EDWARD
THE DEPRESSER
Jerry
Harkins
Do
you remember Ed Koch? He’s been
dead awhile which fact provides the definitive answer to the question he was
always asking, “How’m I doing?”
Not great. Ed was the Mayor
of New York City from 1978 to 1989, the 105th in a long line of
scoundrels, miscreants and jubilant delinquents. Better than most, he proved what we had long suspected, to
wit that a clown could do a better job in City Hall than a horse’s ass. Not necessarily a good job, just better
than might have been expected.
Which was another answer to that perennial question: he was doing marginally better than a
horse’s ass. He was always good
for a laugh whether staring down Al Sharpton at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge
or trying to pass off Bess Myerson as his girlfriend for god’s sake.[i] If you believed the latter, he could
probably have sold you the former.
In
2002, Ed rose from the dead[ii] and was all
over the television announcing in that whinny, sing-song voice that made strong
men shudder, “I’m a Democrat, a Pataki Democrat” and being quoted to the effect
that fellow Democrat Alan Hevesi was a crook.[iii] He even took notice of a State Senate
race on the East Side where he made a commercial for Republican Andrew
Eristoff. Who knew? And what was Ed doing supporting
Republicans like even Al T’Omato?
Well, there are probably several reasons but it comes down to the fact
that the old boy loved nothing better than media exposure and the media love
nothing better than a man-bites-dog story. Ed was endlessly fascinating to himself and, like all
politicians, he was a devotee of the instant playback—seeing himself on the
eleven o’clock news saying some asinine thing he blurped[iv]
out earlier the same day. He was
missing the limelight and willing to descend to any level of tackiness to avoid
feeling like a has been. He tried
buying himself a magic mirror.
Every morning he would ask it, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the
most winsome politician of us all?”
It worked for a while until one day his mirror said, “Rudolph Giuliani
is far and away the most fey of you all.
Fey is almost the same as
winsome.” Come to think of it,
maybe that’s why Ed decided to endorse Republicans.
But
maybe not. In at least several
cases, he was more anti-Democrat than pro-Republican. For years, he denounced Barack Obama for being weak on
Israel. He denounced John Kerry
for being weak on terrorism which Ed equated with being weak on Israel. He denounced Ted Kennedy for being
“contemptible” for being against the war in Iraq. A bit surprising insofar as Kennedy was universally regarded
as Israel’s best friend in Washington.
The Israeli government was embarrassed but Ed reserved to himself the
exclusive right to make Israeli foreign policy. Also, embarrassing the Israeli government is very hard to do
so Ed could go back to feeling superior after being spurned by his magic
mirror.
Every
so often, the Democrats march themselves off the cliff in imitation of lemmings
and 2002 happened to be one of the years of the great fall off. In other words, Pataki couldn’t lose so
Ed’s endorsement wasn’t worth a tinker’s damn.[v] The other Republicans he endorsed all
lost. But he was nothing if not
persistent. Two years later, his
great passion was George W. Bush.
During the Republican convention in New York, he was all over the
television urging his fellow citizens to “make nice” to the outlanders. Isn’t that what mothers ask their
children to do during toilet training?
Afterwards he took off for Florida to campaign for Bush and Cheney among
expatriate New York Jews. They say
politics makes strange bedfellows but Bush, Cheney, Koch and Zell Miller[vi]
in bed together would surely raise eyebrows even in Texas.
At
least it was a feather bed. Ed
left an estate of between 10 and 11 million dollars, all of it accumulated
after he left office, mostly for opinionating on everything from movies to
foreign policy. No one begrudges
him his success. He was colorful,
interesting and usually successful.
His only fault as a big city politician was that he wasn’t Irish.
[i] Bess Myerson was a smart, funny and talented lady who probably played the role of Ed’s significant other as a lark. She was Miss America 1945, New York
City’s first Commissioner of Consumer Affairs (under John Lindsay) and was damn
near elected U.S. Senator from New York in 1980. She lost to a clown named Al Tomato who went on to be the only U.S. Senator to sing "Old MacDonald Had A Farm" on the floor of Congress. She ran afoul of Rudy Giuliani when he was still U.S.
Attorney and was tried for bribery in one of New York’s finest examples of
prosecutorial misconduct.
Naturally she was acquitted.
No jury would have convicted her of jaywalking but, in this case, she
happened to be innocent. Mr. G
overcame his embarrassment and ran twice for the Republican nomination for
President on a platform of being “America’s Mayor.” Too bad he lost.
It would have been the first time since Caligula that a horse’s ass had
been an important politician. Ms Myerson died in 2014 at the age of 90.
[ii] He wasn’t actually dead
dead at the time. He was just
another has-been politician which is very similar to dead dead in that there is nothing so pathetic as a politician
who’s been out of office for more than a decade.
[iii] Of course he turned out to be right about that. Alan eventually served nineteen months
of a four-year sentence for various corrupt shenanigans he perpetrated during a
term as New York State Controller.
Mr. Hevesi holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University. As to Koch being right about Hevesi,
it’s no big deal. You could say
the same thing about any politician at random and there’s a high probability
you’ll be right.
[iv] Blurp,
v.t., to say something concisely so that it can be used by itself in a
television news broadcast. From blurt, to speak impulsively, blur, to obfuscate, and burp to emit hot air from the mouth
explosively.
[v] In case you don’t remember, the Democratic candidate
was Carl McCall whose nomination was a matter of seniority not competence. His greatest virtue—and you should not
underestimate it—was a congenital aversion to taking a stand. George had six other opponents.
[vi] Zell is a born-again right wing fanatic who has held
several high elective jobs in Georgia, a state which also gave America Newt
Gingrich. He served as the Newt’s
campaign manager during the Slimy One’s failed effort in the 2012 Republican
primaries. Newty who holds a Ph.D.
from Tulane*, was of course running on a family values platform. He’s been married three times, the
first time to his high school geometry teacher. Zell served as Chief of Staff to Lester Maddox and later as
a Director of the National Rifle Association. He holds a Master’s Degree from the University of
Georgia. Lester Maddox you may
remember was a restaurateur who
kept blacks out of his establishment by threatening them with an ax
handle. As his reward, Georgians
elected him Governor. Ed always
had interesting friends.
* Footnote to the
Endnote: Dr. Gingrich wrote his
dissertation on “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo: 1945-1960.”
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