By Tom Deignan

“I will not go to Irish centres and go dancing,” the mayoral candidate declared, during a wild race for City Hall 40 years ago.

This candidate, who apparently did not want to win, then added, “I will not go to Jewish centres and eat blintzes, nor will I go to Italian centres and pretend to speak Italian.”

This, of course, was no student of Tammany Hall, which taught its Democratic politicians to, above all things, pander like crazy to the Irish and (eventually) the Italians and Jews and other racial and ethnic groups.

But this candidate, whose name was William F. Buckley Junior, was running to become mayor of New York City as kind of a joke.

After all, Buckley was already a successful writer who had founded the wildly influential conservative magazine The National Review in 1955.

So, a decade later, Buckley thought he could inject a few ideas, not to mention a few laughs, into the race for City Hall.

He did a whole lot more than that. First of all, Buckley lit a fire under a political junkie from Queens named Kieran O’ Doherty, whose dad was an immigrant from Donegal.

Within a matter of years, Buckley, O' Doherty and others would reshape politics up and down all of New York State.

The 40th anniversary of Buckley’s run for City Hall has gained renewed attention in recent weeks, perhaps because the current mayor’s race is, shall we say, a bit bland.

Buckley’s aged face graced the cover of The New York Times Magazine recently, which bore the grandiose headline “How William F. Buckley’s ‘65 Run for Mayor Changed America.”

The author of the article, Sam Tanenhaus, writes, “Forty years after it was decided, the mayoral race of 1965 remains one of the most memorable elections in New York history. It was also one of the strangest, thanks in large part to the candidacy of William F. Buckley Junior.

“Although it wasn’t clear at the time, Buckley’s bid for office was an important chapter in one of the crucial events in modern political history, the transformation of the consensus politics of the peak cold-war years of the 1950s and early 60s, its agenda set by liberals, into the more polarized politics of our era, ruled by conservatives.”

Aside from the anniversary of this race, which was eventually won by liberal Republican John Lindsay, it is also worth recalling because it just seemed so interesting.

Let’s face it, you may be a Mike Bloomberg supporter or you may be a Fernando Ferrer supporter. Either way, this has been a rather dull mayoral race, and it’s easy to long for the days when a Buckley could throw his hat into the ring just for fun.

Bloomberg, it could be argued, did the same thing. He did not have to run, was already a successful guy, just like all the other millionaires and billionaires who go into politics because they are bored.

One problem — these guys are, themselves, quite bland. That was not the case in 1965, or even 1969, when Irish American columnist Jimmy Breslin and gadfly novelist Norman Mailer ran on a dream team ticket which advocated New York City’s secession, which would allow it to become the 51st state of the U.S.

Buckley, incidentally is of Irish Catholic descent, but is much more interested in the Catholic part, having written an acclaimed book on religion in American culture, such as God and Man at Yale.)

Amidst all of this new interest in the 1965 race for mayor, however, it must be added that Tanenhaus and others underestimate the key role Irish Catholics played.

Yes, he does mention Kieran O' Doherty and J. Daniel Mahoney, “brothers-in-law and co-founders of the state-wide Conservative Party of New York,” as he describes them.

And yes, he adds that though Buckley “failed to capture any single district, he finished second in parts of Queens and fared especially well among Irish and German Catholics.” Blue collar New Yorkers in general were as fed up with “the establishment” as everybody else.

But all of this is mentioned in passing, way at the bottom of the article.

The fact is, the Conservative Party of O' Doherty and Mahoney — for better or worse — is what changed the face of New York politics as much as Buckley. Those voters, who attended quite a few Irish dances, also played a pretty big role as well.

It might not be a bad idea to get them all on a magazine cover someday.

(Contact Sidewalks at tomdeignan@earthlink.net.)