BEHIND THE COVER STORY: ANDREW MEIER ON THE 11 MEN AND 1 WOMAN WHO WOULD BE NEW YORK’S NEXT MAYOR
The New York Times Blogs
(The 6th Floor)
July 29, 2013 Monday
by RACHEL NOLAN
HIGHLIGHT: A Q. and A. with our reporter, who followed the candidates
for eight months from borough to borough.
Andrew Meier wrote this week’s cover story on the 12 candidates
seeking to become the next mayor of New York City. Meier last wrote
for the magazine about the Russian opposition figure Ksenia Sobchak.
You followed the mayoral campaign all year for this story. What got
you going? Is it part of a larger project?
For four years I’ve been working on a book on Robert Morgenthau,
the former longtime D.A. of Manhattan, and his family – his father
served F.D.R. for nearly two decades, and his grandfather helped elect
Woodrow Wilson and served as his ambassador to Turkey during the
Armenian genocide. Because so much of the book centers on New York
City politics, I’ve been doing hundreds of interviews – including
meeting with the current N.Y.P.D. commissioner, Ray Kelly. It was
that interview, long ago, that got me thinking about Kelly’s political
future, the race to succeed Bloomberg and just how wild and “wide open”
(as Ed Koch called the campaign not long before he died) it would be.
You had thought you were finished with this story, when news of
Weinergate Part II broke last Tuesday. Were you surprised?
I don’t think anyone who paid even scant attention to the Weiner
revival tour could be surprised. The candidate himself, more than once,
warned there was more out there and something could surface.
Drafting the piece, I’d even considered what happens to Weiner not if,
but when, a former sexting partner steps forward. Now, Weiner and his
(very small and very closed) inner circle may deem this a nonstory,
a media fixation on an arbitrary timeline, and wonder what’s the fuss
about if these recently revealed “chats” (if you can call them that)
took place after he resigned in disgrace. Voters, though, may see it
another way. Because he’s now asking for something truly unprecedented:
a third chance.
Do you think this new turn will make the race easier for Christine
Quinn, the front-runner before Weiner joined the race?
So far, Quinn’s played coy, stopped short of calling for Weiner to
quit. It makes good political sense, of course, to refrain from
piling on. But this much is clear: a Weiner “crippled,” as some
strategists say he now is, is only good news for Quinn. That does
not mean, though, she’ll now see her poll numbers climb. The race,
it would seem, has just grown even more unpredictable.
The cast of characters in this piece is really large. Does all that
campaigning fall on deaf ears? Did you yourself find yourself drawn
to any one of them more than you had expected?
After 12 years of Bloomberg, when either too few paid close attention
to local politics, or too many perceived a monopoly on power, there’s
a genuine hunger out there. New Yorkers are paying attention this
time, and they care. For all the circus distractions, one thing seems
certain: the marathon of mayoral forums and debates will yield an
informed public. But what I, personally, enjoyed the most were the one
on ones with candidates. To sit in the comptroller’s expansive office
downtown and hear John Liu tell of the mice who join him there on late
nights, and joke that he answered his cell with a “Hello Everybody!”
(he made clear that he no longer thinks it’s tapped), or to have
coffee with Sal Albanese in the “defendants’ diner” by Cadman Plaza
in Brooklyn and listen as he recalled teaching tough kids in the
South Slope (five of whom later committed homicides), or to go on a
very sweaty walkabout with Adolfo Carrion at the Frederick Douglass
Houses on the Upper West Side, or on a tour with Christine Quinn,
from Yorkville, near her father’s old building, to Washington Heights
– where we almost stopped off to check out Koch’s tombstone – before
Quinn spoke to a small church audience about her work in preventing
gang violence. Or to have Bill Thompson drive me in his own car around
the South Bronx, where we searched in a downpour for a place to grab
coffee, settled on a Central American bakery in the South Bronx,
and sat there, nearly alone, for an hour as he walked me through his
feelings on everything from racial tension in the city – “While people
can disagree, Giuliani divided the city, Mike Bloomberg did not” –
to Bill de Blasio’s son’s famed Afro – “It would have done any of
us proud years ago.” Or when Anthony Weiner, feigning exasperation
that I kept interrupting him, said, “You know you always step on
my money lines.” And as he sipped ice coffee through a straw in a
Crumb’s below his apartment on lower Park Avenue, and began to joust:
“You’re the interview from hell. You have interesting things you
want to talk about, and then you don’t actually want to talk about
’em.” For a reporter on this beat, or any New Yorker with a stake in
this race, what could be better?
One of the historic aspects of this race, as you write, is that it
may be New York City’s first “minority majority” race. Candidates are
denying that race-based politics still exist and that they are playing
to their perceived bases. How much success do you think candidates
will have reaching out to ethnic or socioeconomic groups other than
their own? For example, Liu’s appeal beyond Asians, or Quinn’s beyond
working white women?
So much of New York City politics remains a numbers game, and it’s
easy to get caught up playing it. I tried, as I was reporting, to
avoid charting the horse race. Turnout, of course, is one big stat
everyone talks about. There are nearly four million active registered
voters in New York City, according to statistics from April 2012;
2.68 million are Democrats, 441,000 Republican and 799,840 belong to
neither party. But in ’09, Bloomberg won a third term with 585,466
votes. This time around, no one believes the turnout will be as
anemic. What will drive turnout? In part, no doubt, it’ll be the
Infamy Factor – with Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner on the ballot.
But what will drive folks to come out to vote for Joe Lhota or Bill
Thompson or John Liu? Liu will tell you he’s won the endorsements of a
slew of political clubs. But only the big unions still retain armies
of foot soldiers. What about newspapers and their once-all-important
endorsements? They are still coveted, but the demise of print
journalism, many candidates say, has drained the publicity pool. And
so the campaigns try to “narrowcast” – to define potential supporters
by neighborhood, tax-bracket, ethnic background, religion, level of
education – you name it.