On Aug. 21, Herman Badillo turned 72. He celebrated not by
fishing, golfing or playing a round of canasta, but by toiling like an
infantryman in the trenches of New York politics, hoping to score an upset in
the Republican Mayoral primary on Sept. 11, and then a greater one on Election
Day. I followed him on a late August day, after the heat wave broke, and as the
summer itself was breaking up into drooping leaves and katydids in the parks at
night.
He began his day with a press conference in front of the
John Jay College of Criminal Justice on the West Side.
He wore a black suit and a yellow tie. Time has made him avuncular without
making him cuddly: He is tall, large and take-charge, and he loomed over a
sidewalk lectern while the morning trucks roared up 10th
Avenue.
Mr. Badillo came to John Jay to tout two new ideas for
crime-fighting: a city high school that would specialize in criminal justice
and feed its students to John Jay; and a course in community sensitivity that
John Jay already offers to police officers, and that Mr. Badillo would make
compulsory for all cops. These reforms, which resemble the ideas of Adam
Walinsky and the Police Corps (a national ROTC-like
program for college students who want to be cops, first funded by Bill
Clinton), might be called Phase 2 of the New Policing. Phase 1 focused on
quality-of-life crimes. Phase 2 will focus on the quality of policing. The cops
must become smarter and more diplomatic, so that they can rely less on force,
and on excessive force, in dealing with the civilians on their beat.
A reporter asked how Mr. Badillo’s proposed programs differ
from those of Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire newsmonger who is the G.O.P.
front-runner, and Mr. Badillo had some fun. “I don’t know that he has a
program; he has position papers that he reads.” He gestured at the empty
lectern top in front of him. “I have nothing before me; my ideas are in my
head. You can’t take someone with no experience in city, state or federal
government” and expect him to be Mayor. “Business and politics are two different
worlds.”
He went to the next event, in Queens,
in a style befitting a bare-bones campaign: He took his wife, Gail, and two
reporters in a rented car driven by a young man whose notions of geography were
somewhat uncertain; a campaign photographer had to follow in a cab. An hour
later, he arrived at Young Israel of Forest Hills, on
a street of old brick apartment buildings and pointy Tudor row houses, with
hydrangea and rose of Sharon blooming in the yards.
Mr. Badillo was the youngest person by far at Young Israel.
He spoke to about 20 old people in a current-events discussion club, then to
about 20 more in the main room who had been reading the papers and playing
mah-jongg until he arrived. The old people used the privilege of age to coo
over Mrs. Badillo. “You’ve got a young, pretty one,” they said. “At least he
knows how to get a pretty one.”
He pitched some neighborhood issues at them-traffic moves
too fast on Queens Boulevard;
he had dealt with a similar problem on Grand Concourse when he was Bronx
borough president. But his primary mantra was educational standards. City
University, he said, was once the
“Harvard of the poor,” and when he was chairman of the board of trustees, he
tried to restore its glory. He insisted that the teachers’ program stop producing
graduates who could not pass the teachers’ exam, and that the law school stop
producing graduates who could not pass the bar exam. “I am not afraid to be
criticized, to bring about change, to take a stand,” he said. The whole school
system suffers from similar ills. “Everybody passes, nobody learns. That
doesn’t help anybody.”
Old New Yorkers may be physically frail, but they know their
issues, and they peppered Mr. Badillo with their concerns, such as fuel
pass-throughs for rent-controlled apartments. A few told him that they had
voted for him before, in one of his many runs for office in decades past. He
left promptly, to make sure he didn’t cut into their
lunch time, and worked the passersby on Queens
Boulevard. Some of these spoke to him in Spanish.
One man with a Russian accent asked him if he was Michael Bloomberg. “I’m
running against Bloomberg,” Badillo explained. “I only vote for a Jew,” the man
answered, a little crazily. “A Jew! A
Jew!” Badillo introduced his wife, who is Jewish. The nut liked her, but
said he would vote for Alan Hevesi.
You know Herman Badillo’s story. He tells it often, and well he should, for it is interesting. Born in Puerto Rico. Father died when he was 1, mother died when he was 5. Came
to the mainland when he was 11, not speaking English, and finally settled with
an aunt in West Harlem. In high school, with English
under his belt, he wrote for the school paper, interviewing rising stars (Peggy
Lee) and writing copy for “The Inquiring Photographer.” (Inquiring
Photographers! Now high-school kids are Inquiring Internet
Pornographers.) One day, a kid on the paper said that no one had ever seen
young Mr. Badillo in class. I’m in the class that takes apart airplane engines,
Mr. Badillo explained. “That’s for blacks and Puerto Ricans,” the kid answered
(what depths frown in that little bit of pop sociology). “I am Puerto Rican,”
Mr. Badillo said (his height may have thrown off the young sociologist). You
should take English classes, his interlocutor went on, you
could go to college. Mr. Badillo scoffed at the notion. But then he learned,
for the first time, that New York City
had a free college. This news launched him on his path in life. Law school,
accountancy and politics followed.
He has made four other great discoveries in his career, all
of them less happy. In 1969, when he first ran for Mayor, he learned that
trendy liberals are scum. This was the race in which Norman Mailer ran as a
lark, taking enough liberal votes from Mr. Badillo-initially a contender-to
drop him to third place in the Democratic primary. In 1973, his second race for
Mayor, he learned that party regulars are also scum. That was the race in which
the campaign of Abe Beame, his rival in the Democratic runoff, sent truckloads
of scruffy youth of color through Jewish neighborhoods, blaring bongo music and
loud chants of “Vote for Badillo.” Ah, the gorgeous mosaic. Beame denied any
link to the trucks, but Mr. Badillo lost once again.
In 1985, when he almost
ran for Mayor a fourth time, he learned that the black political class could
not be trusted. Blacks and Hispanics had a deal to field one candidate against
Mayor Ed Koch in the primary. At the last minute, the blacks exercised a veto
and gave the coalition’s nod to Assemblyman Denny Farrell rather than Mr. Badillo.
But his last, and bitterest, lesson came in Giuliani Time. Mr. Badillo backed
Mr. Giuliani in his first winning race in 1993. Though he was a Democrat, he
accepted Rudy’s appointment to the City University slot. There he learned that, when he went on the warpath against low
standards, none of his fellow Democrats were willing to join him. The high
standards of City College had been his ladder up from airplane engines. The rungs had rotted,
but nobody cared. That was the moment, he says, when he joined the G.O.P.
Now the Republican Party is rewarding him for the compliment
he paid them by lining up behind Michael Bloomberg. Republican weakness has
produced many a bizarre candidate over the years, and Mr. Bloomberg is not the
worst; every political reporter has a few Pierre Rinfret stories tucked away
like vintage port for whenever he wants a sip of pure awfulness. Mr. Bloomberg,
by contrast, seems like a pleasant fellow. He has spent millions of dollars to
publicize his name and to learn a little bit about New
York. The first activity is harmless, and the second
is praiseworthy-all of us should know something about this great city. But the
notion that he is qualified to be Mayor-especially the Mayor that follows Rudy
Giuliani-is surprising. Two weeks ago, I asked the question whether any of the
four Democrats were weighty enough to handle the most important political
transition of our lifetime. If they are questionable, what is Mr. Bloomberg? A dimensionless subatomic particle-a quark, a boson. The
only reason he is being encouraged is that he has deep pockets, and the
Republican Party wishes to pick them.
Herman Badillo is a liberal. Dead fetuses do not concern
him; neither do open borders. But he is a liberal who,
in a long and active life, has learned a few things. The temptation for
principled Republicans in New York
is to run paradigmatic candidates. The economic and ethnic bases of New York
Republicanism are small and dwindling. The Silk Stocking District, the WASP
enclave on the Upper East Side, is gone; how long can
the North Bronx, Bay Ridge and even Staten
Island last? Since no Republican is likely to win, we might as
well cross over to the Conservative Party line and vote for William F. Buckley
Jr., or his heirs.
But the Giuliani years
showed us that there was another possibility. A liberal
who was very right on one or two vital issues, running as a Republican, could
win a citywide race. Rudy did it with crime. Before we go back to our cells and
our purity, maybe we should try the gambit again.
Herman Badillo agrees with George W. Bush in claiming that
Hispanic voters are willing to give the G.O.P. a chance. Nominating Mr. Badillo
would certainly be a better way of luring them than kicking the Navy out of
Vieques. But there are better reasons for Republicans to back him. He knows a
truth-that if you offer to help people by educating them, you must really
educate them-and he knows enough about government to implement what he knows.
Does his knowledge, at age 72, come too late? That is the
great fear. But Ronald Reagan took on the evil empire in his early 70’s. John
Quincy Adams was a stripling of 63 when he was first elected to Congress, but
he was re-elected eight times, and won his great victory over the gag rule when
he was 77. Mr. Badillo’s age is related to one invaluable trait-not giving a
damn. He knows his mind, and he got his start in politics when everyone else in
the field was snot-nosed.
Come Sept. 11 and the first cool air, Republican primary
voters will decide which man to offer as Mr. Giuliani’s heir. Between now and
then, Herman Badillo will traverse many discussion clubs and empty lecterns.
