In a New York State of Mind

By Richard Brookhiser

New York Senator and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani continue to run at or near the top of Democratic and Republican presidential polls, as they have for months. Hovering over the horizon like a Predator drone, current New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg co-hosted a conference on bipartisan political solutions in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago and changed his party registration to unaffiliated a few days later, fueling persistent speculation (denied, so far, by him) that he might pull a Perot and make a third-party run as a billionaire maverick. Come November 2008, voters could be facing a Subway Series presidential race.

Historically, New York was the cradle of presidential candidates. Two of the first politicians to spot the state's potential were Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In the spring of 1791 they took a vacation from their jobs as Secretary of State and Congressman to make a tour of New York and New England, ostensibly to collect botanical specimens but in fact to look for political allies. One they found was the supple young New York Senator Aaron Burr. They might better have left him alone. In the presidential election of 1800, Burr morphed from Jefferson's running mate to his (unsuccessful) challenger for the White House itself.

The Democratic Party nominated a slew of New Yorkers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when Tammany Hall was the powerhouse of the state's big-city ethnic base. But the Republicans tapped New Yorkers too --Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Evans Hughes, Thomas Dewey--as did significant third parties: former President Millard Fillmore headed the anti-immigrant American Party ticket in 1856. Some New York candidates went straight from the campaign trail to the footnotes--Horatio Seymour, anyone?--but four New Yorkers managed to win eight presidential elections: Martin Van Buren (1836), Grover Cleveland (1884, 1892), Theodore Roosevelt (1904) and Franklin Roosevelt (1932, 1936, 1940, 1944).

New York's political importance flowed from people, money and publicity. The 1820 census found New York to be the most populous state, while by the mid--19th century New York City had passed Philadelphia and Boston as the financial and media capital of the country. Virginia, cradle of Jefferson and his followers, and Ohio, bastion of the post-- Civil War GOP, have elected more Presidents because of regional ties to a major party during its political heyday, but New York was the battleground state that both parties fought for.

Franklin Roosevelt's unsuccessful opponent in 1944, Thomas Dewey, ran again in 1948, when he famously did not defeat Harry Truman. And then the parade of New York presidential candidates stopped. A number of ambitious New York politicians looked like presidential timber, but Governor Nelson Rockefeller, New York City Mayor John Lindsay and Representative Jack Kemp failed to win their parties' nominations; Governor Mario Cuomo never declared his candidacy. Colin Powell was a flash in the pan; Donald Trump was a flash in his own brainpan. No New Yorker has headed a presidential ticket in almost 60 years --the longest New York drought in American history.

What went up, came down. The tilt of population to the Sun Belt left New York in third place behind California and Texas; soon it will be tied with Florida. New York City is still rich and glutted with media, but other cities have made their mark--CNN is headquartered in Atlanta, Google in Mountain View, Calif. The stars of Hollywood are bigger political lightning rods than New York's news anchors and talking heads, while imperial Washington is not just a barracks for politicians and a trading floor for lobbyists but also a center of think tanks and policy discussion. Years of bipartisan misgovernment have depressed the state of New York. Although New York City has rebounded from its early-'90s nadir, upstate is a shell of its former self. The local political talent pool has dried up. Albany is one of the most dysfunctional state capitals in the nation, having passed only three budgets on time in 23 years.

If the political wheel is turning back to New York, that is paradoxically because the state has fallen so low. Its very weakness makes it a target of opportunity for office-seeking outsiders. Michael Bloomberg of Massachusetts is an old-fashioned naturalized New Yorker. He had a long and lucrative career on Wall Street before running for mayor in 2001. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, was no more a New Yorker than the average gawker in a foam Statue of Liberty hat when she began her first "listening tour" of the state in 1999. She staged a friendly takeover of the local Democratic Party, running a thorough, well-researched campaign in 2000 and zealously filling constituents' potholes ever since. New York's shrunken fortunes make it unthreatening to the rest of the country. The "lawless hoodlums" of Tammany Hall, as Senator Thomas Heflin of Alabama once called them, no longer even exist. New York City's cleaner, safer streets make it positively attractive. It is not a feral haven of drug addicts and serial killers but a place to take the family. In that respect, mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg are reaping what they have sown. If they could clean out muggers and squeegee men, maybe they could clean up Washington.

The moral of the story: New York is back on center stage politically because it is safely second rate.