No More Bullshit
When Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin Ran For Mayor
New York City wanted change.
Since the last mayoral election, the city had spun into chaos but then again, so had American politics itself. In the city’s Democratic primary for Mayor, one candidate seemed determined to rise above all the others if in no other realm, in the audacity of his ideas. He wanted to ban privately-owned vehicles from Manhattan, insist the police officers live in the places they patrolled, empower individual neighborhoods to govern their own unique issues, and even try to make New York City the 51st state. Above all, the candidates who ran as a ticket—the writer Norman Mailer, and his running mate, the journalist Jimmy Breslin—promised one thing: “No More Bullshit.”
It was 1969. In the prior decade, the violent crime rate had spiked in New York City. In 1960, 390 people were victims of homicide—in 1969, that number reached 1,043. The city was headed toward financial collapse, as it continued to deindustrialize and as white and middle-class flight eroded the tax base. The city was, as Breslin wrote, a “sprawling, disjointed place which did not understand itself and was decaying physically and spiritually, decaying with these terrible little fires of rage flickering in the decay.” Breslin, who was running for president of the New York City Council, continued that “on top of the city was an almost unworkable form of government and a set of casually unknowing, unfeeling, uncaring men and institutions.”
He was describing the mayor, John V. Lindsay, who had been elected in 1965 at a moment when it seemed that insurgent liberalism might sweep over the entire United States. Lindsay was a liberal Republican, the kind of politician that existed for some time during the mid 20th Century and had almost vanished entirely by the early 1970s. As a Congressman, Lindsay had championed the creation of Medicare and voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Like President Johnson, he was a liberal expansionist who believed in expanding a government that empowered the powerless. Lindsay, it seemed, was made for the age: a Yale educated Navy veteran with movie star looks who appealed to voters’ better angels.
But then reality set in as the Civil Rights triumphs soon turned into buyer’s remorse for many liberal voters. It seemed liberal leaders around the country failed to grasp that voting rights and the end of Jim Crow—incredible feats that expanded American democracy as never before—were still not enough to improve the reality that pulsed through the shoddy, overcrowded, overheated, fifth floor walkup apartments filled with four crying kids and two parents who couldn’t find work. Or, as Breslin wrote, “take Lindsay off the front pages of the Washington Post or Los Angeles Times or Chicago Sun-Times and put him on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Put him there with the schools closed and the garbage not picked up and the robberies and assaults way up.”
Lindsay was an Upper-East-Sider, and it showed. As Mailer said, “If you give the Honorable John two more years, there will be only two things left standing in New York – a photographer and the Honorable John, posing for pictures with his hair blowing in the wind.” Mailer and Breslin wanted to make this clear to their fellow New Yorkers. But even they were an odd pair. They were both born and raised New Yorkers, but Mailer was a Harvard graduate who had published his first best-selling novel, The Naked and the Dead, when he was 25. By 1969, he was on his fourth wife. He had stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, in 1960 at a party with a two-and-a-half-inch pen knife. Breslin, on the other hand, had attended Long Island University and hadn’t graduated, instead becoming a reporter for the Long Island Press and later most famously for The New York Daily News.
Soon, Mailer’s style—and his drinking—got in the way of the campaign. At an event at Brooklyn College, one young voter asked, “We had a lot of snow in Queens last year and it didn’t get removed, what would you do about it?” Mailer said he would piss on the snow. At another event in Greenwich Village, he called his supporters “spoiled pigs,” which caused Breslin to leave the event. As Breslin told a friend, “I found out I was running with Ezra Pound,” in reference to Pound’s insanity, not his prose.
In an open Democratic primary, Mailer and Breslin weren’t the only candidates and they soon fell behind. Two term Mayor Robert Wagner, who had served prior to Lindsay from 1954 to 1965, ran too, as did Comptroller Mario Procaccino. Moreso than Mailer and Wagner, it seemed Procaccino had captured the moment. He told voters, if he found a burglar in his home, “I wouldn’t run for the handbook. I wouldn’t call my lawyer. I’d just blow his brains out.” It was part of his law-and-order campaign, which declared, “We must stop coddling the criminals and pampering the punks. The do-gooders and bleeding hearts must stop handcuffing the police.” Procaccino ended up winning the Democratic primary with 32.85% of the vote, while Mailer turned in a disappointing 5.31%.
On the Republican side, Lindsay was on the run too. He ended up losing the Republican nomination to New York State Senator John J. Marchi from Staten Island. Still, Lindsay was able to salvage the nomination of New York’s Liberal Party and ended up the ballot in November anyway against Marchi and Procaccino. That November, John V. Lindsay won anyway, winning 42.4% of the vote by using a strategy that relied on winning the vast majority of liberals in Manhattan, which worked. While he lost Staten Island, Brooklyn and the Bronx, Lindsay won a plurality of the vote in Queens and over 60% of the vote in Manhattan. Despite all the anger, New Yorkers went back to what they knew.
In 2025, New Yorkers could well do that again, though given Mayor Eric Adams’ woes, that seems unlikely. Yesterday, New York City had its Democratic mayoral primary. Though the full ranked-choice voting results are still outstanding, the winner appears to be Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old Democratic Socialist who was born in Uganda to an Indian family. While his top opponent, former Governor Andrew Cuomo had his name—Mamdani had ideas. Beyond policy, their differences came down to style. Andrew Cuomo, long the leader in polls, decided to essentially run a Rose Garden strategy—that is, he did as little as possible. Avoiding confrontation—about his Governorship or sexual harassment allegations—became Cuomo’s communications strategy. He also relied on old alliances and established relationships that he and his father, former Governor Mario Cuomo, had built for decades in New York. It was, in every sense, a campaign built around the past. And a lazy effort at that.
Mamdani, on the other hand, only talked about the future. And he looked like it too. Young, handsome, with a brilliant smile, Mamdani had something Cuomo didn’t: fresh ideas and a fresh perspective. He identified the top issue for many New Yorkers and many Americans—affordability—and beat that drum every single day on wall-to-wall social media and grassroots campaigning. Madani looked like he wanted the job and simply worked harder than Cuomo, who looked like he was reluctantly taking a day trip into Manhattan with his nieces.
Beyond the policy proposals, this primary was about a new generation and new attitude when it comes to political leadership. Democrats learned in November 2024 that same old policies and cringe-inducing appeals that lack authenticity won’t work anymore. More than anything, Zohran Mamdani understood that. As it was in 1969, the message is clear: no more bullshit.
Sources:
https://nymag.com/news/politics/46613/
https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/the-51st-state-norman-mailer-jimmy-breslin-and-the-politics-of-imagination
I remember that campaign — I voted for them!
"New ideas" includes "globalize the Intifada"? He has ideas that appeal to many, but his proto anti-Semitic/anti-Israel theme will cause the majority of Jews to either go with Eric Adams or stay home. The FAFO meme just doesn't refer to disappointed MAGAts.