Is It Sanity, Or Just Self-interest?
The Democratic mayoral primary in New York turned out a mere 17% of Democratic voters. Left-winger Fernando Ferrer won, but polls suggest that most New York Democrats will vote for the liberal Republican incumbent. Michael Barone makes sense of it all:
Affluent Manhattan liberals are not going to turn over city government to a left-wing grievance crier like Ferrer. They may have been willing to vote for John Kerry, but they're not crazy.Is there any national significance to these numbers? Not much but maybe this. The kind of angry left-wing politics promoted by the Daily Kos and Howard Dean seems to dominate the Democrats' political dialogue. But when real things are at stake–like the value of your Manhattan co-op–a lot of Democratic voters know better. In Iowa and New Hampshire, they hurriedly dumped Dean for Kerry in 2004, and this year they simply have no interest at all in ousting Bloomberg for a left-wing Democrat.
