Mailer for Mayor

He insists that he is serious about it:

"I am paying my debt to society. That is why I am running." Indeed, Norman Mailer waxes positively solemn when he talks about his candidacy for mayor of New York. The celebrated author of The Naked and the Dead, more recently of The Armies of the Night, which won him a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, is one of a field of five in next week's Democratic pri mary. Best known among the others are Robert Wagner, mayor from 1954 until Republican John Lindsay took over in 1966, and Mario Procaccino, the city controller.

Mailer calls himself a "left conservative" -- left because he believes the city's problems demand radical answers, conservative because he has little faith in centralized government. Because of this, he explains deadpan, "I am running to the left and to the right of every man in the race." He is cautious about the risks of his new calling. "It's very dangerous for your soul to be a politician," he 'says, "because if you get power it can lead you to perdition faster than almost any other form of human activity."

Mailer's fascination with politics is longstanding. He offered John Kennedy lengthy advice in The Presidential Papers and toyed once before -- in 1961 -- with the notion of running for mayor.

His candidacy is improbable; yet in the course of his campaign Mailer has put forward some provocative ideas. Many merely peck at the periphery of urban problems, frequently with a large mea sure of hyperbole. Mailer proposes a monthly Sweet Sunday, when every form of mechanical transportation -- including elevators -- would be halted. His idea is to give the citizens periodic respite from air pollution caused by cars, trucks, buses and other machinery. He calls for a circumferential monorail in Manhattan, which would ease congestion on traffic-crammed city streets. -, He also suggests that Coney Island be turned into a Las Vegas East, with le galized gambling that would add sizably to the tax revenues. Most of all, however, Mailer has based his campaign on two ideas: that New York City should become a separate 51st state, and that the city ought to be divided into many relatively autonomous neighborhoods.

Neighborhood Power. On the financial side, Mailer argues that the city pays $14 billion in income taxes to Washington and Albany -- but gets back only $3 billion. If the city were a separate state,* it would get to keep a greater proportion of the tax money it ex ports. What is more, it would be freed from legislative control by the present state government, which is often hostile to city demands. At the same time, says Mailer, if he is elected in November, "a small miracle would have happened. At that moment the city would have declared that it had lost faith in the old ways of solving political problems and that it wished to embark on a new conception of politics."

Then, says Mailer, there would be delegated "some real power to the neigh borhoods." This would include "power with their local boards of education, power to decide about the style and quality and number of the police force they want and are willing to pay for, power over the Department of Sanitation, power over their parks." There could be "vest-pocket campuses" built by students in abandoned buildings, restoring a sense of personal involvement that is lost in the large university campuses. Early in his campaign, blithely exaggerating to dramatize his point, Mailer proclaimed: "We'll have compulsory free love in those neighborhoods that vote for it, and compulsory attendance at church on Sunday in those that vote for that."

Long Odds. Mailer wants above all to restore something of the sense of small-town identity that has become lost in the anonymity of city life. "The energies of the people of New York at present have no purchase on their own natural wit and intelligence," he says. "They have no purpose other than to watch with a certain gallows humor the progressive deterioration of their city." Under Mailer's plan for semi-independent neighborhoods, however, "those energies could begin to work for their deepest and most private and most passionate ideas about the nature of government, the nature of man's relation to his own immediate society."

Mailer's rhetoric is seductive if mystical, but the program he proposes is at best elusive. While it is a reminder of treasured values lost, it is an uncertain guide to their recovery. Many may vote for Mailer nonetheless, if only because he represents an alternative to old approaches that have made the city seem ungovernable. Handicapper Mailer, appraising his chances in race-track argot, accurately considers himself "a 20-1 long shot." On his personal morning line, however, the contender adds with bravura: "Best bet."

* For a new state to be carved out of one al ready in existence requires approval of both the old state legislature and the U.S. Con gress. New states have been created from the territory of older states before. For example, in 1792, Kentucky and was West formed from Virginia -- part also of from part Virginia of Virginia -- in 1863. Mailer proposes that the first step, following his election, should be a city-wide referendum on the question of statehood for the city.

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