The New Republic

There is unappreciated genius in the words of Fernando Ferrer, the
Democratic front-runner in New York's mayoral primary. They don't
pack the emotive punch of a Bill Clinton or the soaring brilliance
of a Barack Obama. Ferrer's gift is actually a little
lower-brow--for the snide one-liner of the sitcom trade. For
example, when asked at a recent candidates' forum who he blamed for
the shooting of Amadou Diallo, the Guinean immigrant gunned down in
1999 by four nypd officers, Ferrer shot back, with impeccable
timing, "You know, I'm not a lawyer." In another life, Ferrer might
have landed a bit part on "The King of Queens."I mention the Diallo murder because it has come to define Ferrer's
once- promising campaign. The trouble began in March, shortly after
the former Bronx borough president told a gathering of local police
officers that, in his (nonlegal) opinion, the killing had not been
a crime. For good measure, Ferrer added that "there was an attempt
by many [during that period] ... to over- indict." This came as a
shock to people in the civil rights community, who fondly
remembered Ferrer agitating for an indictment of the policemen
involved. It also came as a shock to Diallo's mother, who
pronounced herself

"surprised to hear he said that because [Ferrer] was among the
people in the

community who ... asked for justice for Amadou." For weeks,
audiences dogged Ferrer with questions about the precise quantity
of indictment he believed Diallo's executioners deserved. The local
news media engaged in an endless, self-fulfilling debate over
whether Ferrer's was a garden-variety faux pas or a truly
disastrous gaffe-the kind that "confirm[s] people's worst fear about
a candidate," as The New York Times put it. Ferrer's poll numbers
plummeted. Last Friday, two top advisers quit.

I have nothing but sympathy for Amadou Diallo. But, tragic as his
case may be, I find it troubling that no one has spoken up for the
real victim in this episode: Fernando Ferrer. All his adult life,
Ferrer has been playing by the same set of rules--that the way to
succeed in politics is to behave like an unapologetic hack. Now
that he's on the verge of his greatest success, voters and the
press have decided unapologetic hackery isn't good enough. Suddenly
they want "consistency." And "principle." And "character." Well, I
say it's not fair. You don't cut Social Security benefits for
people who are about to retire. You don't change frequent-flier
incentives for people who've already earned their free trip to
Hawaii. And you don't go revising the criteria for political
leadership when a longtime pol like Ferrer is about to grab the
brass ring.

Ferrer's outlook on politics is mostly a product of the Bronx
political milieu in which he cut his teeth. Ferrer won a City
Council seat in 1982, then rose through the local machine by
putting his head down and waiting his turn. He didn't have to wait
long. In 1987, a major corruption scandal brought down the mostly
Jewish leadership of the Bronx Democratic Party. Ferrer inherited
the borough presidency by virtue of being far enough from real power
to avoid the taint of scandal. (It also didn't hurt that he was
Latino.)

To the lesson of this formative experience, Ferrer's years as a
borough boss added another: the idea that all politics is
transactional. The Bronx, as New York historian Fred Siegel has
pointed out, has no private-sector economy to speak of. More than
half the area's adult population had actually dropped out of the
labor force by the late '90s. Its only economic lifeblood was the
range of jobs and social services doled out by the local political
leadership, which relied on this arrangement to cement its power.

Ferrer put these two lessons to work in his 1997 run for mayor. Part
one of the strategy was to be the guy who was not the other guys,
just as he'd been in 1987. In

this case, Ferrer noticed that two other likely primary candidates,
Al Sharpton and Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger, hailed
from the left of the political spectrum. He decided to become the
candidate of moderates. Except that Ferrer's instinct wasn't to
appeal to people's values so much as buy them off. Ferrer promptly
shed his liberal positions on abortion and the death penalty
without even bothering to, say, highlight his agonizing personal
evolution on the issues, as a more skilled politician might have. On
abortion, he more or less woke up one day and declared that "every
time a mother hiccups, that's no reason to abort a child." Ferrer's
campaign flamed out after a highly touted fund-raiser yielded
little money but much footage of a half-empty ballroom, which the
New York press obligingly replayed again and again in the days that
followed.

A lesser man might have concluded that higher office wasn't in the
cards. Ferrer concluded he had simply offered the wrong deal to the
wrong people. By the time the 2001 campaign rolled around, Ferrer
had recast himself as a champion of the "other New York"--which, he
insisted, was an appeal to the city's economic underclass, but
which sounded like an appeal to racial resentments. The reason we
can't say for sure is that Ferrer didn't spend much time on the
campaign hustings doing the hard work of demagoguery. At least not
until he had devoted himself to lobbying other local bosses, like
hospital workers' union chief Dennis Rivera and the race-baiting
Sharpton.

Ferrer was less a candidate than a quid pro quo masquerading as a
candidate.

And it very nearly worked. He took first place in the Democratic
primary, with

35 percent of the vote, but lost narrowly in a subsequent runoff.

Still, the near miss made Ferrer the prohibitive favorite to win
this year's

Democratic nomination. His only hurdle was winning back the white
Democrats who felt he had sandbagged the party's eventual 2001
nominee with his tepid support. As always, Ferrer's solution was to
bargain for loyalty, not inspire it. To win over local whites,
Ferrer pandered ( la Diallo) to police unions, which were known to
harbor bitterness toward Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

It should have worked. "This is spring training for the World
Series," waxed one of Ferrer's minions in an inadvertent voice mail
message to a reporter. "Because, dollars to doughnuts, we'll be in
the World Series." Everything in Ferrer's storied rise suggested he
was right. To suddenly deny Ferrer his due would be a crime against
ambitious ward heelers everywhere, a crime against mixed metaphors,
a crime against a lovable sitcom type. Then again, who am I to
over-indict?

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