The New, Improved Liberal

[madmusic]

July 17, 1995

by Alex Williams

Dennis Saffran sits seventeen floors above 42nd Street, his strawlike hair parted with military precision, manning the New York outpost of another next American Revolution. The prefab gray cubicle suggests temp agency more than political mission, though, and lately the daily routine has not been rallying troops or discussing strategy but "licking stamps and figuring out the size of fonts for invitations."

"In my spare time," Saffran says, "I'm trying to get us involved in some issues." "Us" is the American Alliance of Rights & Responsibilities, a public-interest group largely made up of self-professed liberals; the issues are the same ones the ACLU is involved in but usually on the other side: outlawing aggressive panhandlers, cracking down on drug dealers, zoning sex shops into oblivion. The AARR's battle cry, it seems, is We're liberal but not lilylivered. Or as Saffran phrase-makes, "We don't have to choose between social justice and safe streets."

If that sounds familiar, it might be because back in 1993, the AARR, then an obscure Washington organization, became Rudy Giuliani's unofficial long-distance claque-cum-think tank. On issues about which the candidate could be vague ("getting tough on the homeless"), AARR founder Roger Conner would supply media-ready elucidation. He would explain that the homeless are 80 percent substance abusers and/or mentally ill and thus should be pushed into treatment, not into city-subsidized housing. Writers such as the Daily News's Jim Sleeper listened; Giuliani won. But it took another two years for the AARR to send Saffran to Manhattan to collect the spoils.

More:

http://www.communityinterest.org/news/ds-nymag.htm