Seeking a Candidate? Vote for a Journalist

By BENJAMIN SARLIN, Special to the Sun
May 7, 2008

New Yorkers unsatisfied with the 2009 mayoral field may want to expand their search for potential candidates beyond the usual crop of career politicians, lawyers, and business leaders. They could follow London's example, and elect a journalist to the city's highest office.

Boris Johnson, a former editor of Spectator magazine who more recently was paid about $500,000 annually to write a column for the Daily Telegraph, was elected last week to serve as London's mayor. Mr. Johnson's unlikely rise to become the first Conservative London mayor in decades suggests it may be time to consider another New York City run by a news professional.

As the press and broadcast capital of the world, New York has a deep pool of columnists, editors, and publishers who have so far been ignored as possible contenders. Having journalists run for New York City's highest office is not without precedent. Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin ran on a joint ticket in 1969, with Mailer competing for mayor and Mr. Breslin for council president. They pledged to secede from Albany and declare New York City the 51st state, a proposal that failed to resonate with the voters. They they lost handily. An editor of the National Review, William F. Buckley Jr., ran unsuccessfully for mayor in the 1965 election, declaring during the campaign that his first decision in office would be to "demand a recount." Both Mailer and Buckley died within the last year.

Columnists and editors interviewed yesterday suggested that a number of obstacles tend to keep them and their colleagues from declaring for office.

"It's traditionally been extremely hard for writers to make it in politics," the editorial director of Commentary magazine, John Podhoretz, told The New York Sun. "Anyone who has written for a living is almost by definition going to find it impossible to win a major election — it's just too easy to dig something out of Nexis or on Google that can be mischaracterized and used against them."

A columnist for the Sun, Alicia Colon, said writers who pull no punches in their news pieces might not be able handle the give-and-take of political negotiations and campaigning.

"To be a politician you have to compromise, and I don't think a lot of editors or columnists would be able to do it." Ms. Colon said. "Maybe they have too much integrity." A columnist for the New York Times, Clyde Haberman, said conflicts between good journalism and good politicking create problems for would-be candidates.

"We have a nasty tendency to see complexities in life, and I suspect your average politician likes to think in more terms of black and white," Mr. Haberman said yesterday in an interview. "They don't get bothered too much by all the gray that defines life for most people." Writers' nuances and changing opinions could be a positive trait, another Sun columnist, Lenore Skenazy, said.

"Maybe it's a good thing that you get to see their whole minds, how they think over time," Ms. Skenazy said. "A vote is just a snapshot, and sometimes politicians are only voting for a bill because it has a line authorizing money for some zoo in their district."

Ms. Skenazy did concede one disadvantage to electing a candidate from the newsroom when compared to the current mayor.

"Columnists are not the kind who would like working for a dollar a year," she said.