Friday, Oct. 03, 1969
NEW YORK: THE REVOLT OF THE AVERAGE MAN
I'll tell you who the average man is. He's the guy who works hard all day and maybe comes home too tired to move, but he has to moonlight anyway to pay his bills. He wants to educate his kids. He wants his neighborhood to be peaceful and clean. He doesn't have a doorman. His kids go to public schools. He rides the subways and the buses. He never burned his draft card or a flag, and he never will. He tries to play the game by the rules, and for that he's getting pushed into a corner. That's who the average man is.
THIS is an election year for New York City, and those words are the summons to the barricades, the social contract and tacit manifesto of the Democratic challenger for the mayoralty of the five boroughs of the fabled, troubled city. His name is Mario Angelo Procaccino, and he is a defiant little man who claims to speak for the angry little people--by far the voting majority --who live and suffer life in New York. For four years, Procaccino and those he seeks to lead have endured what they feel is a special form of outrage, over and above rising taxes and prices, crumbling services, strife-torn schools and all the other familiar ills of big-city America. That outrage is the administration of Mayor John Vliet Lindsay, which, they feel, has ignored them in its undue preoccupation with the city's blacks and poor. Lindsay liberals, by and large, are not merely for racial equality; they believe that society's stepchildren must be given extra helpings of aid to repair the damage of past mistreatment. There is a personal edge to the bitterness of Procaccino's followers, for Lindsay seems to belong to a world that his detractors say they can never enter -- the world of Manhattan's glittering East Side, of discotheques and penthouse parties, of private-school accents and what Procaccino, in a rare flash of genuine wit, once called the "limousine liberals." Lindsay's riposte was to label Mario's entourage "Cadillac conservatives." In the view of their foes, Lindsay's forces loom as an alliance of patricians and restive blacks -- the New Establishment in urban America -- and Procaccino and his aver age man are out to destroy it.
Beyond the Boroughs
No one, least of all Mario ("Will you please stop calling me Mr. Procaccino?"), would dispute the Democratic candidate's credentials to lead the revolt of the average man. He is as common as the machine clubhouse, a journeyman politician who worked hard, if without special distinction, and waited his turn. As he insists on informing people on every street corner, he is "not pretty" -- a useful attribute, he feels, in his war with Lindsay and the Beautiful Peo ple. He wears electric-blue suits and watermelon-pink shirts and in speech and gesture accentuates the ethnic.
His pencil-thin moustache and often quizzical expression make him look a bit like the late show's Leo Carrillo, sans sombrero.
His gooey delivery and overly simple ideas sometimes obscure the fact, but Procaccino is on to something. When in 1965 he won election as city comptroller -- the city's second most powerful office -- it was fashionable for sassy reformers to ask: "What is a Mario Procaccino?" His answer: a Mario Procaccino is a tough, shrewd operator who treated his average-man approach with a law-and-order veneer to beat four rivals in last June's Democratic primary. Now he is given a good chance to win the general election on Nov. 4.
There is an almost epic symbolism in the match of Procaccino against John Lindsay, who early in his four-year term was perhaps the most celebrated and promising mayor in the U.S. Tall, handsome, flat-bellied, articulate with tongue and pen, popular with academics, big businessmen and show people as well as students and black slum residents, Lindsay represents the aristocratic remnant in local politics. As the liberal Republican who broke the Democratic hold on New York City, he was once touted as a future opponent to Robert Kennedy for the presidency. Only 47, he may yet have a national future, if as a prophet of innovative politics he regains honor in his own house.
So far has Lindsay fallen that he lost the Republican primary this year to a quiet, unassertive, almost unknown state senator, John Marchi; as a result, the mayor is running for re-election as an independent. Marchi's victory last June makes the current campaign a three-cornered race, though the contest is primarily between Mario and the mayor. Procaccino started off far ahead, but his lead seems to be diminishing. Marchi is a bit off to one side in the contest, saying some of the same things as Procaccino, with more thought and less vehemence, and with a more traditionally conservative cast. His presence underscores the fact that the main issues in the campaign have almost erased party lines. The Democratic and Republican candidates have far more in common with each other than with the independent Lindsay, who in turn seeks votes from both parties.
Though the contest involves factors unique to New York, the city's election is very much a frame in the national newsreel. Lindsay is the impatient man, the activist and agitator that Robert Kennedy became in his last year, the self-righteous, abrasive enemy of the way things are, who will make blunders and enemies but who will not placidly accept society's faults. He wants to prove the very problematical thesis that big cities are governable, given enough cash and imagination. It is a bad time for such men because many whites feel that there have been too many concessions to blacks already--concessions that whites must pay for. The American middle feels it is a victim of excessively rapid change. Richard Nixon saw that last year. City politicians are not missing the point either.
The Manhattan Arrangement
The law-abiding American, in Nixon's phrase, is "fed up to here" with violence. Procaccino also knows that large segments of the working class and middle class are weary of idealistic reformers who somehow manage to cast the ordinary white man in the fall guy's role. Even politicians who are not racist--as Procaccino and Marchi are not--can capitalize on this sentiment. Candidates can be swept into office solely on its strength. Circumstances vary from region to region, but some of the same factors appear. Thus Detective Charles Stenvig finds himself the mayor of Minneapolis, and Sam Yorty was re-elected in Los Angeles for no other discernible reason than that his opponent was black and his constituents frightened.
Discontent has weakened traditional political institutions and alliances. Unions and intellectual liberals are no longer at ease with each other. Party organizations find it difficult to organize. Old loyalties fail to bind. Such volatility breeds accidental candidates, and Procaccino is a creature of circumstance. Lindsay's failures and the ugly mood of the city, far more than anything in Procaccino's past record or present offerings, account for the Democrat's promising prospects.
To anyone from beyond the Hudson, the Procaccino campaign must seem more than a little incredible. This is New York City, capital of New Politics and glamour, headquarters of the national communications media, lair of sophisticates. Yet, here is Procaccino, 57 and looking it, poor on television and ducking it when possible, suspicious of the press and at odds with it--here is the scion and heir of Old Politics, doing rather nicely by the estimates of adversary and ally alike.
His New York is not the one seen by the visitor, not Broadway or Park Avenue, not Greenwich Village or Harlem. Procaccino lives in a suburban setting so far north in The Bronx that the city boundary runs through his backyard. Marchi has a comfortable house in another outlying region, Staten Island. Lindsay is the Manhattan man. The differences are major. A man in the outer boroughs may work in Manhattan, but he is no more a Manhattanite by temperament than is a citizen of Omaha. Manhattan is heavily populated by the East Side affluents, by poor blacks and Puerto Ricans, by youngish singles. Elsewhere in the vast, often dreary reaches of the boroughs, middle-class and working-class families predominate. A transit stoppage or a heavy snowstorm that is a minor bother or even a chance for bravado and gallantry in Manhattan can bring near paralysis in some of the outlying sections.
In last June's primaries, both Procaccino and Marchi carried Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx and Staten Island but lost Manhattan. Marchi entitled his campaign kickoff speech 'The Forgotten New Yorker." One of the catchy phrases Procaccino uses repeatedly is "the Manhattan arrangement." By that he means an alliance of the intellectuals, editors, broadcasting executives, businessmen and progressives of both major parties who oppose him. Lindsay, he says, is attempting to "pit the poor against the middle class, while he goes about the business of rebuilding Manhattan for the select few." Procaccino is waging the politics of class by the numbers, knowing the white middle outweighs the rest. Manhattan may be New York to the world, but the politician knows that Manhattan contains only 1,600,000 residents out of a total city population of some 8,000,000.
The Angry and the Threatened
Procaccino's average man and Marchi's forgotten New Yorker are of course political stereotypes. In flesh and blood terms, they are many people. Some live on meager incomes as pensioners, clinging to the frame houses that represent a lifetime's work. "People tend to forget," says Marchi, "that there are many poor white people." To the retired worker, or to the family living on $7,000 or $8,000 in the lower civil service ranks, a tax increase on their homes or an apartment rent rise is a grave threat to the stability of a small, precarious world. Second jobs are common, credit purchases a necessity, a sense of financial security almost impossible.
The barber, the waiter, the cab driver, the factory worker may, with luck and overtime, gross $9,000 or $10,000 a year, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that it takes $9,977 a year for a family of four to maintain a moderate standard of living in New York City, where the living costs are higher than in any large U.S. city except Honolulu. These people, like the highly skilled members of the craft unions, who can earn more when business is good, tend to live in communities where ethnic ties are still strong. Whether they occupy one-and two-family row houses or ranks of monotonously alike apartment buildings, working-class families take pride in an orderly environment. They readily feel threatened by population shifts that change the makeup of their schools, road projects that cut up their neighborhoods, public housing projects that bring in welfare recipients. Like any citizens, they would like more and better amenities and services: a new school, park or playground, better transportation, sewage or public health facilities. But it is in Harlem that a large, new hospital just opened. It is programs aimed at helping blacks and Puerto Ricans that seem to monopolize the attention of public officials.
In New York political terms, the construction worker, the policeman, the telephone repairman already buy Mario Procaccino's brand of politics. They leave the Democratic Party only when it swings too far to the liberal side, and Procaccino has not done that. He also seeks to include behind his average-man barricade another, more elusive segment of the population--typified by the schoolteacher, the junior accountant, the shopkeeper, the middle-income lawyer or engineer who chooses to work for the government.
These professionals and small businessmen are often the sons or grandsons of immigrants, often the first of their families to have graduated from college or to have accumulated enough capital to become modest entrepreneurs. They have status but are not secure in it. They have aspirations for the good life but not quite enough income to achieve it. They cannot afford private schools for their children, and the public schools in many of their neighborhoods are bad. They cannot tolerate crime; yet it keeps rising. They are open to liberal approaches, but the city has had liberal administrations of one kind or another for as long as they can remember while conditions have grown worse.
They are aware of the Negro's plight and sympathetic to it theoretically, but in practice they wonder if the black is not demanding too much. They might not think of themselves as Procaccino's average men, but they are just as angry. Particularly they are angry at John Lindsay. One taxi driver, taking a passenger in from the airport, was cut off by an aquamarine Cadillac driven by a clean-cut, Ivy League type. "Damn it," the cabbie moaned, "they all look like Lindsay." A couple of college girls gathering signatures for Lindsay nominating petitions on a street corner were approached by a young man who seemed to want to sign. "These for Lindsay?" he asked. When assured they were, he urinated on the papers.
Serious Student
By Procaccino's self-serving criteria, he has more in common with the common man than either Marchi or Lindsay. Marchi's parents were Italian immigrants also, but of slightly higher standing than Mario's. Marchi's father came to this country as a scenery designer, later went into the wax-fruit business. Young John was educated in Catholic schools and became a moderately successful lawyer. In the state senate, Marchi, 48, heads the influential committee on New York City affairs. While he is a serious student of government, he is more at home discussing theology or philosophy than politicking.
Mario was nine when the Procaccinos arrived, and his first occupation as a boy was straightening nails for re-use in his father's shoe-repair shop. But he and his two brothers overcame the language barrier, poverty and discrimination against "guineas" to gain success. One became a physician, one an engineer, and Mario a struggling young lawyer. He claims today that anti-Italian discrimination denied him jobs with big law firms, despite a creditable record at Fordham Law School. For a while he subsisted by answering court calendar calls for other attorneys for a $1 fee. But virtue and hard work were rewarded, as Procaccino recalls it. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia heard him address a war-bond rally and arranged for an appointment to a $3,500-a-year post in the city's legal department. When La Guardia's administration gave way to the Democrats, Procaccino became a party worker for the new regime and prospered. One administrative job led to another and eventually he was given a minor judgeship. In 1965, needing a Bronx Italian for ethnic symmetry, the party drafted him to run for comptroller.
Lindsay, the son of an investment banker, is Ivy League. While not rich, the mayor is part of what passes for the gentry. Procaccino's wife Marie is a suburban-oriented homebody; Lindsay's wife Mary makes the social scene. The Lindsays are boosters of the lively arts, often appear at opening nights and art exhibits. To promote what are called "happenings" in the parks, Lindsay is not above leading a bicycle brigade. To Procaccino and other sobersides, that typifies the despised Fun City syndrome. Procaccino is striving, however; two years ago, he treated his daughter, Marierose, to a debut at the International Debutantes Ball.
Lindsay's Record
Differences of style and personal background, and even the malaise evident nationally, hardly account for all of Lindsay's current troubles. Rather, he is in part a victim of his own promises and record. He won election pledging "to make our city great again, the Empire City of the world." The new mayor promised leadership and he tried to provide it by taking on challenges that most of his predecessors had shirked. Lindsay accepted the vice-chairmanship of the Kerner Commission and was one of its most active members. He became one of the leaders in the Urban Coalition. In New York City, he walked the ghetto streets in successful search of rapport with blacks and Puerto Ricans; few white politicians can match Lindsay's ability to get through to the disinherited and to the young. He brought in a promising group of urban experts to head his departments and made plans to reorganize the city's bureaucracy-ridden government.
"What went wrong?" asks Mitchell Ginsberg, head of Lindsay's Human Resources Administration. "Our biggest mistake was that we thought we could change things overnight. We were all so committed, so eager. We just thought we could do too much."
Lindsay has been a visible, courageous chief executive who is always willing to put his prestige on the line for what he believes is right. His frequent television appearances, the heavy coverage of his activities in the newspapers, his refusal to fob off responsibilities on others, have invited personal blame for whatever goes wrong.
Plenty has. Lindsay set out to tame the tough civil service unions and to prevent threatened strikes by public employees; such strikes are illegal in the state. Instead, he and the city suffered through a numbing series of strikes, starting with a transit stoppage on his very first day in office. Since then, sanitation workers, teachers, welfare-department employees and others have also struck. To prevent still more stoppages, Lindsay has been compelled to make extremely high wage settlements.
Like many big cities, New York teeters on the edge of bankruptcy. Lindsay imposed a measure of rationality on fiscal operations by ending reckless borrowing to cover operating expenses. But he also increased spending by 75% and imposed a municipal income tax, giving New York City residents the highest taxes per capita in the country. The increase has not produced many tangible improvements in public services. Most of the money has been consumed by inflation, by the civil service wage settlements and by a nearly 200% increase in the cost of welfare assistance to the poor. During the Lindsay years, welfare has replaced education as the city's biggest single expense, now totaling $1.5 billion, or 23% of the $6.5 billion budget. The number of people on relief has doubled, to roughly 1,000,000, and although city officials contend that the rate of increase is now slowing appreciably, this is scant consolation to the wage earner of moderate means who knows that one out of eight New Yorkers is getting welfare help. "Work is the answer to an awful lot of the problems we have here," says Procaccino typically, "just plain hard work."
If welfare is a constant annoyance, crime is a chronic menace. Lindsay increased the size of the police force and appointed as police commissioner Howard Leary, a highly civilized career cop who has helped guide the department into a relatively smooth relationship with blacks. Lindsay has also designated city hall aides to maintain close and continuing communications with the city's several Negro and Puerto Rican communities, heading off trouble before it begins. These measures, plus Lindsay's self-appointment as ambassador to the ghettos, have helped keep New York free of major racial violence during the past four years. Yet crime --black crime in the eyes of most whites--continues to pose the threat that Candidate Lindsay decried in 1965.
The School and Racial Crisis
If the 1966 transit strike was Lindsay's Bay of Pigs, continuing school troubles and ethnic tensions have been his Viet Nam. The overriding aim of his administration, particularly during his first three years, was to assuage the bitterness of the city's black citizens. In doing so, he managed to increase white resentment and fears. The first test came in 1966 when he tried to organize a civilian review board to hear complaints of police brutality. Lindsay was cast in the role of a softie trying to shackle honest cops; the review-board referendum was defeated. A less stubborn, less self-righteous politician might have gotten the amber-light message. Lindsay did not.
The city's immense public school system (more than 1,000,000 pupils) was unwieldy and unresponsive to those it served. Lindsay wanted to decentralize control of school affairs, to give neighborhoods more of a say in running their schools. The idea was particularly attractive to the ghettos--but it led to a disastrous battle. In one Negro district, the predominantly Jewish teachers' union and the local board got bogged down in a dispute over job-security procedures. The fight soon turned ugly as latent hostility between Jews and blacks gushed to the surface. The union successfully struck the entire system for 36 school days. The stoppage--the second in two years--was Lindsay's biggest single failure, and he himself acknowledges his responsibility for it. City hall just did not seem to grasp the complexities of the dispute or to understand the depth of the animosities involved. "Intelligence was very hard to get," Lindsay says today. "The information that we were getting at the time was terrible." A new decentralization plan devised by the state legislature is now to be tried.
The Jewish Vote
The school debacle damaged Lindsay cruelly. Marchi says he decided to run because of the strike: "It was a disaster. Decentralization became a word for anarchy." To Procaccino, it was a case study of the elite's failure to comprehend the middle classes. Even some of Lindsay's aides acknowledge that city hall tended to take the middle class for granted. "You can't dictate to people," says Procaccino. "You've got to be a healer, a mediator. When there's trouble, you step in and take care of it, but you don't go around trying to stir it up. I'm very fortunate because God gifted me with the ability to talk to people." To many Jews, the school strike and related troubles were evidence that Lindsay was willing to do anything to placate black militants, even those with anti-Semitic leanings and even if it meant damaging the educational system.
Jewish hostility toward Lindsay is ironic on three counts. Jewish Democrats and independents attracted by his progressivism provided his winning margin four years ago. He was then and is again this year running on the ticket of New York's Liberal Party, which is predominantly Jewish. Many of his closest aides and associates are Jewish. All this is logical for Lindsay. Jews tend to be attracted to reformist causes. And in New York, though they constitute roughly a quarter of the city's population, they amount to about a third of the electorate. Jews vote in proportionally larger numbers than other groups.
Jews do not necessarily vote as an ethnic bloc for their own, or even for the Democratic Party, to which most of them belong. This year Lindsay has been booed and heckled in some Jewish neighborhoods outside Manhattan. His campaign strategists, acknowledging that the Jewish vote is the key to the election, detect in opinion samplings an abnormally large undecided element. Yet it is here and among Negroes, who represent about 14% of the electorate, that Lindsay must get heavy support if he is to be reelected. The non-Jewish working-class vote was never a source of strength for him.
Lindsay has been trying desperately to mend middle-class fences. After his defeat in the Republican primary he reverted momentarily to high-flown calls on conscience, charging that the Marchi and Procaccino victories meant that "the forces of reaction and fear have captured both major parties in our city. They offer two candidates who appeal to fear, who appeal to the worst instincts in man." Now Lindsay has moved toward massaging the middle rather than assaulting it.
Although both Procaccino and Marchi have obviously benefited from white backlash, neither is a racist. Further, the white voters whom Lindsay needs are not in the mood to have their consciences addressed. Jews, in particular, feel that for many years they have supported legitimate Negro demands by voting for liberals and financing civil rights causes. It was all very well for Lindsay to be one of the most assertive members of the Kerner Commission and for his aides to take as gospel the commission's key argument: that white racism is at the root of much urban turmoil. Except for the intellectuals and the ultra-liberals--who are already Lindsay supporters--most white New Yorkers do not accept that contention. Marchi says that the commission report was "useful." But he adds: "Unlike some other people, I feel no personal sense of guilt. I have no personal hang-up about it. My parents were eating spaghetti in Italy, remember." Procaccino, when asked last week if he agreed with the commission's racism argument, replied: "Absolutely not, although I realize that there have been instances of discrimination. We have to have someone in office who can understand what it is like to be discriminated against." What this attitude ignores, of course, is that blacks face handicaps not suffered by earlier underclass groups. Further, as long as they remain submerged, most of the city's problems will be insoluble.
Antiwar Sentiment
Lindsay's strategy in these circumstances is to prove that he really is mindful of middle-class and working-class needs, that he is politically independent, that he is still a rallying point for the forces of good government. Many prominent Democrats have come out for Lindsay, and he has endorsed the candidacies of a number of Democrats running for local office who have so far remained uncommitted to him. Rather than emphasizing traditional street campaigning and set speeches, Lindsay has been using the perquisites of office to make points. He has been appearing at groundbreaking ceremonies and assorted dedications, visiting police precincts, attending meetings of Jewish groups. He also attacked the Viet Nam war for what must be the hundredth time, appealing to the antiwar sentiment that runs high among New York's Jews. To Procaccino and Marchi, Viet Nam is not a proper city issue.
In recent weeks, the mayor has announced a variety of improvements in city services, including stepped-up police patrols and accelerated garbage cleanups. One press conference was arranged to allow the mayor to be photographed with a rabbi on one side, the police commissioner on the other and a row of uniformed police commanders in the background. Procaccino, too, knows where the votes are. Any Democrat in New York starts with a huge advantage because his party's enrollment outnumbers the Republican and fringe-party membership by 3 to 1. Defections from the Democratic left are a serious threat to Procaccino, but there are still plenty remaining in the center. Lindsay is on the left, he charges, and Marchi is on the right. "And in the middle, there am I, a moderate, progressive Democrat," Procaccino says happily. "That's where I am and that's where I'll stay."
Mario's Strategy
He does not accuse the mayor of being too friendly with blacks; he blames Lindsay's policies for causing "an upsurge of anti-Semitism." He decries the nightstick approach to crime, but he wants teen-agers accused of violent crimes to be treated like adult offenders, and he wants narcotics addicts swept, from the streets and held without bail when possible. He is skeptical about school decentralization. When accused of racism, he explodes: "That's the dirtiest thing I've seen done in a long time." When he uses the term "law and order," he insists, "The words are not shorthand. They do not stand for something else. We simply must live under the rule of law. Violence never works." Lately he has tried to get away from the image of being a one-issue candidate by presenting a series of position papers.
The statements are unexceptionable. But they are also open to a variety of interpretations. When he talks about "one standard for everybody" in today's context, it can sound like an argument against what some whites consider to be preferential treatment for Negroes. When he talks about abuses of the welfare system, most whites see black and brown, which is not completely unjustified.
Last spring Procaccino adroitly capitalized on the revolt by Negro militants that temporarily caused tuition free City College to close. To many whites of modest means, who regard the school as an indispensable social-economic ladder, the Negro demands for wholesale admission of blacks meant lowered academic standards and less room for whites. City College Alumnus Mario Procaccino brought a court suit to compel the city to reopen the institution. It put him in the favorable position of using respectable means to stand up to the radicals. He scored points across the board with this bit of alliterative class propaganda: "City College is what New York is all about. It has always had more heart than Harvard. It has always been more real than Yale. It has always had more purpose than Princeton. That school is the soul of our city." Lindsay, of course, is a Yale man, and he probably has the Ivy League vote anyway.
Procaccino never tires of life-style comparisons. "Mr. Marchi," he says, "does not fit into this category of people that have to work with their hands, with the sweat of their brows and so forth." He tries to portray Lindsay as an effete jet-setter: "A clean neighborhood is more important to people than poetry reading." That, presumably, was a crack at Lindsay's narration of the text accompanying a performance of Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait. "I am not one of the select few," Procaccino insists. "I am not one of the Beautiful People."
Because many beautiful--and rich --people are for Lindsay, he will be able to outspend both of his rivals. That is one reason why the mayor may well win re-election after all. Much of the money is expected to go into a TV blitz in the campaign's last few weeks.
Also, Lindsay has attracted thousands of young volunteer workers who are canvassing the city, Gene McCarthy-style, on Lindsay's behalf. And despite the charges and countercharges between the Lindsay and Procaccino camps over racism--Marchi calls both his adversaries "rhetorical muggers"--the tension that was so evident a few months ago may be decreasing. If it continues to ease, so will anti-Lindsay sentiment.
More Emotional
Procaccino's durability as a personality is questionable. Lindsay, for the most part, has shucked his own stiff pugnacity for the duration of the campaign at least. He is speaking quietly and candidly about his own record and the unfinished business at hand. He has also managed to put the more emotional Procaccino on the defensive in some respects. The comptroller has had to spend a good deal of time explaining why he preferred not to debate on television; last week he finally accepted the challenge. He has had to deny repeatedly that he is racist. He has had to defend his emotionalism--he wept when announcing his candidacy--and replies that Moses, Jesus, Lou Gehrig and Joe Namath all were emotional. His statements suffer from a poverty of ideas and often boil down to a vague assertion that Lindsay's good intentions have disturbed the peace and that what is really needed is a reversion to the status quo ante of the twelve Wagner years, but Robert Wagner himself has so far refused to endorse Procaccino. Even some of the most orthodox Democrats feel that he may lack the stature to be mayor of New York.
Lindsay is not offering a raft of new ideas either. He stands on the goals he has already set, acknowledges that the city still has vast problems that cannot be solved with its own resources, admits his mistakes and says that he has learned from them. Yet, quite apart from style, personality and particular issues, there is a fundamental difference among the candidates. Marchi thinks that the mayor's office has too much power, that authority should be spread more evenly among the branches of city government. Procaccino takes a traditional view that the mayor should be more of an umpire among competing interests than a principal actor. Lindsay, above all, is an unreconstructed activist. "When I took office," he said the other day, "I thought a mayor in this day and age had to conduct experiments and take risks. He was going to be the most unpopular man in town."
The prediction turned out to be all too accurate. That fact allows Mario Procaccino to say of his average voters: "They're with me now. It's up to the other two to try to take them away and I don't think they can do it." Lindsay does think he can do it, and his drive is strong. "This is where it's happening," he says. "This remains the biggest challenge in the U.S."
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