New York's Steel Cage Match
Last week, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani complained that his Senate rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, had "politicized" the death of Patrick Dorismond, an unarmed black man killed by city police during a drug sting.
Clinton had scolded Giuliani for releasing Dorismond's police record and suggesting the police were justified in shooting him.
"There is a process called projection in psychology," Giuliani instructed his audience. "It means accusing someone of doing what you're doing. That is precisely what Mrs. Clinton is doing."
If projection is what you want, then the New York Senate race is a multiplex cinema, with larger-than-life images projected on an Empire State-sized screen.
This is a clash more about politics than policy, thanks in part to the wolfish appetite of the New York press and thanks to the candidates themselves, whose personalities often drown out their attempts to talk issues. The candidates, or quite often their spokesmen or campaign managers, have bickered over religion, race, residence, fund-raising techniques, traveling expenses, a Billy Joel song, anti-Semitism, and parades. All for the sake of the 9 percent of New York voters who say they don't know whom they'll be voting for in November.
That's an amazingly small number for an election that's still over seven months away. But thanks to years in the public eye, Giuliani and Clinton are well known to New Yorkers. The latest poll showed 45 percent of New Yorkers supporting the Mayor, and 44 percent supporting the First Lady - too close to call. And most supporters on both sides say they can't imagine changing their minds.
To make it worse, Giuliani and Clinton agree on several issues that normally define Republicans and Democrats. Both support abortion rights, both want more gun control, both favor the death penalty, both support gay rights. Of course, there's plenty they disagree over - education policy and taxes, for instance. But mostly they disagree about who would make a better Senator.
Clinton suggests Giuliani doesn't play well with others. The Mayor has had some fabled sandbox fights with, among others, the City Council and the Board of Education.
"You have to be willing to keep working with everybody," Clinton said earlier in the campaign. "You can't walk into the Senate and have a disagreement with somebody and say you're going to fire them or sue them."
Never mind that Clinton's own record of working with the Senate is, well, sketchy.
Giuliani believes Clinton can't possibly understand what New Yorkers want, since she's a carpetbagger. He challenged her to find her way home, unguided, from LaGuardia Airport. It's as though he believes in the divine right of residence, or at least on a good sense of direction.
Perhaps more effectively, he argues that he's held office. The campaign should be about "your record, where you've had a chance to put your ideas in practice," he told i>CBS News last month. Some observers think the Mayor would really rather keep on being Mayor, but term limits - which he supported - make that impossible. "I'm never going to have a better job," he said during his State of the City speech in January.
In fact, when he's not berating Clinton, Giuliani is touting his accomplishments as Mayor, rather than explaining what he would do as a senator. And he's doing much of that touting in the friendly confines of Gotham. He has rarely hitched up the wagon for a visit upstate, in contrast to Clinton, who has diligently stumped across the vast regions north and west of New York City.
One quirky twists of this campaign is the upstate vote. Traditionally Republican, the region might spurn Giuliani. Upstate voters hate like poison just about anything from New York City, which is perceived as a liberal cesspool devouring the money and resources the rest of the state generates. And Giuliani's relationship with New York State Republicans, particularly with Gov. George Pataki, has been tense at best. So the question becomes, which outsider will upstate New Yorkers hate least - the one from the City, or the one from Chicago/Arkansas/Washington?
The antipathy some voters feel for both candidates leads to another wildcard: a third party candidate. New York State has small but vigorous third parties: its Conservative Party is so powerful that, for the past 26 years, no Republican has won statewide office without its endorsement. And Giuliani doesn't have it. His abortion views make him anathema to the Conservatives, who are likely to nominate someone else.
The presence of a new kid in the playground will alter the game entirely. A Conservative candidate would probably take votes away from Giuliani. More importantly, any third party candidate would make inroads among those undecided voters, and it might take only a modest, single digit showing to tip the scales in favor of either Giuliani or Clinton.
And then there's Al Lewis, who played Grandpa on the TV show The Munsters and now the Green Party candidate in the race. Maybe it's a reflection of this race's gaudy, sideshow qualities that his Senate bid raises barely an eyebrow. After all, how can a former vampire compete against tabloid titans like Rudy and Hillary?