Asked to define his own role, Ferrer points to "the leadership we took in planning," like bringing together more than 1,000 Bronx residents in a plenary session in 1988 "and saying, 'OK, let's plan for our borough together.' " That plan, Ferrer says, became the blueprint for directing the newfound funding.
"He didn't do it alone," says Lynch. "I thought Freddy as borough president, as number one cheerleader of the Bronx, convinced a lot of other people to work with him in turning around the Bronx."
Being mayor, of course, involves more than cheerleading. And Ferrer is signaling that he knows this, with his signature policy statement so far: a proposal to place a half-penny tax on all stock sales for four years in order to pay for the city's share of the $23 billion Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) court judgment. Ferrer says he put forward the plan knowing that "it would get barbecued by the newspapers," and he was right. His rival Democrats and the tabloids slammed him for singling out an industry that is one of New York's main sources of jobs and money. Coming on the heels of the Diallo mess, it looked like another misstep by Ferrer.
But he's not treating it that way. He continues to bring it up at debates, arguing that Wall Street can afford a half-cent a trade, and that by funding a better-educated workforce, the tax will create rather than kill jobs. Most importantly, he says, if the city doesn't ante up something, the state will never come through with its far larger share. "The mayor's negotiating position is zero," Ferrer says. "Well, that has brought us exactly zero in terms of CFE funding."
It's later on Sunday and Ferrer is being driven to his next event, a dinner on the Lower East Side. The forum at Wonderland is over, and the candidates displayed few policy differences. The choice among Democrats is between their styles and their stories.
Ferrer's story is one in which government played a life-altering role. "I really do understand," he says, "the power of a good education, the value of living in decent housing, the value in my own life of an after-school program that kept me off a rough street, or accessibility to higher education, having a good job to be able to support yourself and make your own contribution to the life of this city."
Four years after some mixture of racism and fate ended Ferrer's 2001 bid, he doesn't refer to the "other New York" anymore. But it still seems to be what his candidacy is all about.
"I'm never going stop talking about people who have been cut out of opportunity in New York, of hope in New York. I take those things personally," he says, blaming Republican policies in Washington, Albany, and the Bloomberg administration. "That's bad news for the middle class. It's also worse news for the working class and the poor who just want to work their way into the middle class. This isn't hard to figure out."
