ON August 24, two weeks before the Democratic primary, the results from the most recent New York Times / Channel 2 News survey put Abzug and Beame in a dead heat, with both Cuomo and Koch within striking distance.
Beame had nothing to complain about considering that five weeks earlier, in the aftermath of the blackout, his prospects had seemed dimmer than ever. “[I]t is too much to expect you to recover once you wake up on a morning when your city is thoroughly ashamed of itself and you are its Mayor and its symbol,” Murray Kempton wrote on July 19, reckoning that the blackout had reduced the field of legitimate mayoral contenders to two, Abzug and Cuomo.
Kempton had underestimated the privileges of incumbency. Between his daily press conferences and regular walking tours of looted, burned neighborhoods, the city’s mayor was at the center of much of the media’s postblackout coverage. Beame had also made some savvy political moves, writing off the uncertain prospect of a presidential endorsement, opting instead to assail Carter both for his unwillingness to declare New York a disaster area and for his failure
to make good on his preelection pledge to federalize welfare. Out of fidelity to the code of the Democratic clubhouse, almost all the local union leaders and political bosses were lining up to endorse Beame. By the end of July he was climbing steadily in the polls. His reversal on the death penalty was followed by a series of anticrime commercials. One, a radio spot, quoted Abzug pontificating on the social and economic causes of the blackout looting. Another, this one on TV, showed the tiny mayor, crowned by a hard hat, before a sea of blue uniforms, against the tagline “Mayor Beame. He’s fighting your fight against crime.” By the middle of August, Beame was again a frontrunner.
But Kempton had made an even bigger miscalculation with respect to Abzug, the leading candidate through the first half of July. Abzug had been out of town when the lights went out, but her campaign staff hustled her back to New York, where thousands of new leaflets—“Vote Bella: She’s the Greatest Energy Source in America”—awaited her. Abzug promptly launched an attack on Con Ed, urging New Yorkers to “refuse to pay any more to this rapacious monopoly.”
On Friday, July 15, Abzug became the first mayoral candidate to visit what was left of Bushwick. After touring the decimated neighborhood, she stopped by Bed-Stuy’s Eighty-first Precinct, which had worked alongside Bushwick’s Eighty-third during the long night of looting. Looking smart in a polka-dot sundress and white straw hat, Abzug defended her increasingly unpopular position of giving cops the right to strike.
“But what would you have done if the police had been on strike during the blackout?” one distressed community resident asked.
“Mobilize the community organizations and get them into the streets,” Abzug replied.
“The community was mobilized,” another resident volunteered. “They were all out looting.”
Abzug held her tongue, but in the subsequent weeks, as she moved about the boroughs of a changed city, it became harder
and harder for her to keep her infamous temper in check. As she campaigned one late July afternoon at the pool of a beach club in Canarsie, Brooklyn, an Italian enclave surrounded by poor black neighborhoods, Abzug’s lap around the ring of card tables was halted by a man questioning her support for school busing. They argued, and the man called her a bigot. “Hitler spread the big lie too,” she screamed back at him.
Abzug regained her composure and pressed on, but moments later, as Roberta Kapper recounted in the Soho Weekly News, Abzug was arguing with someone else who believed that the cops should have shot the looters. Abzug said that if she’d been mayor, she would have called in the National Guard. Now an older woman chimed in, telling Abzug that she didn’t believe her, that Abzug didn’t care about people like her. “Then go vote for that schmuck we have now,” Abzug spit back. “I’m ahead in the polls.”
Not for long. As July gave way to August, Abzug’s popularity was ebbing. That one of the candidates gaining ground on her was Ed Koch made her all the more spiteful. Abzug and Koch were enemies of long standing. Their feud had begun in 1968, when Koch refused to march in an anti-Vietnam protest organized by a group Abzug chaired, not because he was in favor of the war but because he believed the group was a Communist front. Since then, neither one of them had missed an opportunity to say something nasty about the other. During Abzug’s ’76 Senate race Koch had volunteered to a reporter that New York State would be better off with someone else. Abzug stormed up to Koch on the floor of the House an hour later and called him “a divisive bastard.” She had not spoken to him since.
Upon hearing in late July that Koch had accepted a three-thousand-dollar campaign donation from Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw magazine, Abzug had her staff produce a new leaflet: “You can’t claim to be against pornography—and then take money from the smut peddlers. Ed Koch thinks he can.” (“The treasurer of the
Episcopal Church gave me $3,000, but that doesn’t mean I’m Episcopalian,” answered Koch, who’d been imploring Abzug “not to be the demagogue you usually are.”)
The truth is that liberalism’s retreat was throwing Abzug off stride. In the past she had always buttressed her stridency with a lawyerly attention to detail. During her movement days, she’d produced pamphlets that laid out exactly how many schoolteachers New York could employ for each B-52 bomber being sent to Vietnam. But as the ‘77 campaign entered its final weeks, she was resorting increasingly to generalities. Following Abzug one sweltering mid-August afternoon in Rego Park, Queens, The Village Voice’s Geoffrey Stokes heard her answer a question about what she’d do for the neighborhood with what Stokes, an Abzug supporter, described as “a disconnected attack on ‘the special interests.’”
This was no longer the New York Abzug had once known. “She thought the city was out of control,” her press secretary, Harold Holzer, recalls. “She thought it was beyond our control to remind people of what Lincoln would call the better angels of our nature, to remind them of possibilities, to remind them that harmony was more important than punitiveness. God knows it was impossible to say that people who pillaged in some pathetic effort to express anger should be pitied almost as much as punished. There was no way to get through the mood, between the murders and the heat and the blackout looting.”
There were some bad breaks too. Rolling Stone was working on a story with Abzug, a first-person account of her favorite spots in the city, only instead of photographing her, editor Jann Wenner had commissioned Andy Warhol to paint her portrait. It was all set to run on the cover of a special issue devoted to New York, the magazine’s new home. For Abzug, the timing could not have been better; the magazine would be on newsstands from the last week in August right up to the September 8 primary. But just as Rolling Stone’s editors were making their final tweaks, Elvis Presley died. The New York issue
was promptly shelved. When it was resurrected a little more than a month later, the introductory editorial still wished Abzug “good luck,” but the primary had already passed.
At least US magazine managed to run its feature on Abzug’s diet, which began, “With a Little Help from Shirley MacLaine, Buxom Bella Abzug Is Losing Pounds While Gaining Votes.” Actually, US had it backward. Abzug’s campaign staff had discovered the virtues of food as a sedative and kept a cooler filled with nuts and yogurt in the back of the campaign car. By late August, as Abzug’s once-comfortable lead continued to shrivel, she had added about ten pounds to her already full figure. Unable to fit into her dress when the US photographer arrived, Abzug was reduced to holding it up in front of herself.