DAY FOURTEEN:Sept. 24:
It's awfully hard to believe that New Yorkers are going to vote tommorow. When the terrorists struck the World Trade Center it was primary election day for all of the important offices in the city, including Mayor. In the preceding days every candidate, including the Republicans, had tried hard to distance themslves from Rudy. He was a walking plague on politics. For months he had led the New York State Republian Party down a phoney garden path, promising to trounce Hillary Clinton's bid for the Senate. But in a single week during last summer he autodestructed. announcing he was not going to run, after all. Oops, sorry guys. And we revealed why: prostate cancer and a mistress. He declared his marriage with TV personality Donna Hanover was splitsville, and he had the audacity to bring his mistress to official city affairs.
The NY GOP struggled to find a decent candidate to run, with only weeks left until election day, against the woman Republicans love to hate: Hillary. They opted for a little known car dealer from Long Island, and then sunk obscene amounts of money into a truely nasty campaign. Meanwhile, Rudy pissed off everybody. He paraded around with his mistress, alienating the conservative family values types. He staunchly and loudly defended the police departments "right" to beat and brutalize dark-skinned New Yorkers, horribly polarizing the city along racial lines and creating needless tensions between law enforcement and the populace. He grew nasty, sniping at reporters and calling them names. And by this summer the hole city , regardless of their politics, seemed to be counting the days until his happy departure. Just a couple of months ago he tried to throw Donna and the kids out of Gracie Mansion so he could move his mistresss in. This led to a very public, very nasty dispute between the two, culminating in a judge deciding that both the Mayor and Donna were such terrible parents that a court conservator had to be appointed to protect the children. Nearly every mother in the city despised Rudy when court proceedings revealed he had hardly spoken to his children in three years, and had not taken his little boy anywhere, to do anything, in so long that the court could establish no record of father/son interaction.
So election fever gripped the city, even though the upcoming voting was only the primaries. New York wanted to put this awful little man behind them, even if he had brought affluence and low crime to the city. People were ready for real change.
And then, just 90 minutes after the polls opened, the first jet crashed into the first of the Twin Towers, and voting stopped.
Tommorrow it will have been two weeks since that dreadful day, and we will once again go to the polls. None of the issues are the same. The mood of the city is so blue that it's quite possible less than half the electorate will show up. And to further complicate matters, the once-villified Mayor is now a worldwide hero of such proportions that NY Govenor Pataki declared if he were voting in the election, he would write in Giuliani for Mayor. No matter that Giuliani and Pataki were strong supporters of the new term limits law, which forbids Giuliani from serving a third term. Both men have done everything in their power (largely behind the scenes) to pursuade the electorate there ought to be a popular groundswell for retaining the man in office --- the man all New York loves, for the moment.
The law is the law: Rudy cannot screw around with this one, though he will undoubtedly keep trying, right up to final election day in November. So Gotham must make choices tommorrow, and it is impossible to guess what will happen. Never before has the leadership of this city mattered so much. And never has an election seemed so capricious.
This morning on the subway a small incident occured that illustrates how ridiculous it is to hold elections tommorow. The particular train car was brand new, and had a set of wheelchair flip seats that stay up, out of the way, unless a passenger pulls them away from the wall and sits upon them. A young man got on the train, reached for one of these seats and accidently let go, causing it to flip up against the wall with a BANG. The passengers -- every one of them -- jumped in their seats and turned to stare. The woman across from me began weeping. A big man, built like a football player, shifted nervously in his seat and gave the young man a look that would have turned jello into stone. The young man stood up and loudly apologized to everybody in the car. And the weeping woman looked at me with a pleading look in her eyes that said, "Please make it stop."
God only knows how a populace in this emotional state is going to choose a new government.
Keep your fingers crossed for us..........
Be well. Be safe. Stand defiant.
Laurie Garrett
