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"It's happened again"
When gun-control advocates use mass shootings to push for a handgun ban, critics accuse them of exploiting tragedy. But there's a difference between exploiting a tragedy and learning from it.
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[11/03/99]

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"Let's take the things that have happened in city government that have been positive things, that have helped propel the city in a very, very good direction and let's make them permanent," the mayor said.

This just happens to be exactly the kind of language you might find if you visited the mayor's Senate campaign Web site -- but it was paid for with $1.5 million in taxpayer dollars, because, commission chairman Mastro said, the commission had a "legal mandate" to "educate" voters. And the 1989 charter reform commission had spent $1 million on advertising, so there was precedent.

But like any well-run media effort in a low-turnout race, the first flier was just one in a wave of communications with voters. On Wednesday, voters got another brochure from the charter commission, headlined "keeping our city's progress going into the next century."

On Friday, yet another mailer hit, this one calling itself a "supplement to the campaign finance board's voter guide." Now, the CFB is a nonpartisan agency in the city, and it tends to take seriously its role of publishing balanced guides and enforcing the city's campaign finance laws. It mailed out a 63-page guide that published the full text of the ballot measure and listed pros and cons. The revision commission's "supplement" contained a full side of an 8-by-14-inch flier of letters in support, and one sixth of a side had statements in opposition.

Nor was that all. There were 14-page inserts distributed in the New York Daily News and the Staten Island Advance, and ads in the New York Times and weekly newspapers. The mayor's political action committees spent $110,000 on telephone messages from the mayor urging voters to back charter change.

The goo-goos again, were going nuts. "'All about the future of the city's children' -- you can't tell me that's education! It's advocacy, it's political sloganeering," said Gene Russianoff, senior attorney at the New York Public Interest Research Group and a major agitator against charter reform.

But Giuliani wasn't the only one dipping into taxpayer funds to make a political point. City Council Speaker Peter Vallone, a Democrat, spent $135,000 on two mailings to "likely voters" urging a "no" vote, according to Vallone spokesman Mike Clendendin. Just why the City Council maintains a list of who likely voters are, Clendendin didn't say. Mark Green also dipped into taxpayer coffers, to the tune of $15,000, to mail out a newsletter with a significant portion devoted to discussing charter change.

But these relatively feeble advertising efforts were just the visible elements of the Democrats' campaign. A top aide to Green, Richard Schrader, took a leave from his city job and camped out in the offices of the newly minted Working Families Party, and organized political clubs to fight the proposal. Unions, furious over the budgetary provisions in the charter-reform proposal and just plain mad at the mayor for keeping pay raises down for years, did their own focus groups, mailed out their own flier, but mostly made hundreds of thousands of phone calls and fielded an army of 1,000 volunteers on a miserably rainy, blustery Election Day.

These are the very people -- the teachers union, the municipal workers union, the hospital workers union -- who have pledged their support to Clinton, before she's even made her candidacy official.

But it was Giuliani's own taped phone calls, in a city going a little sour on his take-no-prisoners style (and on the heels of a judicial drubbing about his attempt to withdraw city funds from the Brooklyn Museum over a controversial art exhibit that features a dung-spattered Virgin Mary) that may have gotten many of the no voters to the polls.

The calls were made to Democratic neighborhoods that had supported the mayor, but this time residents weren't buying it. On Election Day, voter after voter at Giuliani's own polling site on the Upper East Side said the phone call from the mayor had reminded them to come out and vote "no." In the end, 281,265 New Yorkers voted against charter change. Only 90,838 voted for it.

The day after the election, most all the state's top Democrats -- state Comptroller H. Carl McCall, and Green, and Vallone, and what seemed like most of the City Council, gathered in front of City Hall to gloat over their victory. Said Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, who, like Green and Vallone, wants to be succeed Giuliani: "This is the first sign of Giuliani fatigue."

Maybe. Giuliani is famous for making endorsements that backfire -- backing former Democratic Gov. Mario Cuomo over George Pataki was his biggest miscall -- but great at winning his own elections. Said Republican consultant Joseph Mercurio: "Even though voters are willing to elect [the mayor], and by large margins, and even though he's ahead in the Senate race, [they said] this time we're not with you, but we'll be with you next time."

There's evidence for that. A New York Times poll taken in March had Clinton nine points ahead of the mayor. This week, she was four points behind. (The Times called this a "statistical dead heat.")

But still, as Clinton breezed into Westchester Wednesday to measure the windows of her Chappaqua home for curtains, her minions were smiling.
salon.com | Nov. 4, 1999

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