NEW YORK: The Luck of the Irish

His theme song in the long and strident campaign had been a snappy rendition of Coney Island Baby, calling to mind his debonair manner and cherubic smile. But on the day after the votes were counted, his top aide said: “We’re going to change to With a Little Bit of Luck.” As it turned out, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 49, needed all the luck of the Irish last week to defeat Congresswoman Bella Abzug, 56, by 1% of the total vote to win a five-candidate contest for the Democratic senatorial nomination in New York State.

The fight between Moynihan and Abzug was an ungentlemanly and unladylike brawl—even for New York’s Democrats. Bullhorn-voiced and madly hatted, Congresswoman Abzug, serving her third liberal term in the House, scorned her opponent as being little more than a Republican masquerading as a Democrat, and made much of the fact that he had served Richard Nixon as puckish gadfly, adviser and, ultimately, Ambassador to India. In turn, Moynihan made Abzug sound like the wicked witch of the West Side, implying she was guilty of “demagoguery and hypocrisy” for proclaiming her support of Israel while not voting for U.S. defense funds. When Abzug refused at first to say she would endorse Moynihan if he won, the former Harvard professor of urban politics inveighed that she was a zealot who believed in the politics of “rule or ruin.”

Antique Attitudes. In the end, Abzug was hurt the most by the fact that there were two other well-known and certified liberals in the primary race: New York City Council President Paul O’Dwyer and Ramsey Clark, Lyndon Johnson’s Attorney General. (The fifth Democratic candidate was a political maverick named Abraham Hirschfeld, a parking-garage builder.) On election Clark got 93,000 votes and O’Dwyer 84,000; Moynihan ended up with only a 327,000 to 318,000 victory over Bella.

Now Moynihan must take on James Buckley, 53, completing his first term in the Senate. A casual, attractive conservative, Buckley’s theme line is: “We must get the government off our backs and out of our pockets.” He caused a flutter just before the Republican National Convention in Kansas City by making himself available for the presidential nomination, a foredoomed maneuver seen as an effort to block Jerry Ford for a while and keep alive the chances of Conservative Ronald Reagan. For Buckley, the ploy was characteristically unorthodox; although 40% of the state’s voters live in New York City, he initially refused to support federal aid for the municipality during its financial crisis—a point that Moynihan, with great relish, is already saying illustrates his opponent’s “antique” attitudes.

Their contest should be among the most literate and witty in the nation this fall. During a panel discussion after the primary, Buckley referred to Moynihan as “professor,” somehow managing to evoke with his richly cultivated tone the image of a chalk-dusty elitist woefully out of touch with reality. Up shot the Moynihan Mephistophelean eyebrow. With mock outrage he fulminated: “Boy, this campaign is getting rough. I might call you a businessman!”