Easymoney-I live too close to close to this mess...(bet.WTC-Empire st.building-MSG is to the west of me) One quarter of the residents of my building are "going away" .I Hope we have something left when we get back.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?040830ta_talk_finnegan The Republicans are coming, and it isn’t easy to tell who’s more jittery—the visitors or the natives. On billboards and television, Ed Koch admonishes everybody to “make nice.” (“anarchy threat to city”was the two-inch front-page headline over a News story about cops and protesters.) The Republicans’ decision to hold their Convention in New York, along with its late date, provoked grumbling that the anniversary of the terror attacks would be exploited for political gain, a complaint that then seemed to cause the Convention’s planners to nervously distance themselves from all Ground Zero symbolism. Even so, for a campaign built on presenting George W. Bush as a “war President,” New York seems a perversely logical Convention-site choice. “republicans venture behind enemy lines” is the way a Financial Times headline put it, over a story about how incorrigibly Democratic this town is.
Not that the Republican Party and New York City are strangers. It’s true that Democrats have always outnumbered Republicans here—the current ratio is five to one—and that the last G.O.P. Presidential candidate to carry the city was Calvin Coolidge. But the Party’s destiny has often been shaped in New York. There was Abraham Lincoln’s breakout performance at Cooper Union during the 1860 primaries. And, a hundred years later, the now obscure but then famous Compact of Fifth Avenue (known among some conservatives as the Sellout of Fifth Avenue), when Richard Nixon met with Nelson Rockefeller in the latter’s palatial apartment and agreed, in exchange for Rockefeller’s endorsement, to support the civil-rights movement.
Governor Rockefeller was one of the most formidable in a line of local G.O.P. establishment giants which goes back at least as far as 1862, when George Opdyke became the first Republican mayor of New York, unseating a Democrat who had proposed seceding from the Union in order to continue trading with the Confederacy. (He wanted to take Long Island with him, and to call his statelet the Free City of Tri-Insula.) The draft riots of 1863 are remembered chiefly for their massacre of black New Yorkers, but Republicans are entitled to take pride in having been secondary targets of the racist mob. The mansions and businesses of prominent Republicans were burned. The mayor’s house was threatened. Brooks Brothers was sacked. The big Republican dailies, Horace Greeley’s Tribune and Henry Raymond’s Times, were besieged. At the Times, Raymond and one of his chief shareholders (Winston Churchill’s grandfather, it turned out) personally manned Gatling guns in the newspaper’s windows to keep the mob at bay. (Nowadays, the Times supports gun control and endorses mainly Democrats.)
New Yorkers still regularly elect Republican mayors—the incumbent and his predecessor, to take two examples. And many of the city’s great reformers and crime-fighters have been Republicans: Teddy Roosevelt, Fiorello LaGuardia, Thomas E. Dewey, John V. Lindsay, Rudolph Giuliani. The local advocates of Good Government, tilting against Tammany Hall and other patronage machines, have tended Republican, too. In 1948, a moderate New York City Republican actually came within hailing distance of the White House, and if Governor Dewey had managed to win his eminently winnable race against President Truman perhaps the decline of the East Coast Republican establishment would have been averted, or at least delayed.
Remnants of the old patrician tradition live on, and many of New York City’s Republican leaders remain markedly more liberal than their national counterparts. Upstate, however, the Republicans, having finally escaped the dynastic grip of the Rockefellers, now resemble, ideologically, the national Party—a fitting outcome when one recalls that the Goldwater coup at the 1964 Convention, which eventually changed everything in American politics, was essentially engineered by the brilliant hard-right political operative F. Clifton White. White was from upstate New York. So was Goldwater’s running mate, Congressman William E. Miller. John Lindsay, meanwhile, who refused to support Goldwater, won forty per cent of the African-American vote the following year in the New York mayor’s race.
So it will be interesting to see how the Convention’s hosts—local Republican leaders—get on with their thousands of red-state guests. (The true hosts, it may be argued, meaning those who will foot the serious bills, will be the same cast of corporate favor-seekers we saw buttering up the Democrats in Boston. But bracket that dispiriting thought.) Mayor Bloomberg has already been brusque, pace Koch, with certain out-of-towners who have crossed him. He ridiculed Tom DeLay, the feared House majority leader, after DeLay demanded that part of the Convention be moved offshore, onto a cruise ship; he even urged Party donors to reconsider giving money to DeLay, whose legislative leadership on issues affecting New York has been, by any standard, unhelpful. (DeLay, for example, is largely responsible for the federal government’s imminent failure to renew the ban on assault weapons. If you don’t count drug lords, there probably aren’t ten New Yorkers who want to see assault weapons re-legalized.) Similarly, earlier this summer, the Mayor was preparing to give a lunch for wealthy Republican donors at his home when he noticed that one of the guests of honor, a congressman from Ohio, had just helped block the transfer of four hundred and fifty million dollars in federal antiterrorism funds to, among other cities, New York. The congressman found himself abruptly disinvited. No one knows better than the billionaire Mayor that, while New York may never be Republican country in voter numbers, it is a huge money pot for both major parties. Some Party leaders grumble that Bloomberg is really more New Yorker than he is Republican. They’ve got that right, of course. He wouldn’t be in office otherwise.
They have been saying the same thing about Rudolph Giuliani for years—certainly since he supported Mario Cuomo against George Pataki in the gubernatorial race of 1994. But Giuliani has become a special case. Because his performance after the terror attacks made him a national hero, he can support gun control and abortion rights and oppose a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and yet remain indispensable to both the Bush campaign and the Republican Party generally. And this is where the choice of New York for the Convention, which at first seemed brilliant and later seemed boneheaded, may end up being fortunate for the Republicans after all. It gives the Party a convenient reason to do the politically intelligent thing and put on a relatively moderate, centrist face, with a lineup of prime-time speakers which includes Bloomberg, Pataki, and, especially, Giuliani—who, in addition to his crossover appeal, is uniquely positioned to reflect forcefully, and with complete authority, on the horrors of September 11, 2001, and their vast ramifications.
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