"Timing is everything," some sage once said, and the career of former Mayor Abraham Beame, who died last Saturday, bears out the adage. Beame was a product of another time who had the bad luck to become mayor as the era that produced him was ending. Although no one realized it, the one-party system that governed local politics, dispensing city jobs and basic neighborhood services in exchange for continued loyalty at the ballot box, was winding down when Beame was elected in 1973. The bills for the services that "machine politics" had long provided--free tuition at the city university system, mushrooming municipal payrolls--were coming due. Beame, a one-time city Comptroller, found himself at the center of the fiscal hurricane that struck New York City two years after he took office.
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