A Mayor for All Seasons

By Roger Rosenblatt

Like his big-city colleagues, Ed Koch practices the politics of survival

If a stiff upper lip could make a sound, say a nerve-racking hum, it would now emit from the offices of the nation's mayors and eventually fill the air.

Mayors are a brave lot generally, but until the advent of the Reagan Administration, their courage was merely tested on sozzly hecklers, dim-witted Governors, intransigent state legislatures and the normal range of external terrors that attend their work. Now Ronald Reagan has made them look inward. When he told the National League of Cities last December that his "first responsibility as President will be to reverse our nation's economic decline," no one in the crowd mistook his meaning. The cities were going to be on their own. The federal purse would be snatched away. From now on the mayors would have to replace dependency with invention.

Conceivably such a threat may be read as a challenge, but the problems of American cities are vast and acute: superannuated industries, disintegrating schools, highways that look like war zones, streets without lights or policemen, vanishing jobs, vanishing people except for the huddled masses waiting for trains that do not arrive.

The woes that beset the aging industrial Northeast and Middle West are not those of the Sunbelt, nor are all cities equally aggrieved. But the essential situation is the same. To put the case in numbers: Jimmy Carter had proposed $117 billion in state and local aid for fiscal 1982.

Under Reagan, the U.S. Conference of Mayors estimates, state and local aid will be reduced to $77 billion. Compare that with the $95 billion to be received in fiscal 1981--a difference that makes no allowance for inflation. The localities are responding predictably. Looking toward 1982 with trepidation, 68% of the 100 American cities surveyed by the Conference of Mayors indicated that they will cut essential services; 58% intend to lay off employees; 41% expect to raise taxes.

What such decisions will do to and for the leaders of these cities will be fascinating to watch. For a long time mayors have not been masters in their domains, and soon they will have no choice but to rule. The battles that were formerly fought with state legislatures and the Federal Government will grow intensely intramural. The mayors themselves may become wholly changed politicians, developing their own politics. One who is already doing that is the ruler of the nation's most powerful city-state--Mayor Edward Koch of New York.

"The fortunes of cities, as well as of men," said Plutarch, "have their certain periods of time prefixed, which may be collected and foreknown from the position of the stars." America's mayors may be forgiven for looking skyward.

By the time the mayor got to the wolf, most of the chicken was bones. The ball-shape French fries had disappeared, as had the string beans. The people were attentive. Under nine huge chandeliers sat the Greater Jamaica Chamber of Commerce, convened in Regency House, Jamaica, Borough of Queens, for their annual "Forecast Luncheon." They were happy with their mayor, who was running late. He would have to step on it if he was going to make Shea Stadium in time to toss out the Opening Day ball for the Mets. But not before getting to the wolf:

Now I have a little story [in response to a complaint from the audience about graffiti on the subway cars]. It is a true story. You know graffiti is not put on as the trains are in the train stations. It is put on in the yards. And the way you prevent the graffiti and the vandalizing of those subway cars is to protect them when they are in the yards. I said to Dick Ravitch [chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority], I said to Dick, 'Look. Why don't you build a fence around the yards at night and put a dog in there to protect those cars? And that will stop the vandals.' And he said, 'No.' And I said, 'Why?' He said. The dogs might step on the third rail.' I said, 'Dogs generally don't step on third rails. But if they do you will replace them. However,' said I, 'if you are worried about that, then build two fences, and have the dogs run between the two fences.' He said, 'No.' I said, 'Why?' He said: 'Because somebody might climb over the fences, and the dog would bite him.' I said, 'I thought that is what dogs were for. But if you are afraid a dog will bite somebody, then use a wolf.' I said, There is no recorded case of a wolf attacking a human being, except if it were rabid.'

"Well I said that, a reporter heard it, and checked it out, and he said: 'Mr. Mayor, you are only partly right. There is no recorded case of a wolf in the wild ever attacking a human being. But there are cases of wolves in captivity attacking human beings.' I said: 'Of course I was talking about wolves in the wild. I would never use a tame wolf. Take a wild wolf, put it in there, and when the wolf becomes tame, you replace it. [The Greater Jamaica Chamber of Commerce is in stitches.] "Now what I am telling is a true story.

We are building the fence. But with the MTA, do you know what they have to do before they build the fence? They have to have an R.F.P.--Request for Proposal.

Any place else you go out and buy a fence.

Not in the City of New' York. This fence, before it will be built, I will be in my third term. Do you follow what I am saying?"

[Who could miss it?] The man who brought down the house is Edward Irving Koch, 56, the 105th mayor of New York, who this week will announce, to the surprise of no one, that he hopes to remain the 105th mayor of New York for four more years (read eight). He is endorsed by his own Democrats and has already gained most of the Republican organization's endorsements as well. What the Greater Jamaica Chamber of Commerce told him in the afternoon, the Yale Club would tell him that night--that he is a sure thing. Nor did Koch tell the Yale Club anything different than he told the Greater Jamaica Chamber of Commerce, except for talking more about financial issues. Otherwise it was pure, consistent Koch, goading his listeners, giggling with malice ("heh, heh, heh"), shining among the crossed oars and dead dignitaries on the walls, as he shone everywhere else he went that day (in appearances at City Hall; Washington Square Park; Gracie Mansion, the official residence; at Shea; in Queens; at the Yale Club) moving right along, touting his achievements the way politicians do, but more openly, aggressively than most, the insistent nasal voice assuring all audiences equally that the city was in the very best of hands.

Those who disagree call Koch an egotist, an obsessive, a thin-skinned son of a bitch who loves nothing so much as his own prominence. They are all correct--at least to some degree--but that still leaves open the question that Koch asks anyone who looks at him: "How'm I doin'?" In terms of the city's budget, he's doing fine.

In terms of the city's spirit, he's doing better--an achievement of sorcery, given that the city's so-called "services" include crime in the streets, garbage in the breeze and a subway system that would look like hell, were not hell more efficient (the wolves won't help). When Koch was officially announced over the p.a. system at the Mets' opener, he was booed to the skies, as the formalities required. Still, he is astonishingly popular in a city that usually elects mayors simply to focus its fury on a single person.

From a New Yorker's viewpoint this popularity is perfectly reasonable. Koch is New York's nut uncle, the bachelor workhorse with opinions on everything, who will not stop talking, who keeps you up all hours telling the same stories a hundred times (half with the mouth, half with the hands), and only grows drowsy when you gain your second wind. He is funny-looking, and dignified too--6 ft. 1 in., bald as an egg, with a body that quits every day.

Yet a scrupulous face, serious eyes. Everything New York does, he does. Gotta lose weight, gotta jog. Did you read Eye of the Needle? "Super, the best." He dines in Chinese restaurants and stands in line for movies. He loves standing in those lines.

Friends persuaded him to hold movie nights at Gracie Mansion, so he tried it.

"But to watch movies in your own home is boring." Koch is not boring. He awakens automatically at 6 o'clock every morning, hungry for his job, and lights a short fuse.

A statue of him would show a fellow eating ice cream on an Exercycle, in perpetual debate with passersby.

All this translates into the sober fact hat Koch is a full-time public servant whose entire being--senses, affections, intelligence--is fused with the life of his lunatic city. Like New York, Koch can be brave, hilarious, generous, protective, occasionally gracious and more rarely, touching. He can also be arrogant, spiteful, petty, wily and a bully. He was a bully at the Yale Club, for example, when a hapless young man rose to challenge Koch's advocacy of capital punishment. The young man put his question: "Why do you think that taking a life is a good thing?" thereby winning the disapproving sighs and groans of those about him, which Koch, of course, picked up. "When do you graduate?" he asked the kid. He would have lost nothing by a show of magnanimity (certainly not the argument, since he went on to state it forcefully), but he had the eye of the needier.

On the other hand, it is this same predisposition to face down opponents that people like in Koch. Stories of his antics at wild public meetings are enlarging New York folklore (with Koch as his own Homer). Yet it is true that Koch has refined a combative style of oratory, which appeals strongly to a city where four-fifths of life is an argument. Often he does not even wait for a threat to appear before pouncing on it. "What's wrong with that?"he'l ask, out of the blue. He tells you that he buys his suits on sale at Brooks Brothers (or something equally innocuous); then suddenly: "What's wrong with that?"

Yet style and manner are not the only reasons for the mayor's foudroyant success. There is a political philosophy at work in Koch, one not fully formed, which is also at work in the country at large. Koch's basic political shift from repentant Democrat to "secret" Republican (as one antagonist, the liberal weekly Village Voice, calls him) is the nation's shift as well. Like the current White House occupant, the mood of the majority is in his blood.

This must seem quite strange to Koch.

He certainly did not start life feeling the pulse of mainstream America. He was born in The Bronx (Dec. 12, 1924), the second of three children of Louis and Joyce Koch, who emigrated to the U.S. from Poland around 1910. On their family tree hangs one Yisroel Edelstein, an orthodox Jew who, under the alias Hersh Pinyas, is said to have been the leader of a gang that stole money and jewelry from Polish noblemen and gave the loot to the poor. Koch's critics would suggest that he has reversed the family tradition.

During the Depression Louis Koch lost his fur business, and the family moved to Newark, N.J., where they piled into a four-room apartment with four relatives.

On Saturday nights the Koches worked the cloakroom of Kreuger's Auditorium, a catering place that specialized in bar mitzvahs, confirmations and wedding receptions. Eddie was a devoted son and an indefatigable worker, though he still recoils at the memory of cadging for tips. In 1941 the family moved back to New York--to Brooklyn. Eddie worked his way through two years of City College by selling shoes; then joined the Army, winning two battle stars and serving as a de-Nazification specialist in Bavaria. Several of his relatives were killed in the Holocaust. He is not pleased when political enemies like Victor Gotbaum, head of the city's municipal employees union, suggests that if Koch were in Hitler's Germany he would be a Nazi. (Koch calls Gotbaum "absolutely the pits.") After the war Koch enrolled at New York University's law school; today he is vague about the reasons why. His political life began as a street speaker for Adlai Stevenson in Manhattan's Greenwich Village in 1952. In 1956 Koch moved to the Village; he still keeps a rent-controlled flat there, which he uses on weekends. He became a charter member of the Village Independent Democrats, a political reform group that doubled as an organized shouting match. Koch lost his first race for public office in 1962, when he ran for the state legislature and felt he had been "betrayed" by powerful political figures he had relied on. He wept on election night and vowed never to enter the "dirty business" of politics again. But in 1963 he was off and running once more, defeating Carmine De Sapio, the last of New York's big-time bosses, in a contest for Democratic district leader. There followed a seat on the city council and five terms in Congress, where he supported solar energy research funds, amnesty for draft resisters, aid to day care centers and Gene McCarthy. He received a perfect 100% rating from the Americans for Democratic Action, which he now abjures, calling himself "Mayor Culpa." He entered the mayoral race in late 1976 as an underdog and won in a squeak.

What is said to have changed Koch's politics was stepping into a job that requires him to pay the bills himself. He took over a city that was not unlike his family in the Depression--only in worse shape because it owed more--and so he applied a Depression mentality to it. His basic governing maxim is: "Don't spend what you don't have." It sounds simple enough, but it was too difficult for Koch's predecessors, who spent a billion a year that New York did not have and pushed the city to the brink of bankruptcy. Owing is something Koch does not approve of.

There is in him a moral connection between owing money and owing political favors. The personal independence he prizes, and that sometimes gets on people's nerves, is the same sort of independence he seeks for the city, which he seems to regard as an extension of himself.

His first order of business, then, was balancing the budget. "And we've done it," he says, with pride. "If you recall where we were--no credit, the seasonal loans were running out. Nobody thought we would get the federal loan guarantees we had to have. Not Felix certainly. [Felix Rohatyn, chairman of the Municipal Assistance Corporation created in 1975 to borrow for the city, and New York's chief financial strategist.] I want to give full credit to Felix for his brilliant conception of what had to be done. But I take a lot of credit for getting it done."

It must be said too that New York's economic survival has been due to circumstance as well as human genius. While federal outlays have grown at an annual rate of more than 11% since 1978, Koch has held his city's spending growth to less than 4% a year. But an inflationary economy that increases revenues--even without a real increase in city taxes--has helped.

Koch's financial success has its dark side. His cutting back has established his reputation as an enemy of the poor. In response, Koch points first to housing, citing the 26,000 major apartment rehabilitations begun in the past two years that will almost entirely benefit the lowest income groups. His main point, however, is philosophical: "We spend 56% of our $14 billion operating budget on services that go only to those people below the poverty line, primarily to 26% of the people in this city. If you have a healthy city financially, who benefits? The poor. Because if you have an unhealthy city, who leaves? The middle class. The poor can 't leave." He adds that in the first half of the 1970s, before he took office, the city had lost more than half a million jobs. Since he became mayor, New York has gained more

than 100,000 jobs in the private sector.

Pleased as he is about balancing the 1982 budget (at $14.7 billion), Koch believes that his city is imperiled by President Reagan's own balancing act.

About one-sixth of New York's budget for 1982 depends on federal largesse, and if those funds are not forthcoming, Koch will face the impolitic Hobson's choice looming for most of the nation's mayors --that of raising taxes or further reducing the very services he needs to beef up. If Reagan's total proposal were to come through as is, Koch predicts that New York would stand to lose $350 million of its operating budget in the first year, and about $350 million of its capital budget.

Koch agrees with Reagan in principle, so he is not about to storm the White House.

He has lobbied Congress, however, on mass transit and Medicaid. And his friendship with the President has paid off in at least one area. New York will receive $1.7 billion to complete its Westway construction project, a covered highway that will link midtown and downtown Manhattan.

The areas most affected by Koch's own budgetary cutbacks have been crime and education; one up, one down. Depending on his mood, Koch will sometimes make less of the city's crime situation by pointing out that New York is only ninth nationally in crime statistics and is not No. 1 in rapes and murders, which is no consolation to victims, and is, in any case, misleading. Last year was a crime bonanza for New York, a record, and Koch does take that seriously. In next year's budget he calls for 1,000 new cops and 500 civilians to be added to the police force, along with 37 new trial courts to try to break the gridlock of the criminal justice system. Yet the New York State Bar Association has approved only twelve of the mayor's 33 legislative proposals to reform the system. Two of the disapproved ideas, the most controversial, are Koch's call for pretrial jailing without bail of certain people charged with major crimes and his proposal that prosecutors be allowed to appeal, to a higher court, sentences they regard as too lenient.

As for public education, New York's problems only differ from other cities in magnitude. Schools are dangerous; truancy is rife; classes are unwieldy; teachers can't teach. Koch emphasizes the good news; reading scores are up about 6%, exceeding the national average. And for 1982 he proposes the hiring of 1,100 new teachers, 400 more school guards, and an additional $9 million for new equipment and the schools' maintenance budget. Yet a central pedagogical problem must also be met. The city's economy, like the nation's, is changing from one of manufacturing to one of service. Will the schools produce students who can compete in this new market?

The mayor's most publicized problem these days is the New York transit system, which successive administrations of the MTA have let go to hell, until now it has become both a mess and a high-crime district. Of the subway, Koch says that "it stinks" and that it isn't his baby. That is true: only the Governor can hire and fire the MTA chairman, and Koch controls but four of the fifteen votes on the MTA board.

Still, the city is Koch's baby, and the subway is a disease coursing through its arteries.

Recently a panel was appointed to recommend comprehensive solutions. It had better. Responsible or not, Koch may well see much of the good will he has won in the past three years go down those tubes.

Of all Koch's concerns, the one that rankles and disturbs him the most personally is the accusation that he does not care about the city's blacks and Hispanics. Even his severest critics on this issue rarely accuse Koch of actually being a racist. What they do say is that the mayor, through his championship of the middle class, is exacerbating the normal racial tensions in the city by treating nonwhites as if they were not true citizens. Koch would argue that he acts toward everybody equally, but as a former aide says, "Ed treats everyone the same-- badly." Nor does it help matters when Koch works himself into a state and starts hurling words at his critics like "wacko" and "ideologue."

Yet Koch's feelings about nonwhites, about blacks especially, are mixed and volatile. In 1979 Journalist Ken Auletta was researching a two-part profile of the mayor for The New Yorker. Koch gave Auletta permission to go through a series of oral memoirs that he had recorded for Columbia University in 1975 and 1976. Among Koch's statements on race was this: "I find the black community very antiSemitic. I don't care what the American Jewish Congress or the B'nai B'rith will issue by way of polls showing that the black community is not. I think that's pure bull . . . Now, I want to be fair about it. I think whites are basically antiblack ... But the difference is: it is recognized as morally reprehensible, something you have to control."

Today Koch is sore at Auletta for printing those remarks because they showed Koch in a bad light, one that his enemies like the Village Voice enjoy switching on. But Koch does not deny having those feelings then, nor does he recant them now. On the other hand, he has frequently spoken out against injustice to blacks. He has appointed a higher percentage of blacks (18%) to top administrative positions than did any one of the three mayors who preceded him. He took the patronage out of the procedure for choosing young people for summer jobs, and raised the percentage of blacks employed for summers from about 60% to over 90% simply by making the system equitable. He has treated poverty programs evenhandedly, getting rid of ones that benefit whites as well as blacks. As for playing favorites, he took heat for removing a full-time police car protecting the leader of the Lubavitcher Hasidic sect in Brooklyn, because Koch was convinced such protection was not necessary. Still, he is regarded by many as a divisive force in the city.

Given Koch's reputation on the race issue, it would seem that he has changed a lot since the summer of 1964, when he spent eight days (his vacation) in Laurel, Miss., defending civil rights workers. He likes to talk about that time. The event was a sit-in at Kresge's to win equal service at the luncheonette counter. Black and white protesters were assaulted by people at the counter. Then the assailants brought charges against the protesters. Koch tells the story with helpless humor (the "heh, heh, heh") about the pixilated justice of the peace; the redneck mob; the unhelpful FBI officer named Robert E. Lee, to whom Koch offered to send his intended route to Jackson, "to make it easier for you to find the bodies." And the inevitable verdict:

"All my people were convicted."

The interesting thing about the story, apart from recalling Koch the liberal (as opposed to the "liberal with sanity," as he describes himself now) is that it reveals an essential part of his makeup. Civil rights was not a lost cause in 1964, but in Laurel it could appear like one. During the period Koch spent in Mississippi, the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, were discovered. Koch himself was in real danger, jokes aside.

His defendants did not have a chance in court, as Koch well knew. He recognized a lost cause, yet he refused to concede it.

One of the fundamental elements in Koch is his capacity to recognize lost causes and principles simultaneously, to wield hope against the facts--a capacity not acknowledged by those who think of him as the enemy of the hopeless.

This facet of Koch is revealed most fully in nothing political, but rather in the story of his most painful lost cause, one that required the greatest display of hope. One recent afternoon, with the light fading, Koch recalled the death of his mother. When he spoke of it, his voice at once softened and rose in pitch, as if he were imitating a boy.

He was asked: Do you picture her in any special way?

"Yes. There was a ... [Then the voice changed] She died of cancer. And that was very painful.

"I remember the medical report. It filled 'the four quarters of the abdomen.' And ultimately the liver. [Then, spoken very quickly] And she died [like a reasonable conclusion]. It was an interesting episode.

"I dropped by the house one night. It was August 1, and it was 1960. There was my mother. She was very pleased to see me. And she said, 'I'm so glad you came, because tomorrow I'm going into the hospital.' And I said: 'What's wrong Mama?' And she said, 'Well, I'm not feeling well. I saw my doctor and I told him there's something wrong.' He had been treating her, the doctor, for a gall bladder for five years. She was taking Pepto-Bismol. And then she said, 'But I said to him, No. I want to go in the hospital, to take whatever tests can be taken.' Quite a smart woman. [Looks up to make sure you realize this.] And the doctor said to her, it's gall bladder, and we'll just operate. We take it out. We'll repair it. God knows what. [The sentences sound increasingly like Yiddish-English.] "So ... [long pause] she was operated on [by a different doctor]. My father and I were there. And the doctor came down.

And he said, uh, [almost inaudible] I've got to tell you something, now or later. He said, uh, 'Mr. Koch--talking to my father I'm going to tell you the truth. Your wife has cancer [voice raised for bravery]. She's going to die in three months. And there's nothing I could do and there's nothing you can do [loud here] to help her. And you should let her die in dignity. I know you won't do it. I know you will run from doctor to doctor. It will not help you.' Well, that is some news. So, we take my mother home. She doesn't know ... They always know ... And just as that doctor knew we would do--my father and I, my brother, and sister, said, no we can't let her die this way. We have to do something. It's ridiculous! You can't let somebody die."

The rest is a pilgrimage. Dragging his mother from place to place, from treatment to treatment, quack to quack. Everyone phoned with a miracle cure. His mother implored: "Why don't you let me die?" And Koch: "Oh, Mama, you're silly. You're not going to die." Then the astonishment: "She died to the day, three months; that is what is so incredible." The doctor who told the truth "was a wonderful doctor. And he didn't expect us to listen to him. It's not possible, I mean, if you're a human being." Asked to recollect his mother in happier circumstances, he said that she was very attractive, handsome, not beautiful, "because that would not be accurate." Lifting the mood, he added that she was a terrible cook.

He told this story in his office in city hall, stretched full-length in a black leather chair to one side of the fireplace, where he customarily talks to visitors. The office is well proportioned: 18-ft. ceilings and six high arches containing the windows and doors. The paintings vary--an uninteresting abstract consisting of parallel lines; a Matisse of a languishing nude; a study by Isabel Bishop of "Two Girls," young women really, the one in the red hat looking concerned toward the one in the black hat, who is holding a letter, perhaps conveying bad news. The room is a trove of bric-a-brac: a bogus Oscar inscribed to "Ed Koch, Mayor for Life"; a trophy from the Friars Club; sheet music of an old song called "How'm I Doin'?" (Koch seems curiously remote from these toys, as he does from the bizarre Pee Wee, a giant black-and-white wooden rabbit that sits in his bedroom in Gracie Mansion.) There is a sculpture of Romulus and Remus under the wolf, and a photo of the mayor on top of a camel in Egypt.

The mayor's desk was originally used by Fiorello La Guardia. It had to be raised for Koch, who is almost a foot taller than the only predecessor of whom he speaks admiringly --partly for his ideas, partly for his fame. Raised now, the desk is a bit too high for Koch, thus giving symbolic pleasure to those who think that the current mayor cannot hold a candle to the Little Flower.

Sitting at his too high desk, Koch can gaze straight across at La Guardia in a portrait, who stares straight back with all the severity due a competitor.

Between the eras of La Guardia and Koch there is a lot of relevant New York City history, including black and Puerto Rican immigration, the strengthening of the unions, the demise of the political bosses.

Koch has no time for history. City hall itself, one of New York's most beautiful monuments to the past (the architecture is Louis XVI with sanity), seems fully functional, a museum to work in. Outside city hall the Wall Street area that now gambles for the world was once the whole city, when New York was a Dutch town veined by canals and hemmed in by a wall (thus the name of the street). Koch shows no interest in such things, any more than he seems to notice the plaque located on the sidewalk in front of city hall: "In this place 24 March 1900, Hon. Robert Van Wyck made the first excavation for the underground railway"--the onset of one of the mayor's great headaches commemorated under his nose.

Koch may not have time for history, but he would like to make history, and there is a good chance that he will. History, in turn, has made him--the immigrant boy, the shoe salesman, the Stevensonian, civil rights-defending liberal Democrat "mugged by reality" in Editor Irving Kristol's phrase, until eventually he became the most recognizable kind of figure in modern American politics: the neoconservative, the crypto-Republican, the Tough-Man Entrepreneur No-Nonsense Tightwad. Oddly, this figure has assumed the most traditional American role. He is the Jew become Yankee Trader--prudent, frugal, resourceful, strict; in Koch's case, ascetic to boot. On his shoulders lies the mantle of New England Protestantism, the mantle scorned and defiled by bona fide Protestants like former Mayor John Lindsay, and now handed over to the latest pioneers.

"We went through an era when middle-class values were dumped on," says Koch. "Honesty, integrity, hard work, patriotism, religiosity, all those were considered terrible things in the minds of some ideologues who are still out there.

Not me. I always believed they were verities then. I think they're verities now."

So, deep down, do most New Yorkers, and that is the center of Koch's strength.

But none of this really explains Koch, who remains remarkably mysterious for an apparently open man. Some of the mystery is due to his living alone and keeping his own counsel. Some is due to the fact that there are sides to Koch that do not smack of Establishment at all -- a strong egalitarian impulse that continually rises to the surface, coupled with genuine comfort in mixing with all classes and races, without any feelings of personal superiority. Perhaps the most telling fact about Koch is that he is a longtime resident of Greenwich Village. A Villager is a special kind of New Yorker. Anyone who chooses to live in the Village opts for the extremes of city life -- squalor and elegance; beauty and danger; stoop ball and art show. He also indicates that he enjoys the potential anarchy of city life-- an idea that appeals to more than dare admit it.

If Koch is the elective shoo-in that he appears, however, it is not only because of what people know and see about him, but what they guess about him as well. New Yorkers know that Koch seems a hard-nose. What they guess about him is that he is not the hard-nose he seems, that he is in stead a quite naive man who may have toughened up because of various treacheries and disappointments, but who remains fundamentally naive nonetheless. It is said of Koch that he trusts others too little. It is more likely that he has trusted others too much (as he trusted John Lindsay, whom he supported for mayor, and who later turned his back). And it is possible that people have affection for Koch not because he is a wised-up sucker, but because they detect that he is a sucker still, quite unwised-up, just -like a great many New Yorkers who are no-nonsense on the outside and mush within.

It may thus be that New Yorkers see in Koch a political sensibility that they recognize in themselves, that of a practical politician who has not always been that way.

The 1960s were a period of extravagant idiocy, but also of great pain; and no politician who has been through that time could remain untouched by both extremes. The Koch who started out as a softy by his own account, and who then acquired a carapace, is different from a political leader who had no soft spot to begin with. With such a convert there is always the possibility (suspicion, hope) that he sympathizes more than he lets on -- as in the anecdote Koch loves to tell of the judge who got mugged and then announced that it would have no effect on his future decisions. An old lady in the courtroom shouted:

"Then mug him again." It always gets a big laugh. But Koch would not tell the story quite so often if he understood only the old lady.

Finally, cities tend to be sentimental about themselves, as New York's ubiquitous "I Love New York" buttons demonstrate. Koch really does love New York.

For that, many people would forgive him almost anything.

Whatever the exact source of his appeal, Koch, like Ronald Reagan, has managed to persuade the citizens that happy days are here again in the face of a continent of evidence to the contrary.

Part of the upsurge of feeling is due to normal human buoyancy; part to genuine signs of recovery. But most is due to Koch himself, who, no matter how well or poorly the city knows him, knows the city like the back of his hand. One thinks, for example, of his tasteless, dopey, unprincipled decision to throw a parade for the returned U.S. hostages. The callousness of making those people suffer yet another ceremony. The ignorance of not being able to tell when the public had had enough already. The parade was sensational.

-- By Roger Rosenblatt.

Reported by Robert Geline/New York

With reporting by Robert Geline/New York

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