PURE GOLD: KOCH: “HOW AM I DOING?” WELL…

Former Mayor Ed Koch, an early reformer during the late 50’s and 60’s, has decided reform should make a return engagement to fix a “dysfunctional” state government which has become “a national disgrace and a laughing stock.” His formula for success, revealed in a recent essay on Bloomberg radio, indicates a selective memory, as well as indications he might be smoking some pretty strong stuff.

He does cite several embarrassments to make his point: the resignations of Gov. Eliot Spitzer and Comptroller Alan Hevesi, both for scandalous behavior; the resignation of Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, who may be under Federal investigation; and the role of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who gets a whopping salary from his private law practice in addition to what he receives as Speaker.

But there has been no conspiracy among this quartet and no central figure leading the pack. Spitzer, arranging for dalliances by phone, could—to use a Kochism—be considered a wacko. Hevesi’s venality was based on greed. The verdict isn’t in yet on Bruno. Silver, on the other hand, was just making more money in his two-job arrangement than other legislators following the same tradition.

To solve the current unhappy political situation, Koch gets nostalgic for “a group of revered citizens—Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Sen. Herbert Lehman and Mayor Bob Wagner” who coalesced in the mid-20th century to end the reign of the last great Tammany boss, Carmine DeSapio.

So Koch says let’s do it again: Create a new party that would run “against the candidates of both Democratic and Republican parties, and has as its goal the sweeping out of Albany of all incumbents.” Wow!

Continuing to puff on the potent stuff, he recommends: “After two elections in which the new party is successful, it should agree to dissolve and allow the Democratic and Republican parties to once again take over, vying with one another on a philosophical basis, hoping they have learned their lessons and become functional.”

He forgets a few facts along the way. First, of course, there is no DeSapio, a central figure who dominated the state party in the 50’s and was twice successful in electing Bob Wagner—yes, the same Wagner Koch now reveres—as mayor, and also electing Averill Harriman once as governor.

Koch also forgets that he ran for State Assembly against the liberal incumbent, Bill Passannante, opposing the strong advice from both Lehman and Wagner, and lost by an overwhelming vote. In 1963—when I was his campaign treasurer—he beat DeSapio by a mere 41 votes while two years earlier Jim Lanigan had beaten DeSapio by 1300. By the end of 1963, Mrs. Roosevelt and Lehman were both gone. Koch, always persistent and single-minded, then won two successive victories over DeSapio by modest margins, and went on to elective public office.

He also forgets that in his successful victories for the mayoralty, he sought and received support from three of the top Democratic old-liners who had survived DeSapio’s political demise: Stanley Friedman in the Bronx and Donald Manes in Queens, both caught up in the city scandals in the 80’s—Friedman going to jail and Manes committing suicide—and the Brooklyn kingpin, Mead Esposito, a master of Tammany-type politics.

When Koch ran for governor in 1982, all three were cheerleaders in his campaign.

In 2008, there is no single enemy like DeSapio to focus on. Nor can one detect any leaders like Mrs. Roosevelt or Sen. Lehman.

Koch’s attack on Silver has the whiff of hypocrisy. His real beef against Silver was Silver’s leadership in killing the commuter tax on non-city residents.

While Koch himself has been scrupulously honest, he abandoned some early reform principles as he moved up the political ladder to City Hall.

He had been a product of Village Independent Democrats, the club that beat DeSapio for the district leadership. VID advocated several salient reform principles which were outlined in an op-ed piece in the NY Times in the mid-80’s. It happens that I wrote it.

The principles included:

1. No officer of a political club should at the same time hold a policy-making position in government. The rule was followed at least in VID; when Koch became mayor, John LoCicero stepped down as district leader to become Koch’s chief political adviser.

2. No party officer should hold an elective public office. That is consistently violated and was during Koch’s three terms as mayor. Best example: Manes serving as both county leader and borough president of Queens. Similarly, Denny Farrell, the Manhattan party leader,today serves in the State Assembly.

3. Legislators, both state and city, should be full-time and appropriately compensated. Koch, as reformer, never mentioned that one, and in both the State Legislature and City Council, the two-job tradition has always dominated.

Of course, Koch is known for supporting other well-known “reformers” for public office, including Al D’Amato, Rudy Giuliani and George Bush.