I fear, Mark, you probably are right on this one.

But it didn't start with Bush vs. Gore.  I think you're an old-time New 
Yorker, too.

Who ran against John V. Lindsay in 1965 to become Mayor of New York?  I 
just ran a search and nothing turns up.  I voted for the man known to 
some of us later as "Pretty John"--my first vote.

Lindsay had everything.  He was tall, WASPy looking (he was, and 
probably was the last Episcopalian Mayor New York may ever have:-), he 
could talk, he appeared to have money, he was educated, he wasn't 
"street"--the last might actually have made him appeal to the 
"street"-level New Yorker in the outer boroughs.

The only problem is that Pretty John forever gave me a mistrust for guys 
who look like old time white-man figures of Jesus Christ in Church 
iconography.  The bastard signed my paychecks.  I worked for the City 
for several months in 1966 and then from early 1968 until September 
1969.  I worked for the Department of Social Services, aka Welfare, El 
Bienestar Publico, and El Welfare.  I was stationed in the South Bronx 
and worked "underground" with members of Vista to undermine the system.  
I saw from the inside the kind of "boss" behind the liberal image.  
Basically Lindsay in his dealings with labor was a whore and a bully.  
Too strong?  He played to the "minority" consituency at the expense of 
his employees in the uniformed services, the schools, and social 
services.  He put our union leaders in jail.  And then he turned around 
and gave us in Welfare better contracts than he gave the teachers (this 
is before Al Shanker started WW3).  The best deal at the time I believe 
belonged to Sanitation: $23K to START in 1969.  Love that garbage.

We undermined the system fer sure dude.  We helped coordinate 
demonstrations to bring all the clients up to "standard" on clothing and 
furniture by giving out huge checks for the asking.  We were on a 
campaign to bankrupt the City.  We were being 
oh-so-subversive-bring-the-Revolution.  What we were doing was playing 
into John Vliet Lindsay's hands.  He was going to break Welfare and 
reassemble it according to policy wonkism.  Was he working within 
Federal guidelines and with the assistance of people in the Nixon 
administration?  I don't know.  I DO know that when Jack Goldberg, his 
Commissioner of Social Services, went on close-circuit TV one summer 
morning in 1969 and said that the codes for clothing and furniture were 
dead as of an hour ago...well, it was ugly.  Resentment and disbelief.  
Clients waiting in the Intake hall, and we had to go down and tell them 
the money stopped.  I felt physically endangered.

Probably we all helped set New York up for the 1975 Apocalypse.  Abe 
Beame was just the City's Herbert Hoover, the stooge for things that 
Lindsay helped many of us set in motion.  No, it wasn't just Welfare, 
but we helped.

Image.  Every so often the jerk did his Louis XIV routine, and the 
Deluge in our time was the 1969 snowstorm where the plows hit our street 
(West 92nd) the next morning but didn't seem to touch Queens until the 
third or fourth day.  The joke that the New York Mets' improbable and 
still-fabled World Series win against the Baltimore Orioles saved 
Lindsay's reelection campaign may not be a joke.  He was getting killed 
in the outer boroughs, needed a miracle, and Gil Hodges handed him one. 

Still...I felt sad for him in 2000 when he died, pretty much forgotten, 
in South Carolina, stone broke and surviving on the charity of friends 
and supporters.  The image he gave was so beautiful you wanted to 
believe it was real.  It wasn't.

So yes...when Gore appeared I saw another Lindsay.  Don't follow 
leaders, watch your parking meters.

It's just that I'm not sure how many people realized how unspeakably 
dishonest Bush and his handlers could be or what a disaster would come 
in behind him.  Take a guy not from Central Casting but out of Tod 
Browning's "Freaks" and make him President..."George The Wonder-Ape."  
Why do I get the feeling that both Bush campaigns weren't so much fought 
and won as stage-managed?

I wonder who follows.  Hillary the Martha Stewart of Chappaqua?  Bill 
Frist the Virgin Surgeon?  And Jack Anderson was still right: you can't 
trust them.

Ken