The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [154]
The same confusion surfaces when liberals fault landlords for acting like landlords. When landlords urge legislation to pass on increased fuel costs to tenants, City Council members, galvanized by a bleacherful of critics, blast it as a give-away. Raising rents to cover inflationary costs is also a give-away. Of course, landlords can be predators. But many liberals try to have it both ways: claiming they believe in private enterprise—yet condemning business profits. One might differ with Marxists, but at least they’re consistent.
Not only did New York liberalism believe too little in profits, they believed too much in money. “The ultimate problem is money—or rather, the problem of not enough money,” intoned John Lindsay’s 1969 book The City. The “problem” was not defined as a declining economic base, steep taxes, crime, the way services weren’t delivered. No, the city could not be held responsible for helping drive people and businesses out. Since the absence of money was defined as the cause, it logically followed that more money would be the cure.
Money was free. New York would get it from a “Marshall Plan for cities,” from “reordering national priorities,” from a new President, from new spending by Washington. It was assumed that the nation’s taxpayers would pay more in taxes but city taxpayers wouldn’t. Billions for national welfare reform or health insurance would, somehow, be free.
“I used to say, ‘Get it from the Defense Department,’ ” Jean Larkin, an early foe of the Vietnam war and a supporter of businessman Joel Harnett for mayor, told an audience of the reformoriented Village Independent Democratic Club (VID) in 1977. “I must confess, I’ve been wrong. There’s no way to restore the city to solvency without encouraging the private sector to create jobs.” Ms. Larkin now knew that HEW’s budget dwarfed the Defense Department’s. She had become a realist.
Bella Abzug had not, as her visit to the VID Club demonstrated. The peeling paint and wall posters of past liberal glories—MCGOVERN FOR PRESIDENT, KRETCHMER FOR MAYOR, ABRAMS FOR ATTORNEY GENERAL—were an appropriate backdrop for Bella’s old-time religion mayoral campaign. She would seek this club’s endorsement by spouting the same message she had for years. “The money and the programs are there in Washington,” boomed Arnold Weiss, former Chairman of the liberal New Democratic Coalition, introducing Bella. “Why Bella? Because Bella’s the one person who can break those doors open.… Bella Abzug is what we need.”
Enter Bella, sliding a cape from her shoulders, adjusting her hat, letting loose on “the issues”—her issues. All this recent right-wing talk about austerity and fiscal responsibility and management and productivity and what the city must do for itself—STOP!
These were not her issues. Although Bella was speaking on Manhattan’s West Fourth Street, her mind was in Washington. She lugged a copy of the new city budget—but only to point out those programs she helped navigate through Congress. “Much of what we have to get is from the outside,” she declared. “… we’re gonna have creative managers, we’re gonna have manager-managers. But I’m gonna fight for this city.… I’m gonna lead a national policy, a national urban coalition.”
In a sense, Bella wasn’t really running for mayor. Like Lindsay, she was campaigning for something else: a “national urban policy.” The unglamorous task of governing more than sixty agencies, policing the expenditure of almost $14 billion,