Nation: NEW YORK: THE REVOLT OF THE AVERAGE MAN

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I'll tell you who the average man is. He's the guy who works hard all day and maybe comes home too tired to move, but he has to moonlight anyway to pay his bills. He wants to educate his kids. He wants his neighborhood to be peaceful and clean. He doesn't have a doorman. His kids go to public schools. He rides the subways and the buses. He never burned his draft card or a flag, and he never will. He tries to play the game by the rules, and for that he's getting pushed into a corner. That's who the average man is.

THIS is an election year for New York City, and those words are the summons to the barricades, the social contract and tacit manifesto of the Democratic challenger for the mayoralty of the five boroughs of the fabled, troubled city. His name is Mario Angelo Procaccino, and he is a defiant little man who claims to speak for the angry little people—by far the voting majority —who live and suffer life in New York. For four years, Procaccino and those he seeks to lead have endured what they feel is a special form of outrage, over and above rising taxes and prices, crumbling services, strife-torn schools and all the other familiar ills of big-city America. That outrage is the administration of Mayor John Vliet Lindsay, which, they feel, has ignored them in its undue preoccupation with the city's blacks and poor. Lindsay liberals, by and large, are not merely for racial equality; they believe that society's stepchildren must be given extra helpings of aid to repair the damage of past mistreatment. There is a personal edge to the bitterness of Procaccino's followers, for Lindsay seems to belong to a world that his detractors say they can never enter — the world of Manhattan's glittering East Side, of discotheques and penthouse parties, of private-school accents and what Procaccino, in a rare flash of genuine wit, once called the "limousine liberals." Lindsay's riposte was to label Mario's entourage "Cadillac conservatives." In the view of their foes, Lindsay's forces loom as an alliance of patricians and restive blacks — the New Establishment in urban America — and Procaccino and his aver age man are out to destroy it.

Beyond the Boroughs

No one, least of all Mario ("Will you please stop calling me Mr. Procaccino?"), would dispute the Democratic candidate's credentials to lead the revolt of the average man. He is as common as the machine clubhouse, a journeyman politician who worked hard, if without special distinction, and waited his turn. As he insists on informing people on every street corner, he is "not pretty" — a useful attribute, he feels, in his war with Lindsay and the Beautiful Peo ple. He wears electric-blue suits and watermelon-pink shirts and in speech and gesture accentuates the ethnic.

His pencil-thin moustache and often quizzical expression make him look a bit like the late show's Leo Carrillo, sans sombrero.

His gooey delivery and overly simple ideas sometimes obscure the fact, but Procaccino is on to something. When in 1965 he won election as city comptroller — the city's second most powerful office — it was fashionable for sassy reformers to ask: "What is a Mario Procaccino?" His answer: a Mario Procaccino is a tough, shrewd operator who treated his average-man approach