New York: Mailer for Mayor

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Then, says Mailer, there would be delegated "some real power to the neigh borhoods." This would include "power with their local boards of education, power to decide about the style and quality and number of the police force they want and are willing to pay for, power over the Department of Sanitation, power over their parks." There could be "vest-pocket campuses" built by students in abandoned buildings, restoring a sense of personal involvement that is lost in the large university campuses. Early in his campaign, blithely exaggerating to dramatize his point, Mailer proclaimed: "We'll have compulsory free love in those neighborhoods that vote for it, and compulsory attendance at church on Sunday in those that vote for that."

Long Odds. Mailer wants above all to restore something of the sense of small-town identity that has become lost in the anonymity of city life. "The energies of the people of New York at present have no purchase on their own natural wit and intelligence," he says. "They have no purpose other than to watch with a certain gallows humor the progressive deterioration of their city." Under Mailer's plan for semi-independent neighborhoods, however, "those energies could begin to work for their deepest and most private and most passionate ideas about the nature of government, the nature of man's relation to his own immediate society."

Mailer's rhetoric is seductive if mystical, but the program he proposes is at best elusive. While it is a reminder of treasured values lost, it is an uncertain guide to their recovery. Many may vote for Mailer nonetheless, if only because he represents an alternative to old approaches that have made the city seem ungovernable. Handicapper Mailer, appraising his chances in race-track argot, accurately considers himself "a 20-1 long shot." On his personal morning line, however, the contender adds with bravura: "Best bet."