The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [196]
Democracy becomes a kind of Tolstoyan drama in which interests and events and institutions, not individuals, often hold sway. Ed Koch came to City Hall determined to shake up the system. He captured a public mandate to do so. He had the opportunity created by the fiscal crisis. The sign on his City Hall desk, the same desk that Fiorello LaGuardia once used, reads:
If You Say ‘It’ Can’t Be Done
You’re Right—
You Can’t Do It.
“I have persevered,” Koch told me in March 1978. “I never give up. Don’t tell me it can’t be done. That’s the sign I have on my desk.… The bastards are not going to beat me down. They’ll have to carry me out of here.” So every morning New York’s ebullient Mayor rises, anxious to get to City Hall, to unleash a new reform proposal, to condemn some ancient wrong as “an outrage.” Like most people in government, Ed Koch is an optimist by choice as well as by chemistry. It would be difficult to get out of bed in the morning and face the day’s problems if he were as cynical as most journalists. Koch honestly believes he can make a difference.
But, imperceptibly, a change comes over most officeholders. It’s not just the crush of responsibility that accompanies public office, a greater appreciation of complexity. It’s also something basic, like ego. After a while, you come to label defeats as victories, not because you’re a liar but because you can’t tell the difference between the two. You also come to believe your own press releases. Knowing that you’re judged not always by what you do but by what you appear to do, a good press becomes all-important. Soon you’re spending part of each day laboring over your image. Success comes not from resolving problems but from skirting or appearing to solve them. From holding press conferences, giving speeches, issuing press releases, creating photo opportunities. The daily press’s preoccupation with a steady diet of news feeds the politicians’ preoccupation with making news.
Soon much of what you do becomes gloss. New York City’s economy looks better to Mayor Koch since he assumed office. Why? Because “I feel it,” Koch says. Like his partners, Koch claimed the labor settlement was an “extraordinary achievement,” as was “the progress” made by the city generally. To claim otherwise is to disparage your own work; all the backbreaking hours of toil and sweat. Besides, your staff and the local military/industrial complex agree. Together, you’re making progress.
Soon you lower your sights. You aim not for the moon but for the top of the trees. “The chains of habit,” Samuel Johnson once said, “are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.” For the first three years of its fiscal crisis, New York could not break with past habits. In his first ten months in office, Mayor Koch could not break the chain, either. He achieved a labor contract, won the continued investment of the banks and pension funds, helped persuade the Congress to pass new loan legislation. He survived some difficult crises. He got by the year.
But as long as the city’s debt and budget grow faster than its revenue base, bankruptcy lurks just over the horizon. As long as no dramatic moves are made to make the city economically more competitive or to improve services, it is unlikely New York will maintain a tax base to support its budget. As long as the city spends more money than it collects, investors will be wary of making loans. As long as the rhetoric of the fiscal crisis is not matched by the actions, the Sturm und Drang of the fiscal crisis will become a permanent fixture, like the Brooklyn Bridge. Someday, the public will no longer believe the rhetoric.
Yet an almost eerie sense of optimism prevails among the partners. “We avoided bankruptcy,” Jack Bigel almost cheerfully told me in September 1977. “No one knew how we were going to refinance