A Different Kind of Candidate

New York City, already aclutter with candidates for mayor, got one with a difference last week.

"Do you have any chance of winning?" asked a reporter, after conservative William F. Buckley Jr., 39, editor of the National Review, became the sixth man to announce that he was running for the job. "No," said Buckley.

"Do you want to be mayor?" another newsman inquired. "I've never considered it," Buckley grinned.

"If you win, would you serve?" The idea had probably never occurred to Buckley, who said, after a reflective pause: "I would serve."

"How many votes do you expect to get," a girl reporter asked, "conservatively speaking?" "One," said Buckley, "my secretary's."

No Taste for Blintzes. In all but the last of his replies, Buckley wasn't kidding. He will run as the recently formed (1962) Conservative Party's candidate, and he has no chance at all of beating either Republican John V. Lindsay or whomever the Democrats pick in their September primary. He does not intend to gear his campaign "to placate voting blocs." In fact, he does not intend to campaign at all as the word is usually understood in ethnically oriented New York. "I do not propose to walk the streets," he said. "I will not go to Irish centers and go dancing. I will not go to Jewish centers and eat blintzes, nor will I go to Italian centers and pretend to speak Italian."

Instead, Buckley said, he would talk about the issues and problems of "the New York that seethes with frustration." His first remarks made no attempt to compromise to the cold realities of politics. He called for "a much larger police force, enjoined to lust after the apprehension of criminals even as politicians lust after the acquisition of votes." He said he would try to help Negroes "by sounder means than undifferentiated infusions of politically deployed cash," and he scorned the idea of helping the Negro "by adjourning our standards as to what is and what is not the proper behavior for human beings."

Rump Affair. His aim, Buckley said, was "to give the people of New York an opportunity to vote for a candidate who consults without embarrassment the root premises of the conservative philosophy of government." He reserved his coldest scorn for Lindsay, accused him of turning the G.O.P. into "a rump affair" that is "no more representative of the body of Republican thought than the Democratic Party in Mississippi is representative of the Democratic Party nationally." Lindsay, he said, "having got hold of the Republican Party, now disdains the association, and spends his days, instead, stressing his acceptability to the leftwardmost party in New York, the Liberal Party."

Ironically, Buckley's candidacy may prove the final push that persuades the indecisive Liberal Party to make Lindsay the first Republican mayoral candidate in 16 years to get their endorsement. The Conservative Party turned out 122,967 votes last year in New York City for Senatorial Candidate Henry Paolucci, is thus creeping up on the Liberals as New York City's major minority party. As the Liberals see it, their best hope for staying in front and maintaining their claim that they are the "balance of power" may be to back Lindsay, a man who might well do them more good than they do him.

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