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"We went through an era when middle-class values were dumped on," says Koch. "Honesty, integrity, hard work, patriotism, religiosity, all those were considered terrible things in the minds of some ideologues who are still out there.
Not me. I always believed they were verities then. I think they're verities now."
So, deep down, do most New Yorkers, and that is the center of Koch's strength.
But none of this really explains Koch, who remains remarkably mysterious for an apparently open man. Some of the mystery is due to his living alone and keeping his own counsel. Some is due to the fact that there are sides to Koch that do not smack of Establishment at all — a strong egalitarian impulse that continually rises to the surface, coupled with genuine comfort in mixing with all classes and races, without any feelings of personal superiority. Perhaps the most telling fact about Koch is that he is a longtime resident of Greenwich Village. A Villager is a special kind of New Yorker. Anyone who chooses to live in the Village opts for the extremes of city life — squalor and elegance; beauty and danger; stoop ball and art show. He also indicates that he enjoys the potential anarchy of city life— an idea that appeals to more than dare admit it.
If Koch is the elective shoo-in that he appears, however, it is not only because of what people know and see about him, but what they guess about him as well. New Yorkers know that Koch seems a hard-nose. What they guess about him is that he is not the hard-nose he seems, that he is in stead a quite naive man who may have toughened up because of various treacheries and disappointments, but who remains fundamentally naive nonetheless. It is said of Koch that he trusts others too little. It is more likely that he has trusted others too much (as he trusted John Lindsay, whom he supported for mayor, and who later turned his back). And it is possible that people have affection for Koch not because he is a wised-up sucker, but because they detect that he is a sucker still, quite unwised-up, just -like a great many New Yorkers who are no-nonsense on the outside and mush within.
It may thus be that New Yorkers see in Koch a political sensibility that they recognize in themselves, that of a practical politician who has not always been that way.
The 1960s were a period of extravagant idiocy, but also of great pain; and no politician who has been through that time could remain untouched by both extremes. The Koch who started out as a softy by his own account, and who then acquired a carapace, is different from a political leader who had no soft spot to begin with. With such a convert there is always the possibility (suspicion, hope) that he sympathizes more than he lets on — as in the anecdote Koch loves to tell of the judge who got mugged and then announced that it would have no effect on his future decisions. An old lady in the courtroom shouted:
"Then mug