Nation: NEW YORK: THE REVOLT OF THE AVERAGE MAN

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are a serious threat to Procaccino, but there are still plenty remaining in the center. Lindsay is on the left, he charges, and Marchi is on the right. "And in the middle, there am I, a moderate, progressive Democrat," Procaccino says happily. "That's where I am and that's where I'll stay."

Mario's Strategy

He does not accuse the mayor of being too friendly with blacks; he blames Lindsay's policies for causing "an upsurge of anti-Semitism." He decries the nightstick approach to crime, but he wants teen-agers accused of violent crimes to be treated like adult offenders, and he wants narcotics addicts swept, from the streets and held without bail when possible. He is skeptical about school decentralization. When accused of racism, he explodes: "That's the dirtiest thing I've seen done in a long time." When he uses the term "law and order," he insists, "The words are not shorthand. They do not stand for something else. We simply must live under the rule of law. Violence never works." Lately he has tried to get away from the image of being a one-issue candidate by presenting a series of position papers.

The statements are unexceptionable. But they are also open to a variety of interpretations. When he talks about "one standard for everybody" in today's context, it can sound like an argument against what some whites consider to be preferential treatment for Negroes. When he talks about abuses of the welfare system, most whites see black and brown, which is not completely unjustified.

Last spring Procaccino adroitly capitalized on the revolt by Negro militants that temporarily caused tuition free City College to close. To many whites of modest means, who regard the school as an indispensable social-economic ladder, the Negro demands for wholesale admission of blacks meant lowered academic standards and less room for whites. City College Alumnus Mario Procaccino brought a court suit to compel the city to reopen the institution. It put him in the favorable position of using respectable means to stand up to the radicals. He scored points across the board with this bit of alliterative class propaganda: "City College is what New York is all about. It has always had more heart than Harvard. It has always been more real than Yale. It has always had more purpose than Princeton. That school is the soul of our city." Lindsay, of course, is a Yale man, and he probably has the Ivy League vote anyway.

Procaccino never tires of life-style comparisons. "Mr. Marchi," he says, "does not fit into this category of people that have to work with their hands, with the sweat of their brows and so forth." He tries to portray Lindsay as an effete jet-setter: "A clean neighborhood is more important to people than poetry reading." That, presumably, was a crack at Lindsay's narration of the text accompanying a performance of Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait. "I am not one of the select few," Procaccino insists. "I am not one of the Beautiful People."

Because many beautiful—and rich —people are for Lindsay, he will be able to outspend both of his rivals. That is one reason why the mayor may well win re-election after all. Much of the money is expected to go into a TV blitz in the campaign's last few