America’s imaginary Law and Order candidate

The new Ronald Reagan in the presidential race

By Gerard Baker
TimesOnline

Last week in these pages I noted the unusually large number of New Yorkers in the running for the US presidency. Hillary Clinton, Rudolph Giuliani and the current mayor of the city, Michael Bloomberg, all have high hopes of representing Democrats, Republicans and independents respectively in next year’s election. But in my customary haste, I omitted to mention perhaps the best-known face of all in the race.

Arthur Branch is the District Attorney for New York County, the official, legal name for Manhattan. He is that unusual but highly attractive political figure – a successful, elected conservative Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic city. How successful? No Republican has held the Manhattan DA position since Thomas Dewey in the 1930s, who later became governor and was famous for momentarily beating Harry S. Truman in the 1948 presidential election – at least in a newspaper headline – before the real results said otherwise.