Ed Koch, A Different Type of Liberal

By Matthew Cooper

Ed Koch at Kennedy Airport in New York in 1981. (AP Photo/Bookstaver)

There are around three postings about Ed koch during this past year this blog is posted. 

My opinions of him are first hand, well known, not something I read since I was in 

NYC during his tenure and  even march as close as I was allowed to him at gay pride 

(gay parade then ouch!!). 

 Someone who came in with lots of promises to the gay

 community particularly the community that had elected him to congress. I am talking 

about the West village, where he had a rent control  apartment (paid price of the 1950’s

 and could not be raised). A well employed single gay man and then a congressman 

and then mayor living at Gracie Mansion could not afford a regular rent apartment.  

This alone says tons about the man.

He turned against the gay community when AIDS hit NYC. It’s like all the anger he felt 

for being gay, Which I felt and many of us felt, but dealt with it and as a result were

 pushed to learn biology at the worse.  He was a man given a lot of power in NYC like 

all mayors do. As a result there was a city council created, which during Koch and

 most mayoralties have just been a rubber stamp for the mayor. As a result he had the power 
to send cops, health inspectors and whom ever the city employed to go after any gay 
establishment he disapproved of. I have no Rooster in this Cockfight but I do in the way
 gays were treated in the city during his administration which I understand very much 
because during those times the most damage to gays were being done by Homophobic gays. 
He was one. I was so happy to accept a transfer out of NYC to Greece town NY and give up 
my rent control apartment( it went by your salary unlike earlier rent control..like koch’s) 
and leave the city that had become a place I did not recognized. From the crime to the deaths 
you saw and expected that probably I was in the list. It was a good time to be in a relationship 
and at least I had that.
Adam Gonzalez

On the eve of him being buried I decided to let someone else talk about him this time By Matthew Cooper

 at National Journal.

Much is being made about the grim New York that Ed Koch inherited when he was elected in 1977, the year of the blackout, Son of Sam, and Howard Cosell’s famous line during the World Series about how “the Bronx is burning.”

Hizzoner is gone now and the reflections on his style (pure chutzpah), his sexuality (quite ambiguous), and his political acumen (awfully adroit) are everywhere. Koch, who died Friday at the age of 88, should also be remembered for how he reflected changes in American liberalism and accelerated those changes himself. His shifting alliances and fights over foreign policy often were telling. Because of Israel, he embraced the most conservative Democratic candidate for president in 1988, Al Gore, and despised Jimmy Carter. He supported Hillary, but not John Kerry. He wrote a whole book, Giuliani: Nasty Man. 

On issues of race, national security, and crime, Koch had a gut instinct for the revulsion many Democrats often felt about their party. If you look at New York City’s portrayal in movies in the 1970s, it was a grim one. There was The French Connection and Panic in Needle Park about the heroin trade. The Out of Towners was about a Midwestern couple that comes to Gotham and is mugged and beaten up—and that was a comedy.

Whenever films offered a more cheerful view of the nation’s most populous city (Annie Hall, for instance), most presented a crime-ridden, almost post-apocalyptic landscape like the one seen in Fort Apache, the Bronx. For the citizens of the outer boroughs, once loyal Democrats, the crime, drugs, welfare, and government bloat had become too much. Whether it was the subjects of Jonathan Rieder’s sociology classic, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism, or All in the Family, the anger wasn’t hard to find, and Koch tapped it. 

He called himself a “liberal with sanity,” which wasn’t too much different than Geraldine Ferraro’s first campaign slogan: “Finally, a tough liberal.” Koch took on unions and crime and a city budget that needed reining in, but it was as a liberal out to save liberalism. Giuliani began life as a Democrat but never really was one. Koch had come of age in Bob Dylan’s Greenwich Village, stumped for Adlai Stevenson, and the cosmopolitanism of the city and the benefits of government were never lost on him. 

I doubt a young Columbia transfer student named Barack Obama would have voted for Ed Koch when he ran for reelection in 1981. Liberals clung to a little known assemblyman named Frank Barbaro. Having been a year behind the president at Columbia and having spent election night with the beleaguered Barbaro backers, I can attest to that.

But Koch was an enthusiastic Obama backer in 2008 after backing Hillary Clinton in the primaries and Bush-Cheney in 2004 because of national security. The kind of racially charged politics that had roiled New York in the 1970s and '80s and the social conditions — welfare, street crime — were a distant memory by the time an African-American Columbia student had become president and Koch was an octogenarian.

The term gentrification first emerged during the Koch years and in the 21st century, in post-9/11 New York, the city was a very different place. The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn were in retreat from hipsters and new immigrants. The racially charged world of 1989’s Do the Right Thing or the Bensonhurst attack on a young black man named Yusef Hawkins had given way to a gentler tableau. In no small measure because of Ed Koch, New York liberalism was different, and so was American liberalism.

  National Journal’s