It's My Party (19 page)

Schundler found Hart disappointing. While the candidate’s elevated ideals may have looked admirable to people outside the
campaign, to people inside the campaign they looked arrogant. “We were there, sacrificing like crazy, working like dogs,”
Schundler said. “But Hart had the sense that all he was going to do was think of some good ideas, and it would be up to everybody
else to achieve them. We’d ask him to sit on a bale of hay for a photo op. He wouldn’t do it. We’d ask him to call up a contributor
to say thank you. He wouldn’t do it. If you’re going to move the country forward, it’s worth paying some price.”

(When photographs of Hart frolicking on a cabin cruiser with a young woman were published four years later, during Hart’s
1988 presidential campaign, the incident struck Schundler as merely one more example of Hart’s self-indulgence. “Our call
is to try to think about others and make this a better society. If you’re going to accept that responsibility, it’s going
to involve some sacrifice. Some men died in battle for a better world. All Hart had to do was remain faithful to his wife.”)

When Hart lost the 1984 Democratic nomination to Walter Mondale, a politician that Schundler considered in thrall to the unions,
Schundler was left without a candidate. Wondering whom to support, he found himself listening to the speeches of the presidential
candidate he had heretofore ignored, Ronald Reagan.

Schundler still believed that Republicans cared only about the haves, not about the have-nots. Yet Schundler noticed a strain
in Reagan’s message that he found appealing. “Reagan gave people a sense of personal responsibility,” Schundler said. “I believe
in telling people they have not just the ability but the
obligation
to overcome the obstacles in their lives. If you sit around and wallow in self-pity, you’re going to be perfectly useless
to others. Reagan was communicating that message.”

Disheartened with Democratic politics and broke after paying his own expenses while he volunteered for Gary Hart, Schundler
sat down with a pen and a pad of paper to think about what he wanted to do next. After listing the characteristics he wanted
in a job, including “something that keeps me in touch with what’s happening in the world,” “being entrepreneurial,” and “working
with sharp people,” Schundler decided to go into the securities industry. An intelligent, ambitious young man, Schundler joined
Salomon Brothers in 1984, landing on Wall Street at the precise moment when intelligent, ambitious young men could make more
money than ever before. In 1987 Schundler left Salomon Brothers for C. J. Lawrence Securities, to switch from selling bonds,
which he found boring and lucrative, to selling equities, which he found fascinating and lucrative. In 1990, with millions
of dollars in the bank, Schundler retired. He was thirty.

During his brief Wall Street career, Schundler and his wife had lived in Jersey City. They had done so for the sake of convenience.
From Jersey City, Schundler’s wife had an easy commute across Newark Bay to Newark proper, where she was attending law school,
while Schundler himself had an easy commute across the Hudson River to Wall Street. Yet Schundler had soon made the derelict
city the object of his altruistic impulses. He helped to operate a food pantry at the Old Bergen Church and became president
of the Downtown Coalition of Neighborhood Associations. Thus when Mayor McCann was indicted in 1991, Schundler found the prospect
of running for mayor himself irresistible.

Before entering the race, Schundler had one matter to tidy up. He was still a registered Democrat. In a city in which more
than 80 percent of the voters were themselves registered Democrats this hardly placed Schundler at a disadvantage. Yet some
time ago—he couldn’t say just when—he had recognized that on the big issues the Republicans were right. Cutting taxes really
did promote economic growth. Economic growth really did mean more jobs for everybody, including the poor. “It was guys like
Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich who were talking about rolling up our sleeves and actually trying to address poverty,” Schundler
explained. The Republican registration of Jersey City was then just 6 percent, even lower than today’s 9 percent. But if he
was going to be honest with Jersey City’s voters, Schundler had no choice but to change his registration. He did so, ran for
mayor as a Republican—and, to his surprise, won.

Schundler has replaced a political machine with a municipal government of utter rectitude. He has expanded the tax base, presiding
over a project in which half a dozen attractive new skyscrapers have gone up on the edge of the Hudson, thereby expanding
the waterfront’s share of Jersey City’s tax revenues from a tiny portion to 30 percent. He has cut taxes and reduced the welfare
rolls. He has established good relations between the police and the populace—Schundler presides over a city, indeed, that
appears to be positively glowing with good race relations. One reason is that the mayor has used tax revenues from the waterfront,
which is largely white, to redevelop Martin Luther King Boulevard, which is almost entirely black. Twenty blocks of abandoned
buildings when Schundler took office, today Martin Luther King Plaza is the center of a thriving neighborhood with a new supermarket,
new restaurants, a new auto supply store. “And all these are African-American-owned businesses,” Schundler told me proudly.

Schundler has even addressed Jersey City’s spiritual life. Originally pro-choice, after taking office Schundler became pro-life.
“I used to believe that fetuses weren’t human because we’d all
feel
worse if we were actually taking human lives. Then a friend said, ‘People had a way of defining away the humanity of African-Americans
during the Civil War. Feelings are cultural constructs. You shouldn’t let them be a guide to what is moral or not.’ ” While
Schundler was thinking over the best way to express his new pro-life conviction, the sanitation department found a dead baby
in the sewage system. “You’d be surprised how many bodies turn up in a city like this,” Schundler said. “Lots of times, no
one can identify them.” In a public ceremony, Schundler joined the city’s ministers, priests, rabbis, and Islamic clerics
in dedicating a memorial to all those in Jersey City who die forgotten or unknown.

How has Schundler compiled such a remarkable list of achievements? The answer is simple. He saw what needed to be done—really,
when you listen to him, you come to believe that all it took was a man of goodwill with a decent head on his shoulders—and
he
did
it. Of course, he had to win approval for each of his initiatives from his city council. But that never proved much of an
obstacle. He was the mayor. The city council
expected
him to lead. How different is the life of a Republican who finds himself as an executive from the life of a Republican who
finds himself merely one of the 435 members of the House of Representatives.

I asked Schundler what he would do after stepping down as mayor. It had crossed my mind that he might run for the House. “I’m
planning on running for governor of New Jersey in 2001,” Schundler replied. Governor. An executive position, not a legislative
one. Of course.

* * *

Washington, D.C., and Jersey City, New Jersey. In one city, a couple of hundred Republican legislators list haplessly along,
frustrated and anxious, unable to see what difference their careers might be making to anyone. No doubt they have prevented
the Clinton administration from raising taxes and making the government bigger. But it is difficult to feel much sense of
accomplishment when your principal achievement is keeping the government gridlocked. In the other city, a Republican mayor,
self-confident and energetic, enacts one initiative after another, producing palpable improvements in the lives of virtually
every citizen in his city. It is worth noting that while Washington has a press corps of thousands, Jersey City has a press
corps of none (to the extent that coverage of Mayor Schundler appears anywhere, it appears in the
Trenton Times
). The ramifications of this disparity in press coverage are obvious—and, for the GOP, baleful. Republicans in Congress affect
the way Americans see the GOP far more than Mayor Schundler—or any mayor or governor, since the coverage such figures receive
is nearly always limited to their own cities and states—ever can.

The next time you turn on the television and see a House Republican looking bewildered or grim or forlorn, force yourself
to remember this: Somewhere in America there is a Republican governor or mayor who is smiling.

W
hen I mentioned the gender gap to Newt Gingrich, his temper flared. “If Republicans get the votes of fewer women than men,
then it’s a simple mathematical fact that Democrats get the votes of fewer men than women. Why doesn’t the press ask the Democrats
about
their
gender gap?” he said.

Gingrich had a point. Yet whether or not the press harps on the Democratic gender gap, the Republican gender gap still exists.
Indeed, it existed for twenty years before the press began to write about it during President Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign.
Studies indicate that with one exception, the election of 1976, when Gerald Ford won 49 percent of the votes of both genders,
the Republican candidate has won the votes of fewer women than men in each of the nine presidential elections since 1964.
In six of the nine, the elections of 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, and 1996, the Republican candidate received only nine or
fewer votes from women for every ten votes he received from men. In at least one election (the election of 1996) the gender
gap cost the GOP the White House: If Bob Dole had received the same proportion of the women’s vote that he received of the
men’s vote, he would have become president. Bob Dole as president. Now there’s a thought to cheer you.

I set out to learn what caused the gender gap. Once I had the answer to that question, I reasoned, I’d be able to figure out
how Republicans could close it. This leg of my journey across the Republican landscape proved less straightforward than I
expected.

* * *

“I call them YDWs,” Jack told me. “Young dumb women.”

Jack is a political consultant. He has devoted himself to getting Republicans
elected to state legislatures. Part of the reason is that Jack likes the challenge. The other part is that so few other GOP
political consultants care to compete with him for the business. As a general rule, the higher the office, the easier it has
proven for Republicans to win. If you think of holding office as eating a pie, then since the Second World War the GOP has
eaten about half the presidential pie, about three sevenths of the gubernatorial pie, and about two fifths of the congressional
pie. But it has eaten only slivers of the state legislative pie. Even today, when the GOP controls both houses of Congress
and occupies thirty of the fifty governors’ mansions, it controls only thirty-two of the nation’s ninety-nine state legislative
chambers (each of the fifty states has two legislative chambers except Nebraska, which has only one). Since so many of his
own clients end up losing, Jack has become an expert on the forces that defeat Republicans. The gender gap is one of them.
Jack’s explanation for the gender gap is elegant in its sweeping simplicity: There are a lot of women out there who actually
believe what they see on
Oprah
.

Jack eyed my tape recorder. “You’ve got to be careful how you use what I tell you,” Jack said. “I mean, it’s all true. YDWs
vote against us all the time. But talking about it could get me in trouble. Political correctness and all.” It was then that
I decided to write about him under the name of “Jack” instead of his real name.

Why are there only YDWs, young dumb women, and no YDMs, young dumb men? “Men are skeptical,” Jack explained. “Women aren’t.”
Men are taught to figure things out for themselves from an early age. Women are taught to be passive. They’ll permit others
to figure things out for them.