New Haven Independent

The encounter Thursday evening captured the essence of the mayoral campaign that ends with Tuesday’s election — the tenor, the stakes, and the personal journey of a homegrown politician seeking a record-tying (with an asterisk) eighth term in office.

The TV news crew on the City Hall steps came from the Travel Channel. It didn’t truly “catch” DeStefano on the steps. It arranged in advance to meet him there, to ask him about the rivalry between New Haven’s two legendary pizza parlors, Sally’s and Pepe’s.

Election Day was less than a week away. But DeStefano had no trouble fitting the crew into his schedule. He had no campaign rallies scheduled. No local news crews or opposing politicians beating on his door with more pressing questions about local issues.

Producer Rick Hill asked DeStefano to tell the camera about the history of the pizza rivalry. DeStefano dived into the answer with ease, jocularity, and self-confidence, body language in check. He slipped in a clever jab at a political opponent (in this case, President Bush) without seeming in the least bit nasty.

The sight would have astonished anyone watching DeStefano’s first mayoral campaign in 1989 (the one he lost). Or his often-retelevised meltdown before the Channel 8 camera in 1998 at the beginning of an ethics scandal that came close to ending his political career.

Since then DeStefano has reinvented his administration, run the National League of Cities, forged a respectable campaign for governor, and survived countless crises du jour.

He has faced quite a few cameras over that time.

Partisan Pizza Politics

“Big Neopolitan population in New Haven,” DeStefano began. “A fellow by the name of Frank Pepe is selling bread.

“People start wanting sauce on the bread. He starts selling it.”

The rest, DeStefano continued, is history. Italy may have already something called “pizza.” But this was something different — thin crust, special recipe, cooked in a brick oven. First just by Pepe. Then by his nephew Sal, too, down the street.

“It was invented here,” DeStefano said. The partial smile told the camera: I know we’re having fun here. It also said: It’s a lot more fun answering questions about pizza than about answering questions about, say, a broken police department or rising taxes.

DeStefano has had to answer some of those unpleasant questions in this campaign. At times. But while people in the city are concerned about those issues, no campaign with a serious chance of unseating him has materialized. No mayoral campaign with, say, more than a handful of aldermanic candidates or vote-pulling teams out of New Haven’s 30 wards. No opposing campaigns able to raise a mere $25 from 200 donors to qualify for matching public funds. Zero challenge, in the end, from the city’s black community, which had shown signs of discontent with City Hall.

Call it the round and flat publicity perk for New Haven mayors: The mayor reaped national hometown-pride headlines earlier this year for staking a second claim to a circular New Haven culinary invention, the hamburger.

DeStefano gave the Travel Channel’s Hill a primer on New Haven politics.

“You can change political parties. You can change your hair color. You can even change your gender,” he said. But in New Haven, you don’t change sides in the Sally’s-Pepe’s rivalry.

And he took a stand. On camera. Politics be damned.

His whole life, DeStefano said, he has been a Sally’s man. It’s in his genes. He even has the secret phone number for advance ordering to avoid waiting in line.

“You can waterboard torture me — which would be permissible under the Bush Administration. I would never,” the candidate said, “give it [the phone number] up.”

The Education Of A Politician

A campaign event?

Not in the sense of seeking votes. Even if the pizza episode airs before the polls open Tuesday, The Travel Channel’s viewership probably won’t swing New Haven many votes to Republican mayoral candidate Rick Elser or the Greens’ Ralph Ferrucci.

But the exchange reflected how, and why, DeStefano finds himself waltzing to a nearly unprecedented eighth two-year term. He has developed the polish and political smarts of a successful vote-getter. They didn’t come naturally to him.

He also, pizza and hamburgers aside, has become a candidate willing to take controversial stands that poll-tested politicians avoid. Like immigration. By offering landmark new ID cards to undocumented immigrants and ordering his cops not to inquire into immigrants’ backgrounds, he put himself at the forefront of an issue that scares leading Democrats, from Connecticut’s attorney general and secretary or state to the party’s leading candidate for president.

In the two pro forma, low-pressure debates in this mayoral campaign, he has continued to stake positions for a next term that make him a target: welcoming ex-felons to apply for city jobs, suggesting a state takeover of East Haven land by Tweed-New Haven Airport.

DeStefano has shown personal conviction about those stands, especially on immigration. He also has chosen shrewdly: While they drew some vicious personal attacks, his stands have cemented his local popularity amid the left-liberal consensus that has grown in New Haven over the course of his mayoralty along with Yale and Yalies’ local political involvement.

When DeStefano started out in politics in the late ’80s, he was the hand-picked inheritor of the mantle of a rusting old conservative white-ethnic political machine. DeStefano bristled easily, insulted potential supporters, managed to stammer and look cagey in public even when he wasn’t hiding anything.

With his career in the balance during the 1998 scandal and then a 2001 party primary challenge, he worked on the defensiveness. He reexamined his approach to government. Most significantly, he abandoned a political base he recognized as having lost traction in a post-industrial university city. He fired some old supporters, cut ties with others, watched a couple go to jail; recruited new, younger aides.

When a devastating police corruption scandal broke this year, DeStefano, after early missteps, got in front of it. He emerged as the leading voice to fix a problem — declining community policing — that in fact had developed under his watch.

By the time he met up with the Travel Channel Thursday, DeStefano, at 52, with 14 years in office under his belt, was at the top of his game.

As in that discussion, DeStefano has history on his mind in this race. He is running for his own claim to history, an honor akin to Roger Maris’ home run record in a game whose rules had changed over the years.

The Asterisk

If he wins on Tuesday, and serves out the full two years of his next term (which he said he plans to do), DeStefano will tie the late Richard C. Lee as longest-serving mayor in the city’s history.

Make that the longest-serving elected mayor.

Make that the longest-serving popularly elected mayor.

You see, there was this guy named Elijah Goodrich. Goodrich was elected 206 years ago (in the sense that you could call such restricted electorates “popular” bodies). But in those days, mayors didn’t have to face local voters after their first election. The state General Assembly merely kept “re-electing” them.

“He [Goodrich] served 18 years and two months,” DeStefano said in an interview in his City Hall office Thursday. “Then he died. Which is not my ambition.” Click on the play arrow to the video to watch the mayor discuss Goodrich, and his own legacy.

Dick Lee served as mayor from 1954-1970, as John DeStefano was growing up. In his later years, Lee served as a mentor of sorts to DeStefano (although he resented the idea that anyone else was allowed to be called “mayor” in New Haven after 1970).

Lee was known as the “Model City” mayor. The remaking of New Haven under urban renewal and the Great Society remains his legacy. People of all ideological stripes have different views on that legacy. No one denies that the legacy exists, that a pivotal period in New Haven’s history is inextricably linked to an eight-term mayor.

DeStefano has served, since 1993, in an era with more modest expectations of government, forged amid the economic and social disappointments of the Lee/Lyndon Johnson era. Still, DeStefano has been identified with some dramatic initiatives, from the $1.5 billion citywide school rebuilding program to his immigration initiatives. Downtown has revived.

How does he see his legacy?

“I think it’s mostly that during the years that I’ve been here, each year’s been a little bit better,” he said. “They were good years. I mean, Dick Lee’s time, I think they created a lexicon where we were going to become the City on the Hill, the Model City… That’s not the end of the story. There’s a lots of living that goes on every year…

“I don’t think of it like, ‘Oh it’ll be the schools’” or downtown, “or, ‘public-housing was mostly torn down and replaced by mixed income and mixed times of development…’ “

Instead, DeStefano spoke concretely about his plans for a next term: Continuing to tackle youth violence, addressing the flood of ex-felons coming to the city from prison, overhauling the police department.

“The next biggest thing for me is economic development,” he said. He promises an “aggressive” retention program, a separate effort to attract new businesses to town, and a “Main Street”-style program for neighborhood commercial corridors throughout the city.

He said he has no plans to replace his embattled economic development chief, Kelly Murphy. “I’m satisfied with the job Kelly’s doing,” he said.

A legacy awaits.