Ignoring the Elephant: Race in the N.Y. Primary

In New York politics, the race issue is like an elephant in the room. It’s big and it’s kind of hard to ignore. But everyone pretends it isn’t there. After all, we’re all liberals, aren’t we?

New Yorkers were busy congratulating themselves last week because they nominated their first black candidate for mayor. Manhattan Borough President David N. Dinkins defeated incumbent Mayor Edward I. Koch in Tuesday’s Democratic primary by a surprisingly decisive 9-point margin.

New York is not exactly the first big city to nominate a black candidate for mayor. It has happened in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Detroit. And those cities not only nominated blacks. They elected them. That hasn’t quite happened in New York. The general election is not until Nov. 7, and Dinkins is by no means a shoo-in--though Democrats outnumber Republicans by 5-1 in this city. He is, after all, black.

New Yorkers dismiss such quibbling. Only 25% of New York’s voters are black and anyway, who cares what happens in Chicago or Atlanta? If it hasn’t happened in New York, it hasn’t happened.

More to the point, one-third of white Democrats voted for the black candidate in last week’s primary. That’s about three times as much support as a black candidate typically gets from white voters.

Everyone expected the candidates to get nasty during the campaign, especially after the brutal murder of a black teen-ager by white youths in Bensonhurst on Aug. 23. But it didn’t happen. “Holy smokes!” New Yorkers said. “We did it!”

The city celebrated the outcome with a mixture of pride and relief. The Democratic candidates advertised their lack of bitterness with a love-in on the steps of City Hall the next day.

New Yorkers are pious about their lack of prejudice. In an exit poll for WNBC-TV and New York Newsday, 62% of white Democrats said New York City is ready for a black mayor. But only 30% voted for one. In the WCBS-TV-New York Times poll, few New Yorkers said race was important in their decision. But half of both blacks and whites said they thought race was a major factor for other voters.

New Yorkers are embarrassed by racism. But they are embarrassed by something else--Koch. That’s why they made such a big deal out of Koch’s attack on Jesse Jackson last year during the New York presidential primary. Koch said any supporter of Israel would be “crazy” to vote for Jackson. So the good liberals of New York rose up against Koch.

“It’s OK to be a racist in your own home,” a political consultant explained. “But God forbid the neighbors should hear.” He added, “What Koch did in 1988 was unforgivable. He let the neighbors hear. He embarrassed New York.”

Koch tried to make nice during the 1989 campaign. He kept his mouth more-or-less shut and treated Dinkins with respect. But then, after the Bensonhurst shooting, he criticized civil-rights protesters and reminded New Yorkers of how embarrassing he could be. Never mind that the bishop of Brooklyn and several black leaders also criticized the marchers. Koch sounded like a Chicago politician. That is unacceptable in New York.

Koch realized his error and tried to make up for it in the last few days of the race. He said racial peace is “my cause as well as David Dinkins’ cause.” But it was too late. Two days of good behavior did not make up for 12 years of insensitivity.

Last year a lot of people thought Koch picked a fight with Jackson to enrage the black community. In this scenario, Koch wanted to run against a black, not a white liberal. He must have been surprised to discover more Democrats disliked him than the idea of a black mayor.

The biggest thing Dinkins had going for him wasn’t racial tolerance. It was Koch. One third of white Democrats had a negative opinion of Koch, and they voted 12-1 for Dinkins. Dinkins got double the white support than Jackson got last year.

The campaign was zany, as New York campaigns are. Cosmetics heir Ronald S. Lauder set a new world’s record for throwing away money. He spent $13 million on his GOP primary race. He got 36,908 votes. That’s about $350 per vote. The winner of the GOP primary, former-U.S. Attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, is also the nominee of the Liberal Party.

Already New York is suffused with nostalgia for Koch, the man they loved to hate. The town is giving him a real New York send-off: “We love you, Ed. Get outta here.”

The Dinkins campaign now has a problem. They don’t have Koch to run against. So Dinkins is running against--would you believe it?--Ronald Reagan. “Ask yourselves, have we scraped and struggled to survive nine years of reactionary Republican government in Washington just to hand over our city to the very same forces?” he said Wednesday. “New York will not become a Republican beachhead in 1989.”

Dinkins is counting on Democratic partisanship to overwhelm racism. His problem is there are several reasons white voters can give for not supporting Dinkins besides racism. Dinkins failed to file tax returns for four years--he says it was negligence, not tax evasion. He has the strong support of municipal labor unions, so voters may be concerned that he will not be a tough negotiator.

Dinkins’ image as a conciliator was useful against Koch, but it may not be what New Yorkers want in a mayor. New Yorkers believe being their mayor is the second toughest job in the country. Dinkins has to toughen up his act to compete with Giuliani, a crusading prosecutor who has taken on crack, crime and corruption.

The Giuliani campaign has the same problem as the Dinkins campaign. They don’t have Koch to run against.

Giuliani is expected to run as a reform candidate. About every 20 years, New Yorkers get sick and tired of corruption and the Democratic machine. So they elect an independent mayor on a “fusion” ticket. That’s the only way Republicans get elected. Fiorello H. LaGuardia did it in 1933 and John V. Lindsay in 1965.

With all the scandals of the last four years, 1989 looked perfect for a reform candidate. But Giuliani doesn’t have a corrupt mayor to run against. So what’s he going to do? For now, he’s decided to run against Koch anyway. On Wednesday, he attacked Dinkins as a “clubhouse politician.”

Giuliani’s problem is the reform vote has already been taken. “The coalition that worked for Dinkins was the old Lindsay coalition,” a politician intimate with reform politics said last week. The politician who said that was Lindsay.

The great irony of the campaign is that, with Koch out, both Dinkins and Giuliani have to go after the Koch vote. But both know how to do only one thing--run against Koch. What else can they do?

Sooner or later, somebody’s going to notice that there’s an elephant in the room. Both candidates are afraid to break the uneasy racial truce for fear it will blow up in their face. Neither wants to be the candidate who divides the city. They are even talking about setting up a “hot line” between the two campaigns so the candidates can stamp out racial brush fires before they get out of control.

If the polls show Dinkins collapsing, however, plenty of people will advise him to “play the racial card”--maximize black turnout by running a “movement” campaign: “It’s us versus them.” Jesse Jackson specializes in this and he is one of Dinkins’ most prominent supporters. No one could deny Jackson the pleasure of gloating over Koch’s defeat Tuesday. At Dinkins’ victory celebration, he upstaged the candidate. “They were trying to get Jackson off the stage but he wouldn’t go,” said one Dinkins adviser.

Movement politics is not Dinkins’ style. But candidates often do unlikely things when their backs are against the wall.

As the GOP underdog in a Democratic city, Giuliani has even less going for him. If nothing else works, he, too, may be tempted to play the racial card. Giuliani is not, by temperament, a polarizer. But neither is George Bush, and look what he did to Michael S. Dukakis last year. In fact, the man who devised Bush’s campaign strategy, political consultant Roger Ailes, is now working for Giuliani.

One of this year’s hot movies, Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” is set in an inner-city New York neighborhood. The black and white characters in the movie are decent, well-meaning, sympathetic people who get caught in a situation they cannot control. Everyone tries to do the right thing. But forces of conflict overwhelm them, and what results is tragedy.

Dinkins, Giuliani and Koch are also trying to do the right thing. But it is easy to see how the situation could get out of control. Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, the kibitzer-in-chief of New York politics, drew the opposite conclusion after the primary when he said, “What Tuesday showed is that there’s not enough racism left in this town to use against David Dinkins.” Between now and November, we’ll see.