Ferrer a Class Act in Chaotic Race

Jimmy Breslin

September 30, 2001

Here is Rudy Giuliani listening to himself.

Uno!

Me!

Uno!

Me!

Unity in the Community!

This is an old chant that must be familiar to Giuliani because it comes from the mobsters that he talks about so much. In this case, Joe Colombo, who brought this slogan to a rally in Columbus Circle and did not have Unity in the Community. He was defeated by an armed dissenter.

Still, the cry lives on. Unity in the Community!

Giuliani today wants Unity in his Community by getting the three candidates for mayor, Ferrer and Green on the Democratic side and Bloomberg on the Republican, to agree to let him remain as mayor after the election of somebody else for three months or three years or 13 years or whatever.

Bloomberg thought it was great to surrender. Characteristically, Green said sure. He would bend and bow to anything Giuliani wants. Probably anybody else, too. What a tough guy he would make for mayor!

It also is arrogance beyond anything we've seen. By the end of election day in November, I will have voted five times. Already I voted twice to put term limits onto city offices, including mayor. I then voted once in the Democratic primary and now will vote in the runoff on Oct. 11. After that, in the general election on Nov. 6.

Green thinks the election is his personal property and he can do what he wants with these five votes because (a) he can see nothing but his own ambition, and (b) he yearns for a greater principle than any grubby old Democracy:

Unity in the Community!

Green was attempting to give Democracy away and then somebody stood up. His name is Fernando Ferrer and he comes off Fox Street in the Bronx, and he would rather fight than be a mutt. Suddenly he gave us the class and excitement that our politics should have at a time like this.

On Friday morning, Fernando Ferrer came around the corner with one hand in his pocket and two people from the Bronx with him, Arnie Segarra, in his thousandth year of politics, and a guy from the Bronx Borough Hall. Ferrer was coming to a meeting of the Transport Workers Union officials on West 64th Street. That was it. There were no detectives, no cops, no entourage trailing. Just the candidate and two of his people and you don't see anything like that anymore and neither do you see a politician who can stand up like Freddy Ferrer.

On television on Thursday night he shucked off this insane Giuliani proposal and did it in a way that reminded you of what politics once was and must be again.

One who capitulated to Giuliani, Mark Green, showed up for a television appearance in the morning with a plainclothes guy checking the garbage cans in a parking lot and police cars with their lights twirling.

Ferrer, who came with no flotilla of badges and earphones, went upstairs to a sixth floor office to wait for the crowd to gather in the meeting room for his rally. The office doors along the hall were marked "Track Maintenance and "Stations, and these are the signs you expect a Democratic candidate to have around him.

"How long did it take you to make up your mind on what Giuliani wanted? he was asked.

"Just as long as it took me to hear it. If he said something like this on Fox Street, do you know what would have happened?