Geraldine Ferraro
New Yorkers won't wait for
much, but they apparently will wait for Geraldine Ferraro. For the last 12
months, the ex-vice-presidential candidate has been mulling over the idea of
quitting her Crossfire job to run for office. She's about to make her
decision: Ferraro will announce in the next two weeks whether she's entering
New York's 1998 Democratic senatorial primary--also known as the race to decide
who gets to mud wrestle Sen. Alfonse D'Amato. Ferraro's Godot act has
overshadowed the campaigns of the two declared primary contenders, Rep. Charles
Schumer and New York City Public Advocate Mark Green. New York political bosses
and big donors are biding their time waiting for her announcement. The
fund-raising group EMILY's List, which could steer $1 million to its chosen
candidate, has encouraged members to withhold contributions till Ferraro makes
her decision.
The
latest Quinnipiac College Poll, a respected independent survey, shows Ferraro
massacring Schumer and Green in the primary and routing D'Amato by 14 points in
the general election. This enthusiasm is a little mystifying. After all, the
62-year-old has served a grand total of six years in public office (all in the
House of Representatives), has not won an election since 1982, was brutalized
in her last two campaigns (1984 vice-presidential and 1992 senatorial), and has
been tangled in more ethics scandals than any politician except, well, Al
D'Amato. A little ethnic arithmetic explains some of the Ferraro excitement.
She's Italian; Schumer and Green are Jewish. "D'Amato beats any Jew, and he
loses to any Italian," says a longtime New York political operative.
But Ferraro owes her popularity to something else: the
Ferraro Aura (try saying that three times quickly). To this day, Ferraro is
defined by 1984, by the four months 13 years ago when she was the most famous
woman in the world. Democrats, especially middle-aged women, remember her at
the Democratic National Convention, remember her white dress, remember her
introduction, which brought the house down, "My name is Geraldine Ferraro." The
Mondale-Ferraro campaign degenerated into a wretched, embarrassing spectacle,
but Ferraro proved that a woman could be just as good--and just as bad--a
vice-presidential candidate as any man. Ferraro, Maureen Dowd wrote, came to
embody "the Cinderella myth, the American dream and the feminine mystique"
rolled into one. Her admirers stopped seeing her as a politician. She became an
icon, an unreal, idealized symbol of women's achievement.
But this
image distorts Ferraro. As an individual, rather than a symbol, she's
wonderfully engaging--charming, tough, smart, funny, thoughtful. But she is
also very much a politician: self-aggrandizing, ambitious, and acutely
sensitive to political wind shifts. Few New Yorkers, let alone few Americans,
remember her six years in Congress, and with good reason. She was a
pork-barreler and a more-or-less willing cog in the Queens Democratic machine.
(Her path to Washington was cleared by the fact that her cousin Nicholas
Ferraro was the Queens district attorney and a political player.) Ferraro had
enough principles to stand on, not enough to get in her way. Despite her
lionization by feminists, for example, Ferraro was not terribly progressive on
women's issues. She was pro-choice, but not emphatically so. She supported the
Equal Rights Amendment, but then maneuvered to keep it out of the 1984
Democratic platform. Her skills as an operator served her own career: When she
arrived in Congress in 1979, she quickly inserted herself under the wing of
House Speaker Tip O'Neill. His sponsorship was critical to her
vice-presidential nomination.
Ferraro seems to favor retail politics over
ideology (like D'Amato). She has never attached herself to any particular set
of ideas, never had any consuming passion. It's notable that none of the seven
New York Democratic operatives I talked to could describe her ideology or name
her pet causes. ("She's sort of moderate, I think," said one.) When I asked
Ferraro about her key issues, her answer was boilerplate: "Education," the
struggling economy of upstate New York, D'Amato's "horrendous" record.
Even her
responses to ethics charges reflect her political instincts. Confronted with
allegations about campaign-finance irregularities or with questions about her
husband's business dealings, Ferraro has bobbed and weaved with Clintonian
deftness: Hand out a few documents, hedge, cavil, deny, admit with
explanation.
All of which is to say: Of course she'll run. She's a
natural-born politician, and she can't stay away from the race. She sounds
thrilled when she considers the prospect. "If you look at the time of my life
that was the happiest, it was the time as a prosecutor and member of Congress,"
she says. "I am 30 points ahead in the primary. And I am the only one who beats
Al D'Amato." Ferraro has always wanted to take on Sen. Pothole. She reluctantly
skipped the 1986 campaign because of ethics problems. Scandal dogged her again
in 1992, when she lost a vicious four-way primary. This year is her last chance
at Al: "It's either do it now, or don't do it at all."
It's not
likely to be an easy primary. Schumer has raised $8 million and is a relentless
campaigner. Green has a loyal following among the liberals who vote in
Democratic primaries. Ferraro says she needs to raise $5.5 million to win the
primary. It will be a fratricidal, exhausting race.
And if she wins, D'Amato will be no pushover.
The bars of New York are filled with politicians who led D'Amato in the polls a
year before Election Day. He always polls low, he has $15 million to spend in
the general election, and he solidified his base with lots of . And D'Amato
will not underestimate Ferraro, whom he fears most of all his potential
opponents. He has already fired a shot across her bow. In October, he ran TV
ads--between segments of Crossfire , no less--slamming Ferraro as a
pro-tax-and-welfare liberal. The ads mimicked Crossfire 's format: "On
the left, it's Geraldine Ferraro. And on our side, it's Al D'Amato." An icon
would have ignored the attack, but Ferraro harpooned right back, calling the ad
a "sign of panic." When Republicans asked CNN to drop Ferraro from
Crossfire , complaining that she was using the program to advance her
candidacy, Ferraro countered that "[i]t's almost unbecoming to see grown men
whine."
If New Yorkers are lucky,
this sniping is a preview of a delightful fall campaign: two leather-skinned,
fast-talking, old-time pols whaling the bejesus out of each other. That's the
kind of politics everyone enjoys, not least Geraldine Ferraro.
