So the budget-minded undergraduate laid out a bold plan: an investigation into the finances of the Georgetown University campus pub, where students were complaining about the runaway cost of beer and pizza.
“It has obviously lost all sense of fiscal control,” Mr. Lhota wrote of the pub in a sober-sounding campaign pamphlet in the winter of 1975.
It was a signature Lhota blend of fiscal discipline (a pub with cheaper beer) and social laissez-faire (let students buy cheaper beer). And it worked, catapulting him to a seat on the student senate, his first elected office.
A cerebral and outspoken Republican who came of age in the tumultuous era of Watergate and left-wing campus ferment, Mr. Lhota, 58, has long sought ways to make his limited-government views appeal to liberal-leaning peers.
Now, running for mayor of New York, he faces the ultimate test of his ideological salesmanship: persuading an overwhelmingly Democratic electorate to pick a leader who cites Barry Goldwater and Margaret Thatcher as his intellectual forebears.
In a city accustomed to Republican candidates who choose their party out of convenience, not conviction, Mr. Lhota is a lifelong conservative with deep-seated but idiosyncratic beliefs about government’s role in society, even as he seeks to direct a sprawling municipal apparatus that spends billions of dollars each year on social services and spread the gospel of banning smoking and trans fats.
In college, Mr. Lhota eschewed protests in favor of nights in the gallery of the United States Senate, where he sat rapt as Mr. Goldwater, his boyhood hero, orated on the floor. He took a shine to supply-side economics, long before the term “Reaganomics” was coined, and developed a revulsion at Marxism, a hostility Mr. Lhota expressed last week when he fiercely criticized his Democratic rival, Bill de Blasio, for sympathizing with the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua in the 1980s.
But Mr. Lhota’s conservatism also has a libertarian hue: he supports same-sex marriage, abortion rights and the legalization of marijuana, and he is quick to distance himself from the moral prescriptiveness of the national Republican Party. He has occasionally called himself a libertarian, but he recently disavowed the term, saying too many New Yorkers confuse the label with — in his words — “Tea Party crap.”
“Joe is a unique political creature in a city that tends to be more black and white,” said Elliot G. Sander, a Georgetown classmate who, like Mr. Lhota, once led the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
In an interview, Mr. Lhota described himself as a champion of the individual who nevertheless believes that government, in moderation, can play a pragmatic role in bettering society.
“Government should steer, not row,” he said, sitting in a cramped campaign office overlooking Grand Central Terminal. “Government is to point you in the right direction, and not to do everything for you.”
“I was born a limited-government person,” Mr. Lhota added. “I’ve always had this streak going through me.”
A headstrong and independent child who bristled at rules, Mr. Lhota grew up in the Bronx and in Lindenhurst, Long Island, the son of a New York City policeman and grandson of a firefighter.
Although his family rarely discussed politics at home, it was an era when urban governments, saddled with runaway spending and labor disputes, were headed toward decline, and Mr. Lhota recalled an early tug toward libertarianism. His grandfather, a Democrat, battled City Hall when his asphalt street in the Bronx was raised without residents’ permission, blocking entrances to garages and basements.
“My grandfather’s stoop went down to three steps,” said Mr. Lhota, who was 5 at the time. “For a kid like me who loved to play stoopball, it was unbelievable.”
He devoured the Federalist Papers in school, but it was Senator Goldwater’s 1964 presidential run that had him riveted, taken by the candidate’s “Western ruggedness” and contrarian bent. There were arguments at the dinner table with relatives who supported President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Known as the founder of the modern conservative movement, Mr. Goldwater was a libertarian who supported abortion rights and had a penchant for blunt, impolitic talk — not unlike Mr. Lhota today. “He was not your typical politician,” Mr. Lhota said. “He believed the government has no role whatsoever in making decisions which are purely personal, and I believe that.”
Arriving in Washington for college, in 1973, Mr. Lhota was accepted into the Institute on Comparative Political and Economics Systems, a right-leaning summer boot camp for undergraduates. The institute was the brainchild of a group of conservatives, including William F. Buckley Jr., who were concerned about the upheavals of the 1960s and wanted to educate a new generation in what they described as core American principles of freedom, individual responsibility and the free market. (Mr. Lhota was later featured on a brochure as a notable alumnus.)
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