Two cops shot, a crane collapse, random razor-slashing attacks and chaos and corruption at City Hall. A mosaic of snapshots of life in New York spells mounting troubles for Mayor Putz.
Midway through Bill de Blasio’s term, the chickens of his misrule are coming home to roost. The test is not whether bad and sometimes horrible things happen in the nation’s largest and most complex city.
Of course they do, no matter the mayor. The test is whether it feels like the mayor is on top of the problems, or derelict in his duties.
Ed Koch once noted that if a sparrow drops dead in Central Park, all eyes turn to City Hall. His point was that New Yorkers have an outsized expectation that a mayor can be everywhere and have an answer for almost everything all the time. It’s an unreasonable demand, and it explains why being mayor of Gotham is considered the second toughest job in America.
But successful mayors manage that expectation through hard work, active engagement with ordinary citizens and a fierce sense of patriotism about the city. It is the essence of leadership and even when they inevitably fail on occasion, they are not blamed for lack of effort or attention.
That’s a mayor’s contract with New York, and it’s where de Blasio is coming up short. He is chasing rainbows and tilting at windmills instead of minding the store.
New Yorkers see a deterioration in public spaces, an explosion of disheveled vagrants and have a growing belief that the mayor isn’t as committed to fixing those things as he should be.
After last week, it is impossible to argue that they are wrong.
In a foolish bid to make himself a national player, de Blasio spent nearly four days in Iowa during the presidential primary. The trip was a bust, and he returned to discover that the unholy alliance he forged to reduce the popular horse carriages was collapsing.
This was no routine policy failure. Beyond giving him a political black eye, the acrimonious collapse exposed both his arrogance and incompetence. Most troubling, the misbegotten venture galvanized suspicions that his is a pay-to-play administration.
In a naked bid to deliver a promise to donors who funded his 2013 campaign, the mayor tried to buy off the Teamsters union that represents the carriage drivers and skeptical members of the City Council. Knowing he had a weak hand and that disclosure of the details would doom the deal, he tried to speed it through the council.
First the union bailed out after some drivers complained, leading council Speaker Melissa-Mark Viverito to pull her support. That left de Blasio standing alone, pointing fingers and vowing to keep pushing.
It’s an odd hill to die on. The public offers wide support for the carriages, and rejects the mayor’s vaporous claims that the animals are treated cruelly.
Yet de Blasio threw facts to the wind, insisting he would fix a problem most people don’t believe exists. As such, the episode is a perfect metaphor for his tenure.
Time and again, he concocts sweeping visions of unfairness and wrongdoing that are wildly exaggerated or beyond the job he was hired to do. He sees a racist police force, greedy charter schools, unfair Uber drivers and now cruel carriage drivers. On all those, the mayor is living in a world disconnected from most New Yorkers’.
Yet the bid to squash the horse carriages stands out like a sore thumb, and the collapse cannot be the end of the matter. As I noted, I believe de Blasio’s efforts probably crossed the legal line.
He spent too much time and political capital on an issue that never troubled him much before donors raised it. Moreover, horses have zero relevance to what he says is the central purpose of his mayoralty–tackling income inequality. So why did he do it?
Something is rotten and I believe the episode warrants a criminal investigation. The mayor is permitted to be arrogant and incompetent and even lie about his motives. But he is not permitted to sell his office to the highest bidder or use taxpayer money to reward donors.
A prosecutor needs to find the facts and reveal the truth.
Party rift looms for Clinton’s campaign
The miracle rise of Bernie Sanders continues, with polls showing he is now even with Hillary Clinton nationally and maintains his 20-point lead in New Hampshire.
He’s still not likely to win the nomination, but his strength and increased willingness to challenge Clinton on her record and policies is creating a new headache for her. She must fear that core Sanders voters will not back her in a general election.
Two incidents point to a deepening party schism.
The first came in Iowa when, during her angry victory speech, she insisted that “I am a progressive.” TV cameras in Sanders’ headquarters showed young supporters booing, then a spontaneous chant of “She’s a liar” erupted and grew.
It’s one thing when Republicans and a majority of independents find her dishonest and untrustworthy; it’s quite another when young Democrats so vital to her Oval Office quest reach the same conclusion.
The second incident happened in a New Hampshire town-hall setting, where Clinton waved off questions about why Goldman Sachs paid her $675,000 for three speeches. “That’s what they offered,” she said with a shrug.
The audience did not seem to share her indifference. Laughter from the people you are trying to woo is never a good sign.
We live in an age of volatility, and both parties are a long way from settling their internal splits. As with the stock market, wild swings are the new normal in politics.
Yet so far, the lack of enthusiasm for Clinton among major parts of the coalition Barack Obama built counts as the campaign’s most important development of 2016. It could determine who wins in November.
City Council’s obscene payday
City Council members love to denounce the 1 percent, but that didn’t stop them from voting themselves obscenely large raises of 32 percent, to $148,500. That’s approaching three times the median family income.
Here’s an alternative: There should be no fixed council salary, just a formula that pays members 10 percent more than they earned in their last private-sector job. That would either save a lot of taxpayer money or produce better public servants.
The job economy’s ‘empty seats’
The surprising decline of the nation’s unemployment rate to 4.9 percent even as a mere 151,000 jobs were added in January recalls one of the great observations about “facts” that don’t make sense.
It came from long-ago Pittsburgh Pirates broadcaster Jim Woods, who gazed out at a tiny stadium crowd that was officially announced as 15,000 people and declared: “If that’s true, then at least 12,000 of them are disguised as empty seats.”