Giuliani Eclipsing N.Y. Mayoral Race

As New York’s mayoral race heats up, the politician who casts the longest shadow and dominates the media spotlight isn’t even on the ballot. Term limits bar Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani from running again, but they haven’t blocked him from overshadowing the Democrats and Republicans hoping to win his job.

Any day now Giuliani is expected to move out of Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence, as part of his bitter divorce fight. He continues to propose new baseball stadiums for the Yankees and Mets, and his clashes with teachers seeking a pay raise have become increasingly harsh.

All of this generates headlines and creates a dilemma for mayoral candidates eager to distance themselves from the pack: How do you compete with a nationally known leader who presided over the city’s remarkable comeback in the 1990s and shows no sign of leaving the stage?

“Most New Yorkers approve of the mayor’s performance, even though they may not like him personally,” said Democratic strategist George Arzt. “And none of the candidates wants to be the guy who jeopardizes what Rudy has achieved, especially the big drop in crime. So nobody’s rocking the boat.”

When they’re not focused on Giuliani, New York’s tabloids and other media have been dominated by hot summer scandals, including the disappearance of intern Chandra Levy, the local arrest of “Sopranos” star Robert Iler and PR guru Elizabeth Grubman’s auto wreck in the Hamptons, which injured 16 people. As thousands of New Yorkers stream out of the city for long vacations, a majority have consistently told pollsters they are paying scant attention to the battle for City Hall.

It’s bad news for four veteran Democratic candidates: Public Advocate Mark Green, City Comptroller Alan Hevesi, Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer and City Council Speaker Peter Vallone. The two Republican candidates--media mogul Michael Bloomberg and former Bronx congressman Herman Badillo--are equally hard-pressed to stir interest.

The first electoral skirmish is Sept. 11, when Democrats face off in a primary. If no one wins 40%, the top two vote-getters will meet in a runoff two weeks later. Republicans also hold a Sept. 11 primary, and both parties will square off in the city’s general election Nov. 6.

New York’s ho-hum attitude toward the race is a testimonial to Giuliani’s effect on a city once thought to be ungovernable. The Republican mayor has put his stamp on the Big Apple during an economic boom and crafted an anti-crime agenda that most Democrats want to continue, not unravel.

Moreover, there is no sense of crisis gripping the city, unlike during prior mayoral contests. Candidates may try to emulate Giuliani’s stance as an outsider who took on special interests, but polls suggest that few New York voters think there is much at stake in the 2001 mayoral election.

For his part, Giuliani has dropped hints that he might endorse Bloomberg or Badillo, and he also engaged in a brief flirtation with Vallone. Largely ignoring the mayor’s race, he has tried to drum up support for a future Olympics bid by New York and a $1-billion westside stadium for the New York Jets. He attracts attention everywhere he goes--even when he attends a minor league baseball game in Brooklyn with girlfriend Judith Nathan.

There’s been nonstop coverage of his divorce warfare with estranged wife Donna Hanover, and the mayor will be moving into a private apartment sometime in the next several weeks. Tensions between Giuliani and Hanover have reached the point where she got a court order barring Nathan from visiting him at the mayor’s official residence.

There are urgent city issues, of course, including the need to reform New York’s deteriorating public schools. Most mayoral candidates also say it’s time to put a more humane, inclusionary face on city government after eight years of Giuliani’s often-abrasive leadership style. And while there are no widespread signs of anxiety, the national economic turndown sparks concern in a metropolis so dependent on Wall Street for revenue and employment.

Indeed, some experts think the very idea of New York’s economic boom is overstated because so many people here, especially in the boroughs outside Manhattan, have not benefited from it. Manning Marable, director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University, cited a report by the Fiscal Policy Institute indicating that “a majority of working-class New Yorkers saw an 8.5-9% decline in real income in the 90s . . . ; the great gains in income occurred at the upper one-fifth of New York’s population.”

Other economic experts praise the mayor for his stewardship, pointing to a greater sense of overall fiscal health and stability. Today, they suggest, any mayoral candidate seen as a liberal free-spender faces certain defeat.

“The welfare rolls have been cut, and nobody’s saying they want to grow them again,” said Fred Siegel, a senior fellow at the centrist Progressive Policy Institute and a scholar of New York City politics. “No Democrat wants to go back to the days of squeegee men [transients who wash car windows] on the street. There is a broad consensus in the city now, and this puts real restraints on candidates.”

Democrats hold a 4-1 voter registration edge, and many observers expect them to recapture City Hall in the November election. Three of their candidates, including Green, Hevesi and Vallone, have been largely deferential to Giuliani’s legacy, pledging to continue the city’s general direction. Ferrer hopes to become New York’s first Latino mayor and has cast himself as the “anti-Giuliani” candidate. His strategy is to forge a black-Latino coalition, but so far Ferrer has struggled to ignite grass-roots enthusiasm outside his Bronx base.

A key factor is that no African American candidate is running for mayor, unlike the three previous elections. Black voters traditionally account for 20% to 25% of the turnout in a city Democratic primary, and all four candidates are busy seeking their support. Rev. Al Sharpton’s endorsement is expected to carry a lot of political weight, but so far he has remained mum.

Green is the early front-runner, according to most polls, garnering 27% to 34% of Democratic support. Most observers expect the race to tighten after Labor Day, when New Yorkers begin to pay more attention. Even so, the city seems resigned to a less-volatile contest than the heated clashes in 1989 and 1993 between Giuliani and David N. Dinkins, New York’s first American American mayor.

“On the Democratic side, this is a campaign of rhetoric, not passion,” said Arzt. “The candidates seem identical, and people get complacent.”

A more intriguing battle is shaping up among the Republicans, where Bloomberg--who bolted from the Democratic Party last fall--has already spent more than $8 million of his own money, far more than all other candidates combined. He has declined to participate in the city’s campaign finance program, which provides matching public funds to mayoral candidates but limits their expenditures to just over $5 million. Bloomberg, a self-proclaimed political neophyte, has attracted more media attention than any other candidate, often because he has stumbled in the early going. He’s had to clarify statements that suggested city sanitation workers face greater safety risks than police officers and firefighters. He also backed off comments that appeared to ridicule the matching fund law. Last week, he stirred controversy by proposing to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms and suggesting that the Lord’s Prayer was not a Christian prayer.

Despite an early, saturation TV ad campaign, Bloomberg faces a tough race against Badillo, who is a more conservative candidate appealing to hard-core GOP voters. While Badillo has been heavily outspent, some think he has a realistic chance of winning in a primary in which only 120,000 Republicans are expected to participate.

Much will depend on how intensely the media cover the campaign, and so far TV stations and local newspapers have been easily distracted, said Maurice Carroll, who runs the Quinnipiac Poll. And then there’s the matter of the mayor himself.

“Are there any limits to what this guy can do and the attention he attracts?” asked Carroll. “Sure there are. They’re called term limits.”