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By Root 1180 0

called racist. But Koch wasn’t a traditional liberal. When he thought Mike Holloman, the black head of the Health and Hospitals Corporation, was incompetent, he was the first prominent white official to say so. With the exception of labor leader Victor Gotbaum, he was almost the only one. “I invited the Council of Elected Black Officeholders to a reception at Gracie Mansion,” Koch recounted. “Yet today I was told they had a meeting and none of them liked what I was doing to change the way poverty funds were spent to ensure that the poor received them. Some said they were going to picket the reception. Others said they wouldn’t cross a picket line. One official called me up and said, ‘What do we do?’ I said, ‘Easy. I’m canceling the reception.’ ”

Early in the 1976 Presidential campaign, the late Hubert Horatio Humphrey, the knight-errant of American liberalism, tore into critics of big government while attending a dinner at the Americana: “Ronald Reagan is setting the rules for this campaign. Less is good. Government is too big.… Well, I’ll tell you, I’m not about to fall for it.” Humphrey was getting into the old rhythm, cranking up the old-time religion, whacking the podium first with his right hand, then with his left. “I am not ashamed to tell you I am a New Dealer,” he proclaimed. “I want to warn you, my friends, that when people turn their back on our family, your heritage … you will lose, and deservedly so.… There are some people today who are running against Washington [presumably Jimmy Carter]. They are not positive.… The ‘less government’ theme is just a code word for neglect, a code word for ignoring our cities.… Neglect of our cities is a new form of racism.”

Wild cheering. Humphrey’s enthusiasm was always infectious, but this time he reached his audience because he reminded them of their faith in money and programs; of their faith in compassion, their desire to right wrongs—immediately. Liberalism’s appeal has always rested on a big heart. For all his flaws, Humphrey touched a wide range of people because of his obvious humanity and concern. But liberals’ very humanity led to an overheated conscience, to demands for instant solutions. After the blackout rioting and looting of 1977, there were loud demands for the federal government to do something. The solution, Daily News columnist Pete Hamill briskly declared, was to “Ask Congress for immediate authorization to create 200,000 goods-producing jobs to be located in New York. Not make-work jobs, shoveling sidewalks or cutting grass. The army can do that work. But building factories that employ New Yorkers in the creation of material goods that can be sold to other people. The government can do that in partnership with private enterprise.” Just like that—presto!—200,000 jobs. In partnership with private enterprise in the sixties, President Johnson initiated the National Alliance of Businessmen to attract jobs for the hard-core unemployed. In 1968, their first full year, they created but 100,000 jobs in the entire nation. It’s not easy to induce profit-making institutions to make socially desirable decisions. Even when government tax or training subsidies are available, white-dominated business is not adept at dealing with the minority-dominated unemployed.

The spreading blight of the South Bronx must be stopped—immediately! Ditto Bushwick. Ditto Bedford-Stuyvesant. Ditto Harlem. Ditto South Jamaica. The answer, declared with absolute certainty, is more jobs, more housing, more government, more money, more inputs. Humility in the pursuit of social justice is no virtue. When confronted with the reality that the people of this country are resistant to new social spending, that President Carter and the Congress will not be forthcoming with the massive funds required—assuming we would know how to spend them if they did—there is a general unwillingness to retreat. To make hard-headed choices about what is do-able as opposed to desirable. So when Jimmy Carter visits the South Bronx and offers a money cure, the city leaps to accept, forgetting that the amount of money