Election Recap: New York
No, I haven't made any blog posts since the Theo Epstein Era. I do have a rock-solid excuse, though, which is that my baby is in the shop (arrived yesterday!) and should return the day after I'm required to use it for finals. OK, I'm pessimistic.
My recap of the NYC mayor's race will be pretty short, because I think all that surprised anyone is that Fernando Ferrer wound up finishing less than 20 points behind Mike Bloomberg, when everyone was expecting a margin of around 33. I will say, though, that I agree with Dick Morris's opinion of the mistake in Ferrer's strategy. Morris is kind of crazy these days, but his book Behind the Oval Office on the 1996 Clinton campaign really shows the genius he used to be; that book is still a valid campaign strategy instruction manual. Another book of his, Power Plays, is almost as good and much more recent. There he goes through six or seven political strategies, with two or three chapters in each on how famous political leaders succeeded or failed to pull that strategy off.
I say all that, because, best I can tell, Dick Morris at this point is generally insane. Almost all of his columns in 2003 were about Hillary's guaranteed run for President in 2004, and he wrote entire books refuting both Hillary's book and Bill's book. Now he's moved back from Hillary-refuting to Hillary-campaign-predicting, with his latest book Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race.
That said, he was weaned on NYC politics, and I think his anecdote on the Ferrer-Bloomberg race is instructive. Ferrer was considered pretty divisive when he ran in 2001 on the "Two New Yorks" theme, and while he mostly abandoned the attack on wealthy New Yorkers time around, he did stick early to the minority label, to try to emphasize the poor-boy-made-good motif. By the time even the primary campaign heated up, it was too late to redefine him.
Morris argues that Ferrer should have skipped the minority label and defined himself as a Catholic instead. I think that would have been a good idea. First, I'm not sure what exactly being a minority or a Hispanic says about your character. I do know Catholics are supposed to be highly moral and committed to justice, life, and helping the poor. I assume Ferrer's pro-choice, but he could have spent the campaign focusing on how his Catholic faith has prompted him to spend his life helping people and how he wants to be mayor to help all the people who aren't getting bought off under Bloomberg. This isn't that far from what he wound up saying, but Morris argues, and he's right, that how you frame a candidate and a position can make all the difference. People who'll take a racial-minority focus to be a liberal guilt trip will embrace the idea of standing up for what's right.
The weird part is that I don't understand why Ferrer didn't go with it. He started off, about a year ago, trying to frame his campaign as a way for Democrats pissed off after 2004 to stick it to George Bush and the Republicans. Good idea, no? But the real lesson from 2004, besides that we need a fucking plan on terrorism, is that Democrats should be unafraid to embrace morality. We absolutely have the moral high ground on most issues, and when we talk of the Republicans and say, "That's immoral, and it should be illegal," we'll relate to the voting public. Unfortunately, it seems that the only lesson Ferrer took from the 2004 elections is that the Democrats lost.
The other part of the New York mayor's race worth noting is that Ferrer didn't have an average opponent. We should note not only that Bloomberg spent some ridiculous figure (like $75 million) on his actual campaign, but also that during his term he spent about $300 million on conveniently placed NYC charitable donations. Talk about patronage! If the mayor helps you out, you help him out. That's basic human nature. If Fernando Ferrer, on the other hand, had an opponent who couldn't buy off the city, would this election be different? Honestly, I think so. So while Ferrer probably dug his own hole too deep for anyone to get him out, I think this may be one case where the problem wasn't the candidate. The problem was a billionaire for an opponent.