Mr Lindsay is alive and well
AMERICA MURRAY KEMPTON
New York—And now it seems quite likely that the Democrats will elect John Lindsay
Mayor in November and that the Repub- licans will thenceforth boast about him. The Mayor failed to win his own party's nomination by a much smaller margin in the primary vote than the way orthodox local Republicans talk about him would have previously suggested; and the overall results are more in his favour than against him.
Mr Lindsay had 49 per cent of the Re- publican primary vote and his tendencies, in theory at least, had 66 per cent of Demo- cratic primary vote. The Democrats fielded four liberal and one conservative candidate, Comptroller Mario Procaccino, whose ad- vantage from this division won him his party's nomination with barely a third of its total ballots. Since the Republicans chose State Senator John Marchi, the anti-Lind- say entrant, the two-party system has given New York a selection of the two most con- servative candidates available, a circum- stance which is being interpreted as one more example of the 'law and order' or `Policy Party' resurgence in our politics.
But the incongruity of this result is sug- gested by the score in the total vote: Pro- caccino-Marchi, 345.000; their opponents, 594,000. Mr Lindsay proposes to try again in November as an independent; on the night of the primary supporters of Herman Bad- ilto, the defeated candidate of the New Politics of Senator McCarthy and Kennedy, trooped to the Mayor's headquarters to offer their help in that venture; and the partisans of former Mayor Robert Wagner, the defeated candidate of the Old Libera- lism, were saying among the ashes that they now had to support Mr Lindsay.
It was, then, an evening for whose out- come Mr Lindsay could afford to raise two cheers; and if 10,000 fewer Republicans had voted, he could probably have raised the third. His managers had always known that resentment against him among New York's 600,000 enrolled Republicans was so strong that, if more than 200,000 of them turned out to vote, he could not be nominated; 217,000 did, and confirmed the fears of the Mayor's friends. Still, the fact that two- thirds of the Republicans stayed at home suggested an apathy among ihe Lindsay- haters which argued both for his chances of survival in the autumn and for the suspicion that the mood of the city is less angry than its politicians go on imagining.
What life was left in any gathering of workers by three o'clock in the morning after the primary belonged to the head- quarters of Mayor Lindsay, the loser of record. The Mayor was laughing and jok- ing with no mark on him except the faint spots of blood in his eyes to suggest how close he had come to winning his reanoint- ment all in one night. The hungry young were looking upon him and shouting '1972, 1972' and the Mayor threw back his head at the wild but nonetheless plausible irony that a candidate defeated in a local prim- ary in 1969 could be a national political figure in 1972.
His speech was perfect for the occasion, nicely crafted, but not winged, and short of that insistence of his, which, if it can raise people, can also frighten them. He seemed at that moment to have occupied the centre so smoothly as to suggest that he had never lived anywhere else, to be the only representative left of those forces of calm and containment which the overall vote had indicated to be the general mood of the city, and thus the figure to whom the majority must inevitably turn.
But the real danger in Mr Lindsay's future, as it has been in his past, is his ten- dency to be less temperate after reflection on an event than he had been upon its first im- pact. By mid-morning he had had time enough to think things over; and, having been calm, cheerful and determined at the moment of his defeat, he emerged more strident and resentful than he really ought to be.
He looked forward to a time 'when the city comes to its senses'. He stood alone, he proclaimed, against candidates 'who appeal to the most base instincts' of the voters. He seemed in these formulas to have accepted a caricature of what had happened the evening before. New York's total vote sug- gested that it was at least 63 per cent in possession of its senses; and you could hardly explained Comptroller Procaccino's nomination as a triumph of backlash when the Democratic primary had registered 66 per cent frontlash. It would seem, indeed, a mark of New York's enduring civility that the only backlash candidates it can produce should be men of mien so gentle and spirit so amiable as Mr Procaccino and Senator Marchi, the first of whom cries in public, the second a Republican of such rigorously hierarchical loyalties that Governor Rocke- feller regularly salutes him as 'a splendid fellow'.
Senator Marchi is, indeed, so orthodox that it seems impossible that he would have contested the claim of another Republican to be Mayor of New York if Governor Rockefeller, as head of his party's state organisation, had made any real effort to dissuade him. The Governor's denial of res- ponsibility in this embarrassment is reveal- ing. 'How could I have persuaded John Marchi not to run against Lindsay?' he asks. 'Lindsay went all over New York last fall blaming the school strike on Marchi. How do you expect Marchi not to get mad about a rotten think like that?'
These comments by his own closest ideo- logical ally indicate how much Mr Lindsay's troubles come from the manner of his ad- ministration as well as from its generally admirable matter. His post-primary utter- ances were dangerously close to his pre- primary posture; their tone was again that characterised by James Breslin as `St Paul's School Chapel sermon', with the continual implication that disagreement with the speaker is a moral lapse. It is neither a heal- ing tone nor one descriptive of reality; the things Mr Lindsay stands for are very prob- ably the things a majority of the city stands for, it would seem that to win he need only contain himself and embody the presence of compassion and moderation. But he must avoid giving the voters some personal ex- cuse to avoid turning to him. It needs only a little delicacy, some fraction of the normal politician's understanding of other politi- cians' problems, to assure his being sworn in as Mayor again next January and once again appearing as the most powerful figure possible in our politics, the Republican whom Democrats like.
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