"So Clinton basically was eulogizing Koch by saying, 'Hey, he supported my agenda, and that's why I'm here.'"

"And he wasn't through.  Somehow Clinton worked Viagra into the routine."

CLINTON: He said, "You know, we've gotta do something to convince these young people to quit smoking, and there's just been a new study saying that it impacts virility."  And he said, "You know, this Viagra is a big deal."  This letter is hilarious.  He said, "Now, politicians don't like to talk about this, especially among young people, but young people are way more sophisticated than older people and they get this, and it doesn't work to tell people they're gonna get cancer or respiratory diseases, go after the virility argument."

"Vote for Cuomo, not the homo."

A campaign slogan from 1978. Noted in the new documentary "Koch," which opens today, the day Ed Koch died.

[Filmmaker Neil] Barsky... doesn’t varnish Koch’s shift rightward in 1978 against mayoral opponents like Mario Cuomo. But he does make you sympathize with Koch’s 1978 beard-and-pony show, in which he held hands with Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America, and broadly hinted at a marriage announcement after the election. Flyers reading “Vote for Cuomo, not the homo” had been plastered all over the place...

Barsky poses the right questions to Koch but doesn’t bother asking them a second, third, or fourth time. He knows there are places the man won’t — or can’t — go. Bess Myerson was Koch’s good friend, and there was never anything more! Whether he’s gay or not is no one’s damn business! It would have been easier to cave in to pressure from the African-American community — maybe he should have — but he stuck to his principles! Blah blah blah....

Edward Koch has died.

He was 88.

With his trademark — 'How’m I doin?' — Mr. Koch stood at subway entrances on countless mornings wringing the hands and votes of constituents, who elected him 21 times in 26 years, with only three defeats....

I lived in Koch's legislative district in the early 1970s — before he became mayor — and I remember going to work, needing to get down into the subway, and he'd be there at the top of the stairs wanting to shake hands. Want to ride the subway? You'll have to get past Ed Koch. It seemed so small-time, such a corny, unlikely way to get somewhere in politics.

The 3 defeats were: "a forgettable 1962 State Assembly race; a memorable 1982 primary in a race for governor won by Mario M. Cuomo; and a last Koch hurrah, a Democratic primary in 1989 won by David N. Dinkins, who would be his one-term successor."

Black leaders were... unhappy with Mr. Koch’s decision to purge antipoverty programs and comments he made that they considered insensitive. He said, for example, that busing and racial quotas had done more to divide the races than to achieve integration, and that Jews would be “crazy” to vote for the Rev. Jesse Jackson in his 1988 presidential campaign after Mr. Jackson’s 1984 reference to New York as “Hymietown” and his call for a Palestinian homeland in Israel....

[I]n August 1989, a black youth, Yusuf K. Hawkins, 16, who went to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to see a used car, was attacked by a group of white youths and shot dead.

Mr. Dinkins, pledging to bring the city together again in a “gorgeous mosaic,” narrowly defeated Mr. Koch in the primary and went on to beat Mr. Giuliani, who ran on the Republican and Liberal lines, by a slender margin in the general election.

“I was defeated because of longevity, not because Yusuf Hawkins was murdered six weeks before the election, although that was a factor,” Mr. Koch wrote.... “People get tired of you. So they decided to throw me out. And so help me God, as the numbers were coming in, I said to myself, ‘I’m free at last.’ ”