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As it turns out, manhole covers are 75 feet apart – an important fact to New York street kids, who played stickball using a broomstick and rubber ball on city streets.
Anybody who could hit the ball far enough to reach the second manhole cover had hit the ball 150 feet – no mean accomplishment.
Such background details are important when talking about New York politics and the great divide between the conservative middle classes – who played stickball as kids, went to local colleges such as Manhattan, got law degrees at St. John’s University Law School, and battled against the "silk stocking" goo-goo element of the state’s Republican Party, who tended to spend their youth in boarding schools prepping for Ivy League colleges and Harvard Law.
Marlin, who once ran for Mayor of New York and later headed the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, returns to this theme throughout the pages of the book.
The people who created New York’s influential Conservative Party, worked for it and make up the body of voters who support it at the polls are typified by the heroes the nation saw and admired on Sept. 11: New York’s cops and firefighters.
The author sets the scene with a quick lesson on the history of New York politics, writing of the likes of Tammany Hall Boss Plunkett, "who made the city work through ‘honest graft’"; Boss Tweed, "who made the city work almost entirely for himself and a few cronies"; the political genius Charlie Murphy (when he died, it was said that "the brains of Tammany Hall lie buried in Calvary cemetery"); right on down to Carmine de Sapio and the waning of the Hall’s influence.
Marlin writes about the factions that have always struggled with each other in New York’s political arena. On one side are the so-called goo-goos (good government goodies), who, the New York Times once wrote, "attempted to deal with … municipal government as though it were a private corporation, and they the board of directors whose only aims were efficiency and economy. [They forgot] that a city administration must have a heart as well as a head."
On the other side were Tammany Hall and its heirs, men such as Murphy and former New York Gov. Al Smith, who had brains and heart.
Marlin reports that the liberal elitists found their icon in one Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller.
Marlin says that Rockefeller, more than anybody else, can be credited with creating the need for a conservative party to counter the century-long goo-goo domination of the state’s Republican Party.
Like Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, who ruled New York and the state’s GOP with an iron hand from 1942 to 1954, Rockefeller, writes Marlin, was a liberal who preferred to be called a "progressive." He believed that "all problems may be solved, and the solutions require a big, activist government; the executive branch of government has the main responsibility for leadership; and the executive branch must trump legislative majorities because they are provincial whereas the executive is enlightened."
From the moment he became governor in 1959, Rockefeller began spending the taxpayers’ money like the legendary drunken sailor, piling up public debt with reckless abandon. By the time he left Albany, he had created 230 agencies and authorities and left the state with a massive $12 billion debt.
In 1960, Rockefeller contributed to the defeat of Vice President Richard M. Nixon in that year’s presidential election. Thanks to Nixon’s narrow defeat, in Rockefeller’s mind he was now assured that he was the GOP’s "presumptive presidential candidate in 1964."
Six days after the election, two young lawyers, Dan Mahoney and his brother-in-law Kieran O’Doherty, met with several Republican colleagues. Out of that luncheon meeting, the seeds of the Conservative Party were hatched.
After nearly two years of intense activity, the Conservative Party of New York became a reality, with an unusual base: Bill Buckley Republicans, who’d had it with Rockefeller, and Al Smith Democrats, who couldn’t stomach their party’s abandonment of the working middle class. (Later, Marlin says, this group would be called the "Reagan Democrats.")
Soon after the party began, it took root quickly and became a force to be reckoned with:
More than anything else, that race revealed the less pleasant side of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who Marlin convincingly demonstrates is liberal and capable of playing underhanded political games.
In fact, Giuliani was endorsed by the state’s Liberal Party each time he ran for mayor.
After doing his best to sabotage George Pataki’s 1994 candidacy, an act that led Staten Island borough president Guy Molinari to call him "Judas" Giuliani, the Republican mayor of New York City endorsed the re-election of ultra-liberal Democrat Gov. Mario Cuomo.
In the 2000 senatorial campaign, Giuliani, so firm a supporter of abortion that he even backed the hideous practice of partial-birth abortion, became a born-again conservative. Realizing that the liberal hat alone would not work so well in conservative upstate New York, Giuliani courted the Conservative Party for its endorsement.
Giuliani’s idea was to seek endorsements from the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party for his Senate run.
This idea, however, was forcefully rejected by Conservative Party Chairman Michael R. Long, perhaps one reason Giuliani dropped out of the race though he had raised millions to run against Hillary Clinton.
Long, who Marlin shows to be both one of the most adept politicians in New York history and rock-hard in his refusal to deviate one iota from the party’s conservative principles, said he told Giuliani that "a dual endorsement seemed almost out of the question because the [Conservatives and Liberals] come from different philosophical directions and that candidates backed by one of the parties should be beholden to [just] one."
When, after being repeatedly rejected by Long, Giuliani threatened to run in the Conservative Party primary, Long told reporters: "The mayor is not a Conservative; he’s a liberal. He’s seeking the Liberal Party’s support. I think Conservative voters will reject him."
In the end, Giuliani dropped out of the race, citing his prostate cancer. A year later, Sept. 11 helped to restore Rudy Giuliani’s image as a strong leader, during New York’s most difficult time.
But Marlin warns that Rudy is no Reagan Republican and can’t be trusted by either Washington Republicans or conservative voters.
In its 40 years, in addition to electing governors and U.S. senators, New York’s Conservative Party can boast of having short-circuited the political ambitions of such liberal Republicans as Nelson Rockefeller, John Lindsey, Charles Goodell and Mario Cuomo.
In looking back at the stormy years when the Conservative Party struggled to make a difference in New York, Marlin sums up:
"When the Conservative Party was founded in 1962, its core supporters were inner city, blue collar ethnics, many of whom were World War II and Korean War veterans. They believed in the American dream, and held to a few basic beliefs: loving God, country, and neighborhood.
"In the sixties and seventies, people turned to the Conservative Party because they were repulsed by the reformists in the Democratic Party and by the flower children rioting in the streets and on college campuses. They abhorred the radicals’ call for a ‘new freedom’ by which they meant the license to do whatever pleased them.
"The neighborhood folks who supported the efforts of the Conservative Party were angered that the traditional values they cherished were disregarded in the universities, the churches, and in the media in favor of moral ‘neutrality’ and ‘tolerance.’
"These intuitive conservatives reacted against the social order in which rights are merely the weapons of self-interest and in which responsibility based on a moral hierarchy is anathema.
"They were disgusted by the liberal vanguard that dominated New York for decades and whose monument to progress is the South Bronx, once a glorious city of broad tree-lined avenues that thanks to the Goo Goos became a municipal desert.
"These street corner conservatives instinctively understood the concept of subsidiarity, and they fought the crypto-totalitarians who deny the intrinsic value of man and define liberty as obedience to their own uncertain wills."
"Fighting the Good Fight” is a two-manhole-cover hit – a must-read for anyone involved in politics, for those want to know how a third party can make a difference, and for Republicans who want to know about the real Rudy Giuliani.
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