NEWS ANALYSIS : Big City Voters Forge New Era of Pragmatic Mayors : Government: Centrists like Giuliani and Riordan are in. Patronage, bureaucracies and tax increases are out.

With Rudolph W. Giuliani’s narrow win over David N. Dinkins in the bitterly fought mayoral race here, the winds of change rattling through America’s cities escalated to hurricane force.

Giuliani’s victory, combined with Richard Riordan’s win in Los Angeles last spring, means that Republicans for the first time in memory control the mayor’s offices in both of the nation’s largest cities.

And the New York result significantly advances a little-noticed trend with powerful racial implications: With Dinkins’ defeat, four of the nation’s five largest cities have now replaced black mayors with white mayors in the past four years.

Yet the most powerful current reshaping urban politics may be neither partisan nor racial but ideological. After decades as the strongest bastions of liberalism, cities from New York to Los Angeles, and Detroit to Atlanta are turning toward mayors committed to a new centrist urban agenda built around strengthening police departments, reforming the vast municipal bureaucracies, privatizing some city services, and generally resisting new taxes.

“Look around the country and what we’re witnessing is the beginning stages of what will be the most fundamental reshaping of city halls since the Progressive Era ushered out Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall,” said William D. Eggers, director of the privatization center at The Reason Foundation, a Libertarian think tank based in Los Angeles.

Mayors who fit along this spectrum of post-liberal reformers are both white and black, Democrat and Republican; they range from Democrats Richard M. Daley in Chicago, Michael R. White in Cleveland and Edward Rendell in Philadelphia to Republican Stephen Goldsmith in Indianapolis.

Riordan aspires to their company, as does Dennis Archer, a black Democrat elected mayor of Detroit Tuesday with a biracial coalition on a program of basic services and conciliation with the white suburbs. Giuliani emphasized many reform themes in his campaign.

“I don’t think it’s a scorched earth thing, but there is a general frustration in urban America with the politics of the left, and it’s come to a head,” says Jack Kemp, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President George Bush.

At least four different streams are feeding into the new currents in urban politics:

RISING GOP TIDE. Giuliani’s victory, coupled with Riordan’s and the surprise triumph last year of Republican investment banker Bret Schundler in Jersey City has led some GOP analysts to proclaim an end to unchallenged Democrat hegemony over city governments.

But even with Giuliani’s victory, Republicans control mayoral offices in only five of the nation’s 20 largest cities. And in many of those other large cities, Republicans are not only out of office, but virtually out of consideration when Democrats nominate candidates with broad appeal.

“Generally where Republicans succeed is where Democrats offer them an opportunity,” says Democratic consultant David Axelrod, who works frequently in mayoral races. “If the Democratic Party in New York had a candidate, whether white or black, who was identified like Daley and Rendell and White with municipal reform, there wouldn’t have been a place in this race for Giuliani.”

Both Giuliani and Riordan sought to blur their Republican identities. Neither endorsed school vouchers--the emblematic national GOP solution to the problems of urban education. And Giuliani in particular took such moderate positions on an entire array of social issues--from abortion to gay rights--that many national conservatives actively opposed his candidacy.

RACIAL POLITICS. With Dinkins’ defeat, black mayors have now been succeeded by white mayors in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia since 1989. In Houston, the other of the five largest cities, Bob Lanier, the white incumbent reelected Tuesday, initially won his job two years ago by defeating a black opponent.

The New York result in particular suggests that racially polarized voting remains the dominant fact of political life in cities with substantial multiracial populations.

Many analysts, though, don’t detect a broad rejection of African-American mayors. Rather, they argue, the black mayors and candidates facing difficulty are those, like Dinkins, who primarily build their political identity around the liberal “Rainbow coalition” model that emphasizes the agendas of minority groups and others who feel excluded from the traditional urban power structure.

Though Dinkins called New York a “gorgeous mosaic” and urged inclusion, many whites here felt his reluctance to confront black boycotters at a Korean market in Brooklyn and failure to act decisively during a riotous clash between blacks and Jews in Crown Heights showed he would not apply a common standard to all city residents.

In contrast to Dinkins, black mayors and candidates whose political identities depend less on racial pride generally did well.

In Detroit, Archer urged greater cooperation with the white suburbs in his contest against Sharon McPhail, another African-American candidate who disparaged Archer as the candidate of “forces plotting to take over the city of Detroit.” Archer narrowly lost the black vote to McPhail, but won by carrying nearly nine in 10 whites, according to exit polls conducted for the Detroit Free-Press.

In Cleveland, Mike White--an African-American who, like Archer, won election four years ago largely with white votes against a black opponent who stressed racial pride--was reelected virtually by acclamation. Seattle--a city just 10% black--emphatically reelected African-American Mayor Norm Rice. Both men pursued centrist agendas with moderate styles. To the consternation of some black community leaders, neither, for instance, has resisted efforts to roll back school busing in their cities. Similarly, in Atlanta, the mayoral runoff later this month will pit two African-American candidates who also made room-temperature, race-neutral appeals.

“Part of what has happened in many of these cities is that barriers have been broken by the first generation of black mayors, and the kind of candidates who are emerging are not those who predicate their campaigns on breaking racial barriers, but rather the new pragmatists,” says Axelrod. “In fact, the appeals to racial unity are part of the politics of pragmatism.”

In racially divided cities, encouraging unity isn’t only a challenge for African-American mayors. After his polarized victory, Giuliani faces the same problem Dinkins did four years ago: broadening his base. “If he’s smart and he wants to have a strong governing coalition, he has to find a way to avoid polarizing things,” says John H. Mollenkopf, a political scientist at the City University of New York graduate center. “He could probably learn something from Mike White.”

NON-POLITICIANS. The third trend at work in cities is a growing preference for non-politicians. Giuliani and Philadelphia’s Rendell were federal prosecutors before their election; Riordan, Schundler and Houston’s Lanier were businessmen. “There is a premium on outsiders right now,” says Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, who is working with a businessman seeking the mayoralty in New Orleans next year.

CITY SERVICES. The final trend may be the broadest: a back-to-basics focus on delivering basic services that emphasizes protection from crime, experiments with privatizing of certain city operations, and tougher bargaining lines with municipal employee unions. Those priorities link mayors otherwise as diverse as Daley, Rendell, White, Riordan and Giuliani--who promised to cut city employment by 35,000 through his first term, study the privatization of components of the vast city hospital system, and crack down on street level drug dealers.

“Every generation produces a new cult of city governance,” says Mitchell Moss, director of the urban research center at New York University and an adviser to Dinkins. “Now we are going through a new version of the reform era, with business practices brought into government: Whether it’s privatization or less patronage, it’s less government rather than more.”