Nation: NEW YORK: THE REVOLT OF THE AVERAGE MAN

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self-righteous politician might have gotten the amber-light message. Lindsay did not.

The city's immense public school system (more than 1,000,000 pupils) was unwieldy and unresponsive to those it served. Lindsay wanted to decentralize control of school affairs, to give neighborhoods more of a say in running their schools. The idea was particularly attractive to the ghettos—but it led to a disastrous battle. In one Negro district, the predominantly Jewish teachers' union and the local board got bogged down in a dispute over job-security procedures. The fight soon turned ugly as latent hostility between Jews and blacks gushed to the surface. The union successfully struck the entire system for 36 school days. The stoppage—the second in two years—was Lindsay's biggest single failure, and he himself acknowledges his responsibility for it. City hall just did not seem to grasp the complexities of the dispute or to understand the depth of the animosities involved. "Intelligence was very hard to get," Lindsay says today. "The information that we were getting at the time was terrible." A new decentralization plan devised by the state legislature is now to be tried.

The Jewish Vote

The school debacle damaged Lindsay cruelly. Marchi says he decided to run because of the strike: "It was a disaster. Decentralization became a word for anarchy." To Procaccino, it was a case study of the elite's failure to comprehend the middle classes. Even some of Lindsay's aides acknowledge that city hall tended to take the middle class for granted. "You can't dictate to people," says Procaccino. "You've got to be a healer, a mediator. When there's trouble, you step in and take care of it, but you don't go around trying to stir it up. I'm very fortunate because God gifted me with the ability to talk to people." To many Jews, the school strike and related troubles were evidence that Lindsay was willing to do anything to placate black militants, even those with anti-Semitic leanings and even if it meant damaging the educational system.

Jewish hostility toward Lindsay is ironic on three counts. Jewish Democrats and independents attracted by his progressivism provided his winning margin four years ago. He was then and is again this year running on the ticket of New York's Liberal Party, which is predominantly Jewish. Many of his closest aides and associates are Jewish. All this is logical for Lindsay. Jews tend to be attracted to reformist causes. And in New York, though they constitute roughly a quarter of the city's population, they amount to about a third of the electorate. Jews vote in proportionally larger numbers than other groups.

Jews do not necessarily vote as an ethnic bloc for their own, or even for the Democratic Party, to which most of them belong. This year Lindsay has been booed and heckled in some Jewish neighborhoods outside Manhattan. His campaign strategists, acknowledging that the Jewish vote is the key to the election, detect in opinion samplings an abnormally large undecided element. Yet it is here and among Negroes, who represent about 14% of the electorate, that Lindsay must get heavy support if he is to be reelected. The non-Jewish working-class vote was never a source of strength for him.

Lindsay has been trying desperately to mend