The odd couple: GOP and NYC

Before the 1976 Democratic National Convention in Madison Square Garden, delegates were warned not to wander north of 86th Street. The city was in rotten shape, and the hope was a convention would kick-start a renewal.

Four years later the Democrats returned to a better but not fully recovered New York, and this time delegates were warned not to roam north of 96th Street.

In 1992, the city was stumbling out of yet another economic downturn when the Democrats came yet again, and although no official would dare nix a neighborhood as unsafe, an extra 3,000 cops were assigned to protect conventioneers from prostitutes, con artists and $5 Cokes.

Yes, those were the good old days when it was the city that was considered a threat to the convention. Now, however, it’s the presence of the convention that is the threat to the city.

Who knows what the truth was then or is now? I doubt the ’76 delegates would have been mugged near my in-laws’ building on 93rd Street. And probably there aren’t too many anarchists lurking in chic Meatpacking District clubs knowing the Bush twins regularly party there.

Whatever the realities, the psychological landscape around a New York convention has certainly been turned on its head.

The Republican National Convention starts today and an extra 10,000 uniformed cops have been on the streets for days because of the threat of terrorism or actions by anarchists. Every morning last week I ran into a staggering number of cops lolling around Penn Station. One tired-looking detective in an ill-fitting blue uniform couldn’t remember the last time he had suited up. “It’s been years,” he said, adjusting his tight pants. “Can you tell I’ve put on weight?”

The irony is that for the first time a convention is coming to a New York -- at least a Manhattan -- that is phenomenally buff if you can put aside that mass grave on the tip of the island where the World Trade Center once stood. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, crime is way down, property values are sky high, most public parks are gleaming, and although there are still vast tracts of poor areas in the five boroughs, nowhere, at least in gentrified Manhattan, is considered off limits for real estate speculators. In fact, a cash-flush Republican might be better off writing a check this week not for the party war chest, but for a row house above 125th Street, where there are still some deals.

So, why New York?

When the Republicans decided to hold their convention in New York it seemed, at least initially, that they were following the same impulse that had brought Democrats here in years past. The GOP was choosing to rally around a stricken city, a gesture made by many post-Sept. 11 but a particularly grand one that promised to pump $100 million into the local economy. It was also to be a nod by a “big-tent” party -- that the GOP could embrace all voters, even those in a city that is 5-1 Democratic and where the president’s approval rating is less than 30%.

Cynics, however, suspected President Bush didn’t, still doesn’t, give a hoot about this city, particularly elite Manhattan where only 80,000 people bothered to vote for him in 2000. These doubting New Yorkers also figure that Republican delegates instinctively loathe them, the riffraff and the rich alike, the assorted transients and strivers from around the world. Thus, many here were none too pleased by the decision to put a big top over our baking asphalt for their party.

This seemed reinforced when GOP honcho Tom DeLay floated a plan to have House leaders camp out on cruise ships in the Hudson during the convention rather than try to get a good night’s rest -- as if that wasn’t possible. New York’s three top Republicans -- the governor, the NYC mayor and Rudy, as we commonly refer to the former mayor, quickly shut down that embarrassing idea.

But it got a lot of people thinking, rightly or wrongly, that they didn’t need a scientific survey, some poll with a margin of error, to prove that the Grand Old Party, at least its leadership, was up to its old tricks. For, speaking of ill-fitting suits, this city and that national party have a (modern) history of being at odds.

In the 1960s, Barry Goldwater suggested the country would be better “if we could just saw off the Eastern seaboard and let it float out to sea.” Remember the infamous tabloid headline before the 1976 convention, “Ford to New York: Drop Dead”? The GOP was still bad-mouthing New York before the Democrats got here in 1992. “In so many ways the liberal Democrats chose the perfect site for their convention,” Vice President Dan Quayle said at the time. “Almost as if they feel a strange compulsion to return to the scene of the crime.”

So what happened that made New York tolerable for a Republican conclave? Did it take the death of nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11 or has something else occurred?

Perhaps having years of Republican leadership in the city, with national hero Giuliani mayor for two terms, inoculated New York from more GOP animus. Perhaps with Disney dominating Times Square and Manhattan literally the set for all the morning-in-America television newscasts, Midtown has become just another generic backdrop for all that Americans love -- Republicans and Democrats alike -- a defanged version of its former self.

The polls and my random sampling of delegation spokesmen showed that the GOP faithful don’t mind coming to New York this week -- for their party and for their president.

That for-their-president kicker made me wonder if the enthusiasm for New York was not being expressed through gritted teeth. But then Saturday I interviewed several members of the Michigan delegation as they checked into the Hilton New York on Seventh Avenue and 54th Street.

“We don’t hold the protests against New York,” said Tony Stackpoole, a restaurant owner from Sault Ste. Marie in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, speaking of the anti-Bush activity expected this week. He went on to describe two young, “disheveled people,” who stopped at his Cup of the Day restaurant on their way from Colorado to protest in New York. “New Yorkers are putting out the red carpet. It’s outsiders making trouble.”

(Stackpoole must have not read the polls in the morning papers. If they’re right, more than 400,000 New Yorkers at least “said” they had plans to join protests this week.)

A tough sell

Certainly there is no love-loss by the natives for the conventioneers. More than half of the New Yorkers polled by CBS/New York Times wished the Republicans had gone someplace else. Some of that is about inconvenience and fear; some of it is about, as they say, bad blood. Despite the Daily News’ front-page headline lecturing New Yorkers on Sunday to “Play Nice,” the GOP presence is a tough sell.

“I remember the nasty stuff Republicans from Washington have said about us in off-election years,” said May Ellen Bush (no relation to the president) as she bought college texts last week at a large Barnes & Noble near Union Square.

Bush, who is 35 and has been working as a teacher’s aide, lives in Bedford Stuyvesant. She finally has saved enough to attend college, and had rushed into Manhattan last week to preregister as a political science major at one of the city’s public colleges and to buy books so she could avoid the convention. This New Yorker, who lives on the perimeter of one of the toughest neighborhoods in Brooklyn, was more afraid of the dangers surrounding the convention hall than she was about getting shot on the subway near her house. Which happens periodically.

“I resent this worry they’re bringing because I know Republicans just don’t like us; they never have,” she said. “And I’m not some big old Democrat. I’ve voted for Giuliani, I think, once, and for Bloomberg definitely the last time. But I’m a New Yorker. That’s a separate thing, really my religion.”