Mayor Mailer, President Trump

The Donald wasn’t the first New York City “outsider” to run for office

A loudmouth celebrity from New York City with no experience in governance (and no small reputation for egotism) announces a run for elected office. At first, the media thinks it’s a joke — but no, the man’s serious! He presses the flesh, he makes fantastic proposals that are short on details, and he ends up saying things you would think would cost him the election.

No, not Donald Trump — Norman Mailer, who ran for mayor of New York City in 1969.

The Left has long loved painting candidates on the Right as ignorant, out of touch, misogynistic, and uncouth — Trump being no exception — but let us not forget that the same aspersions were once legitimately cast against a Democratic candidate, Norman Mailer.

The Mailer ticket paired him with Jimmy Breslin, the street-smart Irish-American columnist from Central Casting who would be the next president of the New York City Council. Campaigning under the campy slogans “Vote the Rascals In” and “No More Bullshit,” Mailer and Breslin undertook a vigorous schedule of public appearances, but they favored college campuses, where audiences were tolerant (indeed, approving) of curse words from the podium.

Electability notwithstanding, Mailer and Breslin were entertaining: frank, blunt, and mad as hell. Mailer was the poet; Breslin, his pit bull.

Their city, New York City, was in such a sorry state in 1969, maybe it was high time to elect “outsiders” with far-flung ideas and a flair for the dramatic.

Sound familiar?

Today we may poke fun of Donald Trump’s facile solutions to complex problems (“The wall will go up and Mexico will start behaving”), but Mailer and Breslin ran on ideas that were similarly large in scale and short on details: declare New York City an independent and sovereign state; each neighborhood hires its own police and teachers; a once-a-month moratorium across the entire city on traffic and electricity, called “Sweet Sunday.”

We may join Megyn Kelly in chastising Trump for his having called women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals,” but then there’s Mailer.

When Mailer and Breslin brought their act to Sarah Lawrence College, Mailer kicked off a rejoinder to a female student in the audience with, “Look, sugar…,” and down came the disapproving storm.

Breslin, afterward, reportedly told his running mate, “I should go back in there and call them a bunch of dumb dyke — ”… well, let us omit the final invective.

Trump, as we all know, has said provocative things, but he has yet to have his own Village Gate.

The Village Gate was a nightclub in Greenwich Village, where the Mailer campaign held a fundraiser on the night of May 7, 1969. Mailer, securely in his cups and, one imagines, itching to vent his frustration with himself and his own quixotic enterprise, took the microphone and berated his own volunteers, calling them “spoiled pigs.” Anyone who heckled or interrupted was invited by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author to have sex with himself.

The following morning, campaign manager Joe Flaherty scoured the newspapers, fearing the worst. In his (out-of-print) book Managing Mailer, Flaherty wrote: “We had the good fortune that a ‘family’ newspaper would have trouble reporting the event.” The Post mentioned the event, but left out scurrilous details; the Times checked in, but not on page one.

It didn’t seem to occur to Flaherty that the print media couldn’t be bothered with reporting the drunken, foul-mouthed self-destruction of a candidate who had no chance of winning.

Those were the days!

Today we could say, well, it’s good thing Mailer isn’t running in 2016: The Village Gate debacle would have gone viral on YouTube and become a meme on Twitter, ruining not only Mailer’s political credibility but also any reputation he had as a “serious” author or man of ideas.

Or would it have? Cf. Trump.

Mailer saw the campaign to the end, he lost, and then he went back to being Norman Mailer — just as Donald Trump, should he not become President, will move on to the next Donald Trump enterprise, and that also will be huge.

Obviously, Mailer and Trump are different men: in background, profession, style, character, and bank account. But to knock Donald Trump as a vulgarian and his supporters as louts while at the same time saying of candidate Mailer, Well, that’s Norman being Norman — what a scamp, is to betray a bias that goes beyond politics.

It’s the kind of bias Joe Flaherty displays in Managing Mailer: one of the book’s flaws is that he’s far too enamored of Mailer and Breslin to assess them objectively as candidates and as men. Flaherty also never delves into the question of why Mailer ran in the first place.

So let us theorize: by 1969, Mailer had seen fellow author Gore Vidal run for Congress, and lose. Mailer also saw how William F. Buckley Jr.’s bid for mayor of New York City in 1965 had, despite his loss, elevated Buckley’s public profile as a person of consequence, a paragon of American conservatism.

Mailer may have thought he could do better, as perhaps Donald Trump thought he could do better than millionaire Steve Forbes or billionaire Ross Perot. (If Trump did think this, obviously he thought right.)

Go back to 1959: Mailer declares in his book Advertisements for Myself that at 36, he is “imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.”

If Mailer could not do that as an author — his novels Deer Park and Barbary Shore were savaged by critics — perhaps he can do it as a politician.

In 1961, at what was supposed to be a party in his New York apartment to announce his candidacy for mayor, a drunken Mailer stabs his wife Adele with a pen knife. She survives and does not press charges, although Mailer spends a couple of weeks under psychiatric observation at Bellevue Hospital Center.

One would like to think that had a drunken Donald Trump stabbed Marla Maples and subsequently logged hours in a state hospital, a career in politics and certainly a run for the Presidency would have been out of the question. Why? Well, because words and actions, like experience and bona fides, are important. They matter.

As Mailer’s hero Ernest Hemingway once wrote: Isn’t it pretty to think so?

Mailer’s run for mayor did not make a revolution in the consciousness of his time. New York City, and America at large, survived it.

And what lessons are we, today, to glean from it?

Perhaps that while some political candidates want to make a revolution, others appear satisfied with just being revolting.

Tim Lemire is a published author living in Providence, RI. He is working on a writing project about Norman Mailer.