The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [149]
In a piece subtitled “The Sweet Smell of Pork,” Ward Sinclair of the Washington Post, in April 1978, sketched how members of a House committee were seeking to amend a new federal highway law to aid their districts. James J. Howard (D-N.J.) submitted a $30 million request for a “seagoing jetfoil service to connect his district with New York City.” Don H. Clausen (R-Cal.) desired a $50 million road built as “a demonstration to determine how much the road would divert motor vehicle traffic around the Prairie Creek Redwood State Park” in his district. James C. Cleveland (R-N.H.) wanted federal law changed to allow New Hampshire to sell lottery tickets along its interstate highways. Robert C. McEwen (R-N.Y.) asked that the law be changed “to allow placement of a duty-free store on an interstate highway in his district near the Canadian border.” These were a few of the election-year requests, prompting a Congressional aide to exclaim, “They’re turning this bill into another Christmas tree!” Senator Edmund S. Muskie, Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, in an emotional address to his colleagues in April 1978, warned that Congress was repeatedly ignoring its own formal spending guidelines. Like the city, it was spending according to perceived political need rather than estimated revenues. “During the debate last year on the energy tax bill,” Muskie chided, “we witnessed again this eagerness to sacrifice budget reform in favor of spending proposals when political opportunity becomes more attractive for the moment.”
The same melody—politics—flows through the short-term decisions that helped bring New York to its knees. There are reasonable explanations for many of these. The word moral derives from the word mores, which means “customs.” During the sixties and early seventies, spending, borrowing and taxing were the accepted custom in New York. There was no organized opposition. “We would always report what the Citizens Budget Commission said in a little sidebar deep inside,” recalls former Times man Richard Reeves. “We thought the budget tricks were clever.” The same point was made by former Budget Director Fred Hayes in an interview with the Times: “The newspapers created the impression that we had phony problems and real solutions. Actually, the problems were real but the solutions were phony.”
“The presence of so much media skews New York politics,” Special Deputy Comptroller Steve Clifford told me just days before leaving his post in late 1977. “Media is all politicians come to care about. If you can get a shot on the six o’clock news, it’s more important than changing pension benefits.… Politicians see their job as running for office, not providing vision or persuasion. Part of the blame, though, is the public’s. We have the most irresponsible electorate anywhere.” As Clifford suggests, many of these past decisions were popular, or appeared to be. Rent control was popular, as was free tuition, subsidized rents, school aid, the anti-Arab boycott bill, business taxes, spending now and paying later. “Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed by no better than we deserve,” observed George Bernard Shaw. Citizens complain about garbage collection—but it is, after all, our garbage. Critics complain about television executives who offer braless Charlie’s Angels—ignoring the public, which gave the show its number one rating.
When he was about to depart city government after five long years, former Deputy Mayor John Zuccotti told a reporter, “You know, if you ever worry about America becoming socialist, it’s an interesting idea. I’ll tell you why. You believe in the American dream, private enterprise, etc. You’re raised on that. You work hard. You’ll get somewhere, etc. That’s the whole series.… You get in the government five years and you begin to see that people want you to solve all their