Big Apple Disaster Averted
The Sept. 10 candidate loses.

By Fred Siegel, a professor of history at Cooper Union & author of, among others, The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America's Big Cities.
October 15, 2001 10:10 a.m.

ark Green, the Democratic party nominee is very likely, Mike Bloomberg's money not withstanding, to be the next mayor of New York. The city dodged a bullet on October 11 when one time Nader's Raider Mark Green defeated Bronx Borough President Freddy Ferrer in the runoff for the Democratic party's mayoral nomination. At a time when the economy is moving into a recession sure to be dramatically deepened by the destruction of the World Trade Center, a Ferrer victory would have sent the city careening downhill.

The problem with Ferrer went well beyond the influence that Ferrer's key ally, Al Sharpton, would have had on demoralizing both the police and the city's middle classes. Ferrer was the candidate of both the Bronx machine and the city's three largest public sector unions. Ferrer's politics derive from the public sector nature of the Bronx economy which has the highest rate of nonmilitary government employment and the lowest rate of labor-force participation of any county in the country. It's the only borough without a chamber of commerce. In the first round of voting for the Democratic nomination on September 25 all of 1% of Ferrer's backers thought that rebuilding the financial district should be the next mayor's top priority.

Fear of Freddy drove the heroes of 9/11, the city's police and fire unions as well as most of the city's private-sector unions into the Green camp. The Ferrer campaign produced an unlikely mesalliance behind Green who was endorsed by both The Village Voice and the New York Post. Or as one Brooklynite, who has long loathed the left-liberal Green explained, "the choice was between uncertainty and disaster, I voted for uncertainty."

The winner, Mark Green, who presents himself as a chastened liberal, backed by former top-cop Bill Bratton, showed some statesmanship when he supported a 90 days extension for the term of "America's Mayor" the soon to be knighted "Sir Rudy Giuliani." It cost Green four or five points in his race with Ferrer, but the extension as provided for in the emergency provisions of the New York State constitution, would have given the city a fighting chance to quickly bring in the federal disaster aid essential for saving the city's struggling small businesses. While Ferrer, the September 10th candidate insisted that "the Towers have crumbled but our priorities have not," Green, the September 11 candidate, quickly saw that rebuilding Wall Street, the engine of New York's economy, had to be the new mayor's foremost concern.

It's not clear which Mark Green will govern, the chastened or the liberal. On election night Green's supporters spontaneously broke into the hoary 60s chant, "THE PEOPLE (brief pause) UNITED (brief pause) WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED." The chair of Green's victory party on election night was Bertha Lewis, the leader of ACORN, a loony Left group that fought successfully to prevent the Edison corporation from taking over the city's five worst elementary schools.

The campaign has left a lot of bad blood between the rival camps and the question now is how Green handles the hostility. Ferrer's backers, having played the race card to get their man into the finals, now accuse Green of playing the race card to win. When Green ran an effective ad describing Ferrer's non-response to 9/11 as "borderline irresponsible," Hazel Dukes, former chair of the NAACP, responded by decrying the "lynching" of Ferrer and said that she thought she was in "Mississippi." At the same time Reverend Al, who cost Ferrer big time, says that he's been "dissed" by Green who claims no knowledge of telephone calls warning about a Ferrer/Sharpton victory.

I admit to no small pleasure in watch Green, who's done his share of liberal race baiting over the years, on the receiving end. But what's important is how Green responds. The city's 5 to 1 Democratic registration all but assures his victory over Bloomberg, so Green has the chance to distance himself from people like Sharpton who will make it all but impossible to govern. But so far Green is blowing the opportunity. Instead of standing tall, he's trying to propitiate Sharpton and that gives Bloomberg a small opening to win in November.

Postscript: Since this was written a dispute has broken out over the final-vote tally. Double counting of some precincts by the Board of Elections means that Green is still the winner but by a smaller margin of about 21,000 votes. But the Board of Election's error has sent Ferrer's supporters in general, and Sharpton in particular, into a rage. They now want Green to come to them hat in hand for their general election support. His response will set the tone for both the general election and a likely Green administration.