A liberal sane enough to say ‘Nuts!’

John Podhoretz

The legacy of Ed Koch is all around us — and by "us" I don't mean just us New Yorkers, though we remain today the chief beneficiaries of the remarkable and remarkably dramatic mayoralty over which he presided from 1978 until 1990.

By "us," I mean Americans — because Koch played a role in snapping Democrats and liberals out of the political madness into which they were fast descending when he was elected mayor in 1977.

A onetime lion of the left, Koch didn't let ideology blind him to the very real consequences of the very bad ideas that had gripped his party and his movement. When he saw an idea that was (one of his favorite words) "nuts," he said it was "nuts," no matter its partisan derivation or ideological coloration. He was, he said, a "liberal with sanity," and he came along to show liberals a better way.

This was no small thing, for the liberalism of the '70s and '80s had become profoundly irresponsible. In a city that was drowning in crime, the liberal elite sympathized far more with the rights of criminals than with the victims of crime.

Koch made no excuses. "It stinks," he said of soaring crime, and horrified his former Village supporters with his support for the death penalty.

An ideological distaste for capitalism manifested itself in regulatory hostility — it was just too expensive for private businesses to do business in the city, and they were fleeing in droves when he took over.

Koch understood that he needed to do what he could to convince the city's business class that he viewed the private economy as the city's lifeblood, not as a bunch of vampires.

If you walked around with him, as I did once in the mid-1980s, he'd point up at a new skyscraper going up and say, "Isn't that beautiful?" It wasn't, of course, but in the decade before he took office, new construction in the city had ground to a near-halt, as New York seemed to be dying. He wanted buildings. He wanted growth. He knew it meant life for New York rather than death.

Then there was the madness of social disorder, best exemplified by the deranged ideas in liberal circles about homelessness. This disastrous phenomenon was viewed as the result of evil Ronald Reagan social policies, not as the result of the wholesale emptying-out of psychiatric institutions and jails.

Koch stood athwart famed liberal institutions that hotly defended the rights of people to live in the city's streets, even though they were a clear danger to themselves and others and the most visible mark of a society no longer able to maintain any kind of civil order.

The most famous homeless person in New York, a former nurse named Joyce Brown, had gone schizophrenic and renamed herself "Billie Boggs" in honor of a local TV host. The city sought to have her committed and to give her anti-psychotic medication. The New York Civil Liberties Union found judges who ruled the city had no right to do so.

Brown became such a cause célèbre that she was invited to speak at a Harvard University conference on the homeless. But not long after, she was back on a Second Avenue grate, screeching at people, throwing things at cars.

Long after his mayoralty ended, Koch could summon up the same disgust he felt with liberals at the time, how they'd simply used this desperately sick woman as a weapon to advance their agenda.

Thanks to the prominence granted him by his position as mayor of the nation's largest city, and to his undeniable star power, Koch's successes as a liberal with sanity provided a blueprint of sorts for Democrats seeking to lead their party out of the Reaganite wilderness. By which I mean: No Ed Koch, no Bill Clinton.

At his best, he conveyed his infectious delight with the best that this city and this country could be, and did what he could to get them both there. He was an agent of change for New York, and for the Democratic Party and for the United States.

How did he do?

Pretty great.

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