With a political career that began as Koch’s advance man, Bill Rauch is now a three-term mayor himself.

Bill Rauch was once Mayor Ed Koch’s (D) advance man and press secretary. But these days, he has a city to call his own, as a mayor himself.

“It’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn,” said Rauch, describing Beaufort, South Carolina, population 13,000, where he has been the chief executive for the past eight years.

Koch hired Rauch in 1977 as his advance man in his first successful campaign for mayor. Rauch had been working as a journalist in Michigan, Boston, Long Island and Manhattan.

Rauch served Koch in various positions for the next several years, before being promoted to press secretary midway through the mayor’s second term. Over the next four years, Rauch was faced with a series of scandals and media fiascos, all while dealing with the difficult task of handling a politician known for his hunger for media attention. Along the way, he coauthored two books with Koch, the best-selling Mayor: An Autobiography and its prequel, Politics.

Rauch left the administration for Wall Street in 1986, after he got an offer for quadruple his City Hall salary.

“I had a wife and a one-year-old son. It wasn’t an easy decision, but it was an obvious decision,” Rauch said.

Two years later, Rauch and his wife decided they wanted to raise that son in a place where he could safely “run out the back door and jump on his bike and go wherever he pleased,” Rauch said. 

Henry was first of six children, and Rauch thinks that Beaufort was the perfect town for raising them. On the weekend, they often go to the family farm to ride horses, fish and shoot birds.

His son Henry, whom he joked never forgave him for leaving New York, attended Manhattanville College and currently resides New York City, where he is an intern for Bloomberg News.

When he first got to Beaufort, Rauch founded The Lowcountry Ledger, a Sunday paper in a town that until then had only a weekday paper. He spent two years running the Ledger before closing the paper in advance of a brewing newspaper war that he feared might lead to the paper’s going bankrupt.

Less than a year later, at the encouragement of his friends, Rauch ran for city council. Koch donated half of his $1,000 campaign budget. The other half came from Beaufort residents, albeit in smaller checks.

Unlike the Koch campaigns, Rauch lacked an extensive staff: this time he was the candidate, advance man and press secretary, along with everything else. But, looking back, he said his time in New York had been excellent preparation.
“The lessons that you learn in big campaigns are all transferable in some scale or another to smaller campaigns,” Rauch said.  
Nonetheless, Rauch was surprised when he, a Yankee from the big city, won his first election for public office in a town where he says the legacy of the Civil War still resonates.

“The reason for it wasn’t that I was so good, but that the other candidates were mediocre,” Rauch said.

In 1999, after six years on the Beaufort city council, Rauch ran for mayor to fill out the term of the previous mayor, who had resigned. Rauch won 50.1 percent of the vote. Looking back, he said he benefited from the large number of candidates running. He was reelected twice: in 2000 he ran uncontested, and in 2004 he won against a member of the city council.
In 2004, Rauch published Politicking, which combines a personal memoir about his work with the Koch administration and with his own in Beaufort with advice to small-town politicians trying to win their first elections.

Rauch insists on the personal touch. Beaufort’s website lists his office and home phone numbers. He answers both lines himself.

He visits the Big Apple four or five times a year to see his son, take care of personal business interests and pop in on Koch, with whom he stays in touch.

He said he learned many lessons from his old boss, but the most important is always to be completely frank.

 “If it’s true, you can go ahead and say it,” Rauch said. “People get it. The other politicians may not like it, but the constituency gets it and they appreciate it.”

But in some ways, Rauch hopes to outdo his political mentor. Koch won three terms before losing the Democratic primary in his bid for a fourth. Rauch has already won three elections and is hoping to run for mayor several more times.

And he just might get his wish.

Koch sometimes jokes that he wishes he could have been mayor for life. But without term limits or major political opposition in Beaufort, Rauch said, “I can be mayor forever.”