A New York State of Mind

TO GET THERE you take the Southern State Parkway out of New York City, running east along the coast, and you don't stop driving until you can taste the salt in the air. Along the way you pass the Fire Island bridge, a monument in concrete and steel to the relentless vision of a man named Robert Moses. Moses ran for governor of the state in '34 and lost, but he ran the state anyway, with his convoys of cement mixers and cranes. Moses created most of central Long Island in his own image--flat and gray and cement-hard--and he also created a fortune for himself, but he was never able to push his relentless vision out onto the eastern part of the island.

You keep going until you hit Montauk Point, the eastern tip of the island, windswept home of fishermen and lobstermen and a charming stone lighthouse that somehow never managed to keep scores of Atlantic clippers away from the homicidal rocks off the coast. Montauk is also the home of Perry Duryea, who wants very much to be governor of the state, and who may well get his wish quite soon.

Perry Duryea looks like a product of eastern Long Island, as much a part of the coastal view as the countless red-and-white lobster pots from which he has, over the years, extracted a fortune worth a couple or three million dollars. Craggy-faced, silver-haired, attractively beefy, Duryea reminds you of a fine old patrician gentleman: so much money and style, and so little of the incisive wit or brilliance that might scare off the natives. He speaks the language of the east, which is to say he pronounces his words with a heavy Republican accent, and with the marked deliberation of a man who is either sagely cautious or just plain slow. No one is quite sure which label fits Perry Duryea.

Although he has been indicted only once, Duryea has otherwise lived a model life for a Long Island Republican, bartering the long plodding years in the Albany legislature into the leadership of the state party, the speakership of the state assembly during the glorious years before the heathen Democrats took over in 1974, and finally, this year, the Republican gubernatorial nomination. People like him, and many will vote for him--some because he likes the death penalty, some because he favors tax reform, many because he just looks so much like a governor, a stately, silver-maned Millard Fillmore-clone. Back in Montauk, where the fishermen and duck farmers and county lawyers know him best, they will vote for him because they know what Perry is all about. Like so many of the folks back home, Perry hates The City.

NOT THAT HE would ever confess to it. Duryea, as the Manhattan commentators smugly like to point out, is a "downstater," a suburban Republican totally unlike those wild men from up north who run around in animal skins and try to turn every election into a blood match against the five boroughs. Duryea, they want to think, symbolizes the Republican Party's new era--a shift away from the rural, anti-city sloganeering of past elections, a conscious effort to win the big urban voting blocs that for decades (Rockefeller excepted), have been under Democratic lock and key. For the first time in memory, they argue, none of the candidates for governor or lieutenant governor is an "upstater": Duryea's running mate, Rep. Bruce Caputo, operates out of Westchester, while the Democratic ticket of Gov. Hugh L. Carey and perennial candidate Mario M. Cuomo hails from Brooklyn and Queens, respectively. The geographical factor--always crucial, but even more so in the era of Swiss-cheese bond issues and state aid for the city--has, the Manhattan observers try to assure themselves, finally tilted in their favor.

They are wrong, of course, but Duryea won't tell them that. In fact, for several months now, the Republican has been quietly taking a man-sized chunk of credit for the last-minute, spit-and-chicken-wire debt refinancing agreement that was the first step out of New York City's fiscal crisis. Duryea has campaigned well: Peddling his wares upstate, he stresses his early opposition to the Big MAC bond agreement, which he says was designed to make sure the city wouldn't get off with easy terms that might have endangered the state's own bonds. In Manhattan and environs, though, the spiel changes dramatically: Look here, Duryea says, if I hadn't agreed to the last-minute compromise the city would have floundered. The fact that he had no real choice--that he could not possibly have blocked the city's recovery and still expect to run for governor three years later--does not intrude on his creative analysis. Like a losing football coach who somehow manages to take credit for the other team's victory, Duryea has been able to double-talk and double-think his most notable legislative retreat into a key win--and he is getting away with it. The most recent New York Post poll shows Duryea leading Carey by 5 per cent.

All of which presents the Brooklyn-born governor with the most damnable of ironies. New York, after all, is a state where geography has traditionally held the key on election day, and up until a few months ago it looked as though Carey had done his map-work well. It's all very simply arithmetic: the Republicans can usually count on the northern half of the state, Democrats can usually count on the southern half, and the winner winds up as the party that manages to sneak enough votes out of enemy territory. Last May, his home base presumably secured by his heroics in passing the city financing bill, Carey had seemed on the verge of invading the upstate Republican fortresses with enough in the way of last-minute patronage to assure an easy victory. But it hasn't worked out that way.

IT DIDN'T WORK because Duryea so successfully developed a schizophrenic image. With the conservative upstate vote relatively safe, if only by virtue of party orthodoxy, he has managed to do what no conservative Republican has been able to accomplish in 30 years--impress the city voters. Most of this success, granted, is traceable to Carey's singular inability to make a favorable personal impression on anyone outside the range of third cousin: with a Dukakis-like reputation for brusqueness and tactlessness, Carey simply doesn't score many points with the casual voter or party worker. Despite his impressive accomplishments--lobbying for federal aid to the city, lowering the state income tax and eliminating a billion-dollar budget deficit--Carey projects coldness, aloofness, insensitivity. Aside from occasional forays back to the wilds of forgotten Brooklyn, where he doesn't mind stumping amidst a sea of pug noses and red hair, the governor hasn't been able to charm all those blue-collar and ethnic voters who grew up voting Democratic but wouldn't mind breaking the habit. Given the chance to vote for Duryea--a moderate conservative, almost a city dweller, a man who says he understands the city and its needs--the Carey-haters may well bolt the ticket with hardly a twinge of partisan guilt.

THE KICKER, of course, is that this moderate, suburban, new-breed Republican Perry Duryea does not exist. Duryea's sentiments are about as suburban-sophisticated as those of the feed dealer in upstate Callicoon; back home in Montauk, where the folks care less about Medicaid funding and mass transit than whether the state will subsidize a new trawler dock, Duryea has survived only by aggressive, unrelenting provincialism.

The record shows it: Duryea's voting record in the state assembly displays a consistent disregard for city needs in the areas of revenue sharing, mass transit funding, Medicaid programming and low-income housing. But the record does not speak for itself. Duryea, with the silver mane and the mellow deliberate tones and the one careful vote for the Big MAC bond issue, can speak around it with startling effectiveness.

Absurd or not, Perry Duryea still has a very real 'chance of sending Carey back to Brooklyn for good next month. There is, of course, always the chance that the governor could charge back--if, for instance, the city's newspapers return soon enough to allow Carey the extra publicity that always attends the incumbent, or if city voters abruptly decide to vote for one of the candidates instead of simply against one. But right now Duryea still keeps a firm grip on his 5-per-cent lead in the polls, and the governor still spends most of his time struggling against his own misanthropic image. And so out in Montauk, where Perry's people are readying the boats for a winter season of dark surf and sharp winds and streaming silver fish too small to catch, the mood is light despite the weather. In early November, after all, the fluke start running, and it looks like a good season.