A wonderful town.

A WONDERFUL TOWN IN RESTROSPECT, the New York primary was decided in Wisconsin, where Jesse Jackson's second-place finish meant that he would not come roaring into town with the Big Mau Mau. But it didn't necessarily look that way at the time. Michael Dukakis had dropped two big ones the month before (Illinois and Michigan); if he dropped New York, Mario Cuomo, the exotic dancer of Albany, might drop another veil. Accordingly Dukakis was calling on every resource.

One of his biggest resources throughout the campaign has been money. I attended a powwow of Dukakis money-raisers in the board room of the Equitable Building on April 6, the day after the Wisconsin primary. You could plunk the Oval Office into the Equitable Board Room and never notice it. A post-modern proscenium window gave a Valhalla view of the West Side. Several of the Dukakis people noted the resemblance of the circular board table to the one in Trading Places.

Since the election-law changes of the Seventies, the goal of successful fundraising has become to find, not the biggest givers, but the biggest number of those who can give the thousand-dollar limit--what Brian Sullam in The New Republic called "plump cats." The way to do that is to establish a network of friends of feline friends. Most campaigns do this; Dukakis just did it better.

Part of the reason is that he is a governor. More business gets done with governors than senators or congressmen, and governors must come to Wall Street to float bonds. By the time New York rolled around, and despite his stumbles, Dukaki's people were also making use of the magic of inevitability. On the invitation to a Dukakis fundraiser I had attended the week before was a picture of a steaming train (the little engine that could?) with the message, "Get on Board."

And part of the reason for the Dukakis success at raking it in was plain hard work. Those assembled in the Equitable aerie belonged to the Finance Council, a group of over one hundred supporters who had pledged to bring in $10,000 or more; they met every three weeks to plan fundraising events. The members of the Finance Council's inner circle, the Executive Committee, a dozen strong, had each generated over $50,000; they met every week. There had been one big event--i.e., six figures--in New York every month since last summer. They were looking to raise half a million more before primary day. Multiply that by parallel organizations in other rich states, and you've got a lot of wherewithal.

The Dukakae dispersed with exhortations to get as many Democrats as possible to "max out" in the two weeks remaining.

JESSE JACKSON'S first full day in New York City after the Wisconsin primary was heavily scheduled. He was slated for lunch with the New York Times, meetings with the state Democratic committee and with a labor union, a candidate's forum at the Ethical Culture Society, and evening rallies at the Columbia Faculty House, a chi-chi downtown restaurant, and a Baptist church in deepest Brooklyn. Four years ago, Jackson's schedules were frankly fantastical. This time, they were--indicative. I came to the Ethical Culture Society when Jackson was scheduled to appear, first of three speakers, at 5:30, and saw him, last of three, two hours later.

Ethical Culture is a sect developed at the turn of the century by those who found Unitarianism and Reform Judaism excessively dogmatic and insufficiently serious. Perhaps for that reason, the pews at their building on Central Park West are the hardest in the universe.

Albert Gore and Michael Dukakis had been greeted with applause that was, respectively, polite and heavy. Jackson received a full-throated roar. Conservatives who mock his rhymes and jingles, or who think his speaking skills depend entirely on them, should hear him on a good day. I have been listening to presidential candidates now professionally for eight years and the only one who came close to Jackson as a speaker was John Connally. (Ronald Reagan is not a speaker at all, but a Friend.) Jackson is always at least spuriously moving, sometimes genuinely so. Most moving is his period devoted to the working poor--a catalogue of nurses, maids, janitors, together with their long hours and their responsibilities, bound together with the refrain. "They work," which he began developing and polishing as early as his last campaign.

His remedies for the working poor, or for anyone or anything else, are mostly nonsense, while his record, as an administrator and public figure, is often worse. After his surprise win in the Michigan caucuses, a number of mainstream reporters began laying out the malodorous record--Arafat, Castro, PUSH, the bloody shirt--in stories that were passed around like hermetic formulae. But all this too was mostly recycling of material from the last campaign. Michael Kramer, who did a tough wrap-up for U.S. News & World Report, had written it all for New York magazine the last time around. The tale of Jack O'Dell, the old Communist Jackson picked for a foreign-policy advisor, which surfaced in Commentary and The New Republic, had been broken by William Rusher in a column four years earlier--indeed, Rusher had been on to O'Dell since Special Counsel in 1968.

In answer to the question, What do you want? Jackson told the Ethical Culture Society that he wanted to win, and that having done so, he would want to raise the minimum wage, to institute "comparable worth" (that is, higher pay for jobs in which feminists feel that women are shortchanged), and to make the National Labor Relations Board "a mediation and not a strike-breaking board." A question about drugs provoked a detailed answer, which Republicans had better get used to: the Democrats are following Jackson's lead on this issue, and George Bush, as head of the federal anti-drug effort in South Florida, makes a tempting target. The details boiled down to extensions of present programs--military aid to the governments of source countries, substitute crops for their peasants, education, rehabilitation, a beefed-up border patrol at home--generously larded with rhetoric: Drugs are "the number-one threat to our national security." (Cf. Michael Dukakis: the "most serious threat to our national security is not the Sandinistas, but the avalanche of drugs flowing into this country.") At the end, Jackson raised the most important question. "As President, I will cut the supply. But people must cut the demand."

By the time he finished, he was already ten minutes late for the appearance after his next scheduled appearance, so I left him to entirely sympathetic ears.

WHERE JACKSON was concerned, Dukakis's strategy was to see, hear, and speak no evil. These tasks were left to the other white guy, Albert Gore. Gore had looked to Super Tuesday to get his campaign rolling; he carried five outer Southern and Border states--big deal. In Wisconsin, he had bellowed for dairy price supports and finished a distant third. New York became make or break for him, and he took the war to Jackson with a stout heart.

He fired an opening shot on March 29 at a breakfast of the Association for a Better New York, a group of businessmen and boosters, when he said that the goal of Democrats should be to elect a President, not a preacher. That same day, at a Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, he found the range, blasting Jackson for suggesting moral equivalence between Israel and the PLO. Gore's criticisms, mild enough, paled and faded altogether when Mayor Koch, who later endorsed Gore, opined that any Jew who voted for Jackson would have to be "crazy."

And so the great hunt for Jewish votes began, with Gore and Koch acting as the beaters. Another phrase from four years ago, this one belonging to Murray Kempton--that Jackson may have called New York City Hymietown, but Mondale and Hart treated it as if it were--got a certain amount of replay. Kempton's mot was true then, and it remains true now, but half way through the ruckus I was seized with a sudden longing to let New York alone. Yes, the city is full of people and pols who behave as if they think that Ellis Island is somewhere up near Poughkeepsie, and they are still citizens of the Old--or New--Country. (It isn't just Jews. We will visit the Greeks presently, and the Irish still give a kick whenever some aged plastique merchant is elected marshal of the St. Patrick's Day parade.) But anyone who heard Dick Gephardt campaigning to farmers, or everyone but Pete du Pont campaigning to old folks, knows that New Yorkers do not exhaust the supply of people in the Republic who think there are more important things than the Republic.

If New York is not unique in its sins, it does express them with a special degree of infantilism. This came home to me at a debate sponsored by the Daily News at the Felt Forum, a week before the primary. The Forum, a barnacle on Madison Square Garden, was as full as it would be for a Fifties doo-wop concert, though, in fairness, the concerts sell beer and the candidates didn't. The first group of infants was the homosexuals. They had a black banner, SILENCE = DEATH, with a pink triangle on it, and they yelled "What about AIDS!" in every lull. I could see a radicalized homosexual heckling, say, Cardinal O'Connor or Jerry Falwell. But what is the point, other than getting on television, of heckling people who agree with you?

The second band of infants was the Jackson claque. I have heard right-to-lifers in full and bitter cry, and I have seen the dewy look in the eyes of the Robertsonites, but they are nothing to the Jacksonians. Some analyst of kitsch, maybe Clement Greenberg, gave as a sign of kitsch art that it contains its own reaction. A painting, for instance, will not simply be sad; it will say, See how sad this is. Jackson and his followers practice kitsch politics. It's not just that they cheer and whoop, it's the pleasure they take in hearing their own cheering and whooping. How wonderful it is, they seem to say, that this wonderful man makes such wonderful people feel so wonderful. When, kitsch on the attack, they boo, the wonderful man has a chance to admonish them, whereat they wonder anew at his sobriety.

By the time of the Daily News debate, the Gore strategy had produced no tangible results. Over the final weekend, tracking polls showed a modest Gore uptick--modest, and deceptive.

FIVE DAYS before the primary, like Antaeus touching ground, Michael Dukakis came to a fund-raiser in Astoria, in Queens. It was a long way from the Equitable Board Room. Across the street from the event was a stationery store advertising SCHOOL SUPPLIES AND CIGARS, a billiard parlor, and a bar named McLoughlin's; at the corner was an El stop.

The event itself was held on two floors of a banquet hall, teenagers disco-ing on the lower, their elders and Dukakis crowded into the upper. The crowd was, shall we say, Hellenic. You couldn't throw a plate without grazing a mustache. At 6'4", I felt like a center for the Knicks. The Greeks had a band--not a singer, an electric guitar, and a percussion machine, but an honest-to-God band, with trumpets and trombones, bass drum and cymbals, that played thumping, last-century marches.

Dukakis made the obligatory reference to Cyprus. In the New York homestretch, it seemed to be the only foreign-policy issue he truly knew about. He was hazy on who demanded what as preconditions for Israeli-Palestinian talks, and he waffled on America's response to the Iranian mining in the Gulf.

In Astoria, all sour thoughts were banished. It was perhaps the only crowd in America that could genuinely like him, and he, in response, truly loosened the plates of his carapace. "The sweetest honey," he said, "is made only slowly"--and he repeated the proverb in Greek--"and when we win the primary, the nomination, and the Presidency, it's going to be very sweet indeed." If Dukakis could bottle what he had that night, and sip it from now until November, he could make George Bush sweat.

THE CAMPAIGN winds on, but New York has her madness and her politics still. Three prominent locals were left wounded on the field.

Mayor Koch, the New Yorker who seems most hurt, may not in fact be so badly off. His anti-Jackson tub-thumping honed the loathing of hostile blacks and liberals to razor sharpness, and they vow to get him in 1989, the next mayoral election. But then, they vowed to get him in 1985. It's not as if New York City is bursting with political talent.

If there were justice for campaign media men, David Garth, who handled the hapless Al Gore, would be selling dictionaries. A fellow kibitzer defended Garth to me on the grounds that he had boosted Gore from 5 per cent to 10 per cent. Well, swell. Gore needed 20 per cent. Twice not enough still wasn't enough.

Smirched every bit as badly was Mario Cuomo. His game of not-so-hard-to-get finally came to annoy even his greatest boosters, the press. Martin Nolan, of the Boston Globe, referring to his incessant phone interviews, called him the "Martha Mitchell of the Eighties." Perhaps Cuomo figures they'll all be back in a few years anyway. Perhaps he's right.