This file is a single-author polemical political essay. Rothbard’s scope is narrow—the 1993 New York City comptroller Democratic primary and runoff—but he uses it to stage a broader revenge narrative against Elizabeth Holtzman, whom he treats as an emblem of punitive liberal moralism, prosecutorial politics, and self-advertised “integrity.”
It would be difficult to pick, out of an all-too-jammed field, the most repellent politician in American life, but surely Elizabeth Holtzman would run anyone a very close race for that honor.
The essay’s thesis is that Holtzman’s defeat by Alan Hevesi was not merely an electoral upset but a kind of political retribution. Rothbard first establishes why he believes Holtzman deserved humiliation: her Watergate prominence, her public persona as a “stern avenger,” and especially her role in creating the Office of Special Investigations.
And then, in her congressional stint, in the 1970s, she conceived and introduced the bill that has been tormenting the country ever since: creating the Office of Special Investigations as a virtually independent fiefdom in the Department of Justice where Alan Ryan, Neil Sher, the Anti-Defamation League and their minions can drag elderly-Eastern European immigrants out of their beds and get them deported and often executed abroad for allegedly “Nazi” activities engaged in half a century ago.
Rothbard’s central conceptual move is reversal: the prosecutor becomes the prosecuted, the avenger becomes the target, and the politician of moral righteousness is recast as an ordinary machine figure caught in dubious financial dealings.
But now, hallelujah! Justice has at last triumphed; the stars are once again in their courses; the avenger has been on the receiving end of vengeance and how does she like it?
The structure is chronological but dramatized. Rothbard begins with Holtzman’s apparent invulnerability, then rewinds to the 1992 Senate primary, where Holtzman’s negative advertising against Geraldine Ferraro helped Robert Abrams win the Democratic nomination and left Ferraro eager for revenge.
At the beginning of this year’s New York City political campaign, Liz Holtzman looked to be a shoo-in for renomination and reelection.
Ferraro’s defeat becomes the origin point of the 1993 counterattack. In Rothbard’s telling, Holtzman’s anti-Ferraro campaign alienated ordinary voters, moderate feminists, Italian voters, and party insiders while failing to advance Holtzman herself.
Defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory, as Holtzman’s savage attacks reopened old wounds, and Bob Abrams, who had mildly seconded the attacks on Ferraro, squeezed into victory.
The middle section turns into an account of tactical politics: Saltaire plotting, Geraldine Ferraro’s anger, the selection of Alan Hevesi, and Hank Morris’s campaign craft. Rothbard emphasizes how Morris converted Hevesi’s obscurity into a campaign asset and framed him as likable, competent, and actually interested in the comptroller’s job.
Since no one had ever heard of Hevesi, Morris began the campaign by making use of that very fact: by turning a liability into a near-asset.
The final act is the Fleet Bank controversy. Rothbard presents the Department of Investigation report as the decisive collapse of Holtzman’s “Ms. Integrity” persona. Her refusal to release the report before the first primary is treated as a political blunder because it allowed opponents and press to frame her as evasive.
Hevesi and Badillo naturally demanded that Holtzman release the report; surely the people have the right to know about their servant!
Once released, the report completes the reversal: the moral scourge is now implicated in “gross negligence,” and Rothbard argues that her harshness no longer has compensating credibility.
In the event, they didn't need two weeks: the Investigation report was damning, demonstrating Holtzman's lies about not knowing that the two Fleets were involved; the report actually accused La Holtzman of "gross negligence" in office.
The essay’s relevance lies less in neutral electoral history than in Rothbard’s view of politics as coalition vengeance, ethnic arithmetic, media timing, and reputational collapse. Its rhetoric is openly partisan and punitive; its analysis turns on the destruction of a public identity. Holtzman loses because the traits Rothbard despises—moralism, ambition, aggression, and sanctimony—cease to look like strength once paired with scandal. Hevesi’s victory is therefore presented as both tactical success and symbolic demotion.
No one in New York is going to ask “Alan Who?” anymore.
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