The City Politic

The Accidental Candidate

In 1997, Ruth Messinger stepped down as Manhattan borough president to run for mayor. Looking for black support to ward off Al Sharpton in the Democratic primary, Messinger endorsed Fields as her replacement. Last year, term limits forced Fields to consider her next move, and until November 2004, she was angling for a position in the Kerry administration. Running for mayor is Fields’s fallback position. And even that decision was conditional on the city comptroller’s declining to run, leaving the role of mainstream black Democratic challenger open.

She hasn’t yet figured out how to truly capitalize on her latest bit of good fortune. After a jump in the immediate aftermath of Ferrer’s Diallo stumble, Fields’s Democratic-primary poll numbers haven’t budged from the underwhelming low twenties or thirties, depending on the polling institute you believe. On the stump, Fields frequently lapses into narcotizing progressive-bureaucratic verbiage. Confronted with a specific issue, she’s a great fan of appointing commissions to study the subject. Her policy themes so far are worthy and numbingly predictable: more affordable housing, more attention to the plight of average New Yorkers, more “inclusiveness” in decision-making about the public schools. When the Fields campaign did introduce a more specific education-reform proposal last week at a Park Slope forum, the idea was debuted by an aide appearing in place of the no-show candidate.

Fields radiates genuine decency. But she has a long way to go to show there’s substance beneath the pleasant surface.

Fields’s stagnant poll numbers aren’t crippling, considering that it’s May and that her name usually elicits blank stares outside of Manhattan. After finishing in Hell’s Kitchen, Fields races to a sparsely attended Asian Democratic club meeting in Flushing, then to a Jewish center in Jackson Heights, where the crowd is more plentiful and gloriously polyglot: black, Bangladeshi, Puerto Rican, Jewish, and other. “I didn’t know much about Virginia before hearing her speak,” says Larisa Ortiz, a 30-year-old urban planner who works for a small, socially conscious real-estate developer in midtown. “I haven’t liked any of the Democrats, and I thought I’d wind up voting for Bloomberg. But I liked Virginia. She was articulate, poised, impressive. Yet while Ferrer is talking about policy and solutions, Fields is more into ‘we need to come together’ platitudes. I want to hear meat.”

The image might be imperfect, but it speaks to Fields’s central problem. In person, she comes across as a warm presence, radiating genuine decency. Yet Fields has a long way to go to convince voters that there’s substance beneath the pleasant surface, that she has the hunger to seriously challenge Bloomberg, and that she’s her own woman. Fields’s advisers are counting on a low turnout in the Democratic primary, believing she can triumph by scoring well with female and black voters. The Bloomberg campaign, which for months had been polling only Ferrer as a general-election opponent, has recently begun preparing for the possibility that the mayor could face one of the other Democrats. Sexism and racism are still significant political obstacles, not to mention being deeply offensive. But if Virginia Fields is the Democratic nominee in November, she’ll need to show that accidents of birth aren’t her only strengths.