Nation: NEW YORK: THE REVOLT OF THE AVERAGE MAN
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longer at ease with each other. Party organizations find it difficult to organize. Old loyalties fail to bind. Such volatility breeds accidental candidates, and Procaccino is a creature of circumstance. Lindsay's failures and the ugly mood of the city, far more than anything in Procaccino's past record or present offerings, account for the Democrat's promising prospects.
To anyone from beyond the Hudson, the Procaccino campaign must seem more than a little incredible. This is New York City, capital of New Politics and glamour, headquarters of the national communications media, lair of sophisticates. Yet, here is Procaccino, 57 and looking it, poor on television and ducking it when possible, suspicious of the press and at odds with it—here is the scion and heir of Old Politics, doing rather nicely by the estimates of adversary and ally alike.
His New York is not the one seen by the visitor, not Broadway or Park Avenue, not Greenwich Village or Harlem. Procaccino lives in a suburban setting so far north in The Bronx that the city boundary runs through his backyard. Marchi has a comfortable house in another outlying region, Staten Island. Lindsay is the Manhattan man. The differences are major. A man in the outer boroughs may work in Manhattan, but he is no more a Manhattanite by temperament than is a citizen of Omaha. Manhattan is heavily populated by the East Side affluents, by poor blacks and Puerto Ricans, by youngish singles. Elsewhere in the vast, often dreary reaches of the boroughs, middle-class and working-class families predominate. A transit stoppage or a heavy snowstorm that is a minor bother or even a chance for bravado and gallantry in Manhattan can bring near paralysis in some of the outlying sections.
In last June's primaries, both Procaccino and Marchi carried Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx and Staten Island but lost Manhattan. Marchi entitled his campaign kickoff speech 'The Forgotten New Yorker." One of the catchy phrases Procaccino uses repeatedly is "the Manhattan arrangement." By that he means an alliance of the intellectuals, editors, broadcasting executives, businessmen and progressives of both major parties who oppose him. Lindsay, he says, is attempting to "pit the poor against the middle class, while he goes about the business of rebuilding Manhattan for the select few." Procaccino is waging the politics of class by the numbers, knowing the white middle outweighs the rest. Manhattan may be New York to the world, but the politician knows that Manhattan contains only 1,600,000 residents out of a total city population of some 8,000,000.
The Angry and the Threatened
Procaccino's average man and Marchi's forgotten New Yorker are of course political stereotypes. In flesh and blood terms, they are many people. Some live on meager incomes as pensioners, clinging to the frame houses that represent a lifetime's work. "People tend to forget," says Marchi, "that there are many poor white people." To the retired worker, or to the family living on $7,000 or $8,000 in the lower civil service ranks, a tax increase on their homes or an apartment rent rise is a grave threat to the stability of a small, precarious world. Second jobs are common, credit purchases a necessity, a sense of financial security almost impossible.
The barber, the waiter, the cab
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