman) followed suit. This kind of cross-racial support is all butinconceivable in today's New York.
In the end, the politics of race derailed the prospects for a new urbanliberalism in both cities this year. In Los Angeles, however, there is at leastan institutional vehicle for combating those politics. In New York, no such vehicle exists, and in its absence, a future looms in which racial resentmentsare both the means and ends of political life. Add a decent political culture tothe list of things New Yorkers need to rebuild.
