If, like me, you have no life and spent a total of nearly six hours these last couple of weeks watching the New York City mayoral primary debates, you saw quite a show, with great, quirky characters.
There’s the charismatic Zohran Mamdani, endorsed last week by AOC, a 33-year-old Democratic Socialist surging on a platform of a $30 minimum wage, city-owned and operated grocery stores, and a litany of free stuff — bus rides, childcare, frozen rent — most of it paid for by taxes he’s not empowered to raise.
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There’s Brad Lander, the progressive former City Comptroller, whose vocal inflections strike a cross between Al Gore and Mister Rogers, detained this week by ICE in immigration court for essentially trying to keep a migrant from being taken into custody and deported. Welcome to the new campaign tactic: Getting yourself handcuffed for the cameras. (Lander is no stranger to it, having been carted off no less than four times between 2015 and 2018 at public protests.)
Then, of course, there’s the former longtime Governor, Andrew Cuomo, attempting a comeback after resigning amid sexual harassment allegations four years ago. He’s steadily been leading in the polls, securing the endorsement of one-time foe Mike Bloomberg and fending off Mamdani’s closing momentum with lines like: “He was in the State Assembly for 27 minutes and produced three bills,” before nothing that Donald Trump would cut through the socialist upstart “like a hot knife through butter.”
Cuomo is a complicated character. The sexual harassment allegations, looked into by multiple district attorneys, went nowhere — though he’s apologized to those he offended. Indeed, they read more like sad old guy comments — confessions to young female staffers of his loneliness, wondering if they’d ever date an older man — as opposed to evidence of classic workplace hostility. They’re cringe, in other words, but not criminal. What’s most damning about Cuomo is his atavistic management style: the bullying and cutthroat score settling.
Interestingly, there has been no mea culpa moment for Cuomo in this campaign. Even Richard Nixon in his 1968 comeback tried to soften the sharp edges of his public persona with the “New Nixon” — little more, we’d learn later, than the inventive media framing of a young consultant named Roger Ailes. Cuomo, on the other hand, has opted to just be himself. He scowls and devastates with one-liners; his smile, when it emerges, is tight-lipped and signals the imminent arrival of political payback. He’s politics’ version of Col. Jessup: You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.
Why this matters here
What’s all this got to do with Philly? Well, New York mayoral politics have tended to presage our own zeitgeist. Think of it: Among Michael Nutter’s first visits when preparing for the office of mayor? To New York’s Mike Bloomberg, the master of technocratic reform, and a relationship flourished. Many of Nutter’s policies were rooted in Bloomberg’s remaking of New York City in the post-9/11 era; politically, Bloomberg became a big brother to the Philadelphia mayor. Pragmatic progressivism was the order of the day.
Bloomberg’s successor, Bill de Blasio, said, in effect, who needs the pragmatic part? Under de Blasio, spending soared, crime surged, and he checked out. Our version of de Blasio was Jim Kenney, who campaigned on many of de Blasio’s high cost progressive policies — like raising taxes to pay for universal pre-K. But he also mimicked de Blasio in his disconnectedness. It was said that de Blasio wouldn’t talk to voters while he was at the gym. Kenney didn’t just stop talking; he quiet quit while in office, even once publicly fantasizing about when he’d finally be set free by City Hall.
De Blasio was followed by Eric Adams, a former cop who ran on a law and order and pro-business platform in 2021 and governed with a refreshing swagger, at first. Ultimately, two things have haunted his mayoralty: an inability to consistently implement the popular policies he’s touted, and his own corrupt ways.
…on any given issue, Cuomo was willing to piss off, say, 15 percent of his party and a third of the opposition if it meant getting points on the board. How he did it may be distasteful, and may create enemies, but they just may be examples of politics in action.
Like Adams, Mayor Cherelle Parker deserves credit for putting public safety at the forefront of her 2023 campaign. When she won, it was a signal that, as in New York two years before, voters, particularly Black ones, didn’t want to hear talk of defunding or abolishing the police. Parker oversaw a city turnaround when it came to the scourge of murder and mayhem — her hiring of Kevin Bethel as police commissioner was a stroke of genius — but the jury is still out on her administration’s ability to implement policy. (It was not a good sign when she ordered that first sweep of the Kensington encampments and the social workers showed up two hours later than the cops.)
Parker is by no means corrupt, but like the product of machine politics she is, she’s remained conspicuously silent on the topic when it’s all around her, as in the Sheriff’s Office or her own administration’s hiring of Wille Singletary, the one-time traffic court judge who’d been convicted of fixing tickets, not to mention showing photos of his, uh, gavel to female court staffers.
Old vs kooky?
Which brings us to the current race in Gotham, which really boils down to the efficacy of old-time hardball politics as represented by Cuomo versus the kooky idealism of Mamdani. It’s action versus talk, politics versus punditry, a type of aging grumpiness versus youthful charisma. Results versus vibes, in other words.
Remember, whatever your feelings about Cuomo and the various controversies surrounding him during his decade plus as governor, he arguably produced the nation’s most progressive results — even as progressives fought him every step of the way, because they’d rather be right and lose than compromise. Check the scoreboard: the nation’s strictest gun laws. Banning fracking. The second state — by a matter of hours — to enact a $15 minimum wage. Free college tuition. Legalizing same sex marriage. Passing medical and recreational marijuana. And Cuomo built things, for all you abundance progressives out there: the Second Avenue Subway, the Moynihan Train Hall, the reconstruction of LaGuardia Airport.
In his book about Cuomo, The Contender, author Michael Shnayerson shows how the then-Governor, skeptical of corrupt downstate Democrats, secretly empowered a renegade group of the General Assembly called the Independent Democratic Caucus to collude with Republicans to get him what he wanted. (Which may explain why Cuomo fought de Blasio for so long on a millionaire’s tax — he owed much of his progressive agenda to a coalition that included Republicans.) Shnayerson shows the sausage being made and it is a thing to behold — the deals, the head fakes, the way Cuomo settles scores and runs them up at the same time.
Donald Trump would cut through the socialist upstart [Mamdani] “like a hot knife through butter.” — Andrew Cuomo
What Cuomo didn’t have was an overly likable personality; he used fear and intimidation to get his way, which came back to bite him in the end. But on any given issue, Cuomo was willing to piss off, say, 15 percent of his party and a third of the opposition if it meant getting points on the board. How he did it — the rewards offered, the threats implied — may be distasteful, and may create enemies, but they just may be examples of politics in action.
Against that record, Mamdani’s pie in the sky rhetoric seems farcical, no? Put aside all your hatred of Trump. The real lesson we should take from Dear Leader is his sheer inability to actually marshal together a coalition that gets shit done in any lasting way. When you govern by executive (illegal?) fiat, you’re a painful blip on the screen. Trump and socialists like Mamdani have that in common — a naive belief that simply saying it makes it so.
Politics is the art of making sometimes distasteful deals in order to enact half the change you originally sought. Maybe the ranked choice referendum in New York City next week will provide a clue as to whether the art of politics has a future in Philly, or if, fresh off its successful campaign to paint pro-growth tax cuts as anti-worker, performative progressivism will keep its momentum going.
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