A Guide to Making de Blasio a One-Term Mayor
Mayor de Blasio looks easy to beat this fall, with only 39 percent of potential voters thinking he deserves re-election, according to a Quinnipiac poll.
But such polls can be deceptive. So here are some New Year’s resolutions for the half-dozen or so people who might put up a credible challenge in the September Democratic primary or the November general election.
Don’t be hysterical about crime. Under de Blasio, New York has kept crime down. This year, the city has had 330 murders as of Christmas. Over de Blasio’s first three years, we’ve had an average of 338 murders a year, 25 percent below the average of Bloomberg’s final term. That’s twice the rate by which Bloomberg himself cut murder in his first term.
New Yorkers worry about crime. But 48 percent of New Yorkers rightly approve of how the mayor has handled it, compared to 44 percent who don’t.
Anyone who runs a campaign claiming the streets run red with blood is either dumb or lying, and the voters will see right through it. Similarly, anyone who tries to say de Blasio isn’t responsible for his crime cuts, but that Giuliani and Bloomberg were responsible for theirs, will find herself in a rhetorical pickle.
Don’t coddle the elites. If the main way you campaign is to give speeches to real-estate groups or other business concerns, you’re not doing it right.
And don’t focus too much on de Blasio’s various corruption scandals. Don’t ignore it, either: voters care about corruption. But the dim reality is that prosecutors have always been the ones to ferret it out.
Do hold weekly town halls in different neighborhoods with voters. The only requirement to attend should be proof of voter registration, or willingness to sign up at the event. Invite the media to these events and give them 10 minutes to ask questions. Don’t be afraid of reporters and don’t fight with them, but don’t focus on them. They won’t win or lose you the election.
Do walk the streets to arm yourself with evidence of de Blasio’s real-world failures. Start with what people can clearly see: The mayor has failed to manage traffic.
Walk through Midtown on a weeknight and what you see is chaos: drivers running lights to block the intersection, creating congestion; trucks and buses parked haphazardly, for hours, clogging traffic behind them; buildings that block off entire lanes of traffic with metal barriers for days because they might do construction later on.
The city has built bike lanes, but bicyclists can’t ride in them because of double-parked cars. Manhattan is supposedly pedestrian-friendly, but pedestrians must navigate backed-up cars across every intersection.
There’s no basic, consistent enforcement of traffic laws — or evidence that the mayor even notices this mess. In his end-of-the-year look-at-how-much-I-accomplished video, de Blasio fits the definition of out-of-touch: He’s sitting in the back seat of a luxury SUV, talking on a cellphone.
Almost nobody gets around that way. Bloomberg was a billionaire, and also a little bit out of touch. But he did often ride the subway in the densest parts of Manhattan, where taking a car makes no sense.
Do ride the subway, and not in a cocooned photo op. Film yourself doing a regular New Yorker’s commute each week, from the South Bronx to downtown in the morning rush, or from Midtown to Flushing or Jamaica, Queens, in the afternoon rush.
The people who have the longest commutes on New York’s subways are the working class. This points up another mayoral failure: He hasn’t stuck up for the vast majority of New Yorkers who depend on mass transit and who now have intolerable rides. They could benefit, in the short term, from bus lanes that could ease crowding on subways.
And do be honest with voters in saying that no mayor is going to fix inequality in a city like New York, as de Blasio cynically promised to do. What a good mayor can do is address the results of the worst type of inequality: protecting children whose parents can’t or won’t take care of them, something the city failed to do in the cases of 6-year-old Zymere Perkins and 3-year-old Jaden Jordan, both murdered at home.
Even if you support the mayor, you should welcome strong candidates to run against him — since strong losers will make the winner even stronger.
This piece originally appeared at the New York Post
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post