The Last Sane Liberal: Mayor Ed Koch’s practical progressivism saved Gotham’s finances and restored its spirit
This past summer, Edward I. Koch, a Democrat, made headlines by noisily endorsing Republican Bob Turner in a special election to fill the congressional seat of disgraced Tweeter Anthony Weiner. The former mayor explained that he’d decided to rally Jewish voters in Brooklyn and Queens to chastise President Obama for his Israel policy. Koch’s outsize role in Turner’s surprise victory made for big political news and led to speculation that Obama could be facing trouble in his reelection bid.
The episode was unusual, but unusual has always been de rigueur for Koch, a three-term mayor and a constant post-mayoral presence in New York City. For one thing, Koch has long described himself as a “liberal with sanity” in a city that consistently tilts left. Further, Koch’s personality and ego have always been larger than life, and long before the era of 24-hour news, the mayor found imaginative ways to keep himself in the spotlight. So while the role he played in the Turner election was eye-catching, it wasn’t surprising when you considered his eventful, iconoclastic career.
Ed Koch was born in the Bronx in 1924 to Polish Jewish immigrant parents. After completing his law degree at NYU and beginning his legal career, he moved into an apartment in Greenwich Village, where he became involved in local Democratic politics. In 1963, he ran for Greenwich Village district leader as a reform Democrat and won, beating the powerful machine pol Carmine De Sapio. Koch’s willingness to run against the local Democratic Party machine was an early sign of his independence: for this Democrat, party loyalty wasn’t the ultimate virtue.
In 1968, Koch ran for Congress and proved a tireless politicker. One month before the election, his opponent, Whitney North Seymour, Jr., saw him asking for votes outside a subway station, struck up a conversation, and asked how long he had been doing that kind of campaigning. “Oh, about a year,” Koch replied. The “look on Seymour’s face,” Koch wrote in his autobiography, Mayor, meant that Seymour knew that the man with two names was going to beat the man with four names.
At first, there weren’t many indications that Koch would be anything but a run-of-the-mill Democratic congressman. As he remembered in a 2007 article for the New York Press, “I was just a plain liberal.” But he made a telling deviation from convention in 1972, when residents of Forest Hills in Queens were protesting the planned development of three 24-story buildings that would house 4,500 residents on public assistance. The protests seemed to pit the Jewish residents of Forest Hills against the African-American community. Koch sided with the protesters and called for a reduction in the size of the developments.