WHY does Alan Hevesi think that the easiest route to City Hall is to morph into Ruth Messinger?
Indeed, the comptroller’s increasingly leftward lurch ever since he officially started running for mayor is nothing less than astonishing.
Maybe this is nothing more than cold, hard political calculation: Perhaps he and his advisors believe that if he can win the September primary, which is dominated by liberal voters, then carrying the general election – against either under-financed Herman Badillo or over-financed Michael Bloomberg – should be a breeze, especially since Hevesi has the Liberal Party line.
He may well be right.
But for those who have come to appreciate Hevesi as a quiet public official with a determined refusal to shamelessly hop on the bandwagon of the political issue du jour, his campaign thus far has been downright dismaying.
Hevesi entered the race as a candidate who’d shown real courage in the past on some of the most important issues facing the city. But the past seven months have seen him apologizing for his past courage and offering proposal after proposal that raise real questions about what a Hevesi mayoralty would be like.
Hevesi stood almost alone among elected officials in not only refusing to join Al Sharpton’s mass arrest-a-thon in the wake of the Amadou Diallo shooting, but in defending Mayor Giuliani’s handling of the case.
“I think substantially in this case the mayor has acted appropriately,” Hevesi said at the time, noting that the mayor had become a “lightning rod” for protesters.
It was a classy and gutsy move. But that was then – and this is now.
The opening TV ad of Hevesi’s campaign charged that the NYPD engages in racial profiling – an accusation that justifiably enraged Giuliani, who at the time had been eyeing Hevesi as his favored successor.
And he’s kept that theme going: Hevesi’s latest commercial promises a crackdown on crime and police misconduct – as if the two are equal problems. He and rival Freddie Ferrer (who, incidentally, has Messinger’s backing) favor the dismissal of the four acquitted Diallo cops.
Hevesi claims he’s had an epiphany of sorts on police misconduct. “I didn’t get it, I got it later,” he confessed last January, adding that “I got it with the Dorismond case” – which Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau’s lengthy investigation determined was not misconduct.
Nothing symbolizes this more than Hevesi’s blatant about-face when it comes to Sharpton – a change of heart that seems prompted less by any sudden maturation on the reverend’s part and more on Hevesi’s realization that blacks comprise 30 percent of the primary vote.
Four years ago, Hevesi angered Sharpton’s supporters by declaring that he could not support Sharpton if he won the mayoral primary. And he made no bones about why.
“I think it is fair to raise questions as to whether the Rev. Sharpton endorses [Louis] Farrakhan’s idea that Judaism is a gutter religion [and] that Adolf Hitler was a great man,” said Hevesi, “[or] Leonard Jeffries’ theory that Jews are responsible for slave trade.”
Added Hevesi: “If you criticize Al Sharpton, [he says] it’s race-baiting.”
Since then, he has twice gone, hat in hand, to Harlem to pay obeisance to Sharpton and beg his forgiveness for past slights and endorsed reparations to blacks for slavery.
But Hevesi’s portward moves aren’t limited to issues of race and policing. Eager to win over the municipal-workers unions, Hevesi issued an irresponsible call to water down the state Taylor Law, which bars strikes by public employees. Hours later, when the political spit hit the proverbial fan, Hevesi was hastily issuing one “qualification” after another.
To garner the favor of Randi Weingarten and the UFT, he supports a hefty pay hike for teachers – and would pay for it by instituting a 12.5 percent tax on “millionaires.” Just what the city needs – a new tax hike.
To win over the pro-choice crowd, he threatened to use the clout of his office to dump millions of pension-fund shares of Wal-Mart unless the retailer agreed to sell the so-called “morning after” pill that induces abortion.
Alan Hevesi came into the race determined to stake out the center and appeal to voters who’ve generally supported the Giuliani policies of the past eight years. But after toting up the 1997 primary vote – in which Messinger and Sharpton together got 71 percent – he’s decided that his best chance lies in a headlong leap into the past.
The frightening thing will be if he’s proved right.