With Albany crippled by ethics scandals and general political inaction, former Mayor Ed Koch told the Times it's his duty to shake things up. "Everybody I talked to over the past year has been saying, 'Ugh, it's so awful,'" said Koch. "I finally said to myself, somebody's got to do something ... And if no one else does anything, notwithstanding the fact I'm 85 years old, I'm going to throw myself into it."
Koch is planning on bringing together a coalition of civic groups that will work together to unseat incumbents who aren't committed to reform. "The key must be the defeat of those incumbents, regardless of party, who are responsible for this odious situation, and the election of new candidates, committed to a reform agenda, to take their place," he wrote in a letter, along with the leaders of the good government groups Citizens Union and New York Civic. It's unclear exactly which state politicians he'll target, but Koch—who has recently been spending his time preparing his gravestone—told the paper: "I don't believe the good ones are good enough, and the bad ones are evil."
That said, Koch hopes that the push for reform will inspire change in candidates who have stood in the way. "It's possible that the defeat of a few will turn the others into reformers." Though only 39 incumbents have lost in elections since 1982 and more than half who ran in 2008 won by more than 80 percent of the vote, Koch says now is the time for action: "There will never be for another 100 years the same kind of environment that we have today that would help us succeed: that is, the disgust people have toward Albany."
