I was born in 1977, and have been in Brooklyn since. For 32 of those years, the mayor has been to the right of the city’s political center, owing to one exceptional circumstance or another.
In place of city Democratic regulars, Rep. Ed Koch won office when New York teetered near bankruptcy; prosecutor Rudy Giuliani did so after David Dinkins’ one term was undone by the city’s precarious finances and his own shaky leadership; and businessman Mike Bloomberg‘s private fortune along with Rudy’s suddenly invaluable endorsement were just enough to get him into City Hall weeks after 9/11.
Come January, we will have a liberal mayor presiding over a reasonably healthy city for the first time in my life. How he does will either put an end to, or revive, the hoary narrative of the heroic outsider we need to save New York from itself.
The long game. In 1999, Bill de Blasio was on the steps of City Hall for the founding of the Working Families Party, intended to push Democrats leftward on behalf of organized labor — and now poised to rise with him in prominence and power.
After running Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, his star was on the rise and it surprised most everybody when he ran for an open City Council the next year as a longshot in a crowded Democratic primary. He won, and has come from behind to win each new contest he’s entered since.
After eight years on the Council and four as public advocate, de Blasio will finally hold real clout — and after a generation on the outside, his core supporters are eager to see it used. What’s more, there will be little political pressure on his right flank but plenty on his left. The other two citywide offices are held by a Democratic regular and a WFP stalwart, and the Council looks to be dominated by its progressive caucus.
The dog has caught the car, so to speak. Now we’ll see what he can do with it.
The Obama playbook. Hope and change have become a brand that political professionals (many of them Obama campaign veterans) attach to the right candidate. Notably, de Blasio’s tale of two cities slogan, which resonated so powerfully this year, is the same one Freddy Ferrer used so unsuccessfully in 2005.
De Blasio, though, was hailed as a national progressive hero after winning a quarter-million votes in the Democratic primary, and will be again after his blowout win Tuesday, with little mention of how low turnout was. With so many New Yorkers having tuned out the city’s politics, those who have direct stakes in the outcome have their voices amplified.
Two cities indeed. One reason the slogan resonated this year: A staggering 46% of New Yorkers now live in or near poverty, up 8 points from 2005. The booming property values that have been a boon to developers and homeowners have only added to the burden for market-rate renters and people on fixed incomes here.
For the millions of New Yorkers who are not — as Bloomberg relentlessly insists — competing with the best and brightest from London, Singapore and other world cities, New York has becomes a very pricey place to be, even as incomes have slipped and, as has happened nationally, good-paying jobs have been replaced by service positions.
Anyone but Mike. De Blasio was the first candidate to see that New Yorkers were eager to turn the page on Bloomberg, even as polls showed most New Yorkers happy with the city’s overall direction, and many of his administration’s policies.
Bloomberg’s naked contempt for democratic process, love of big banks and disdain for the will of citizens (who he sometimes referred to as “clients”) left a huge political opening on the left. To be sure, Bloomberg was of the left in many ways — hiking taxes to pay for a much-expanded government, creating public-health programs by fiat — but the sour taste of his third-term push never went away.
So even with 52% of voters in one exit poll saying the city was headed in the right direction, de Blasio claimed a huge win by promising to “turn the page on the last 20 years,” as his campaign manager put it.
It’s easy to picture a continuity candidate winning in 2009 if Bloomberg had honored term limits and stepped aside then. Instead, he helped ensure the next mayor would be one who ran as the antidote to him.
Gravity bends. So after 12 years of a billionaire mayor bragging about how he couldn’t be bought (and habitually buying support from others), political gravity is returning to New York.
In many ways, we know more about what de Blasio doesn’t like about the mayor who’s dominated the city’s political scene through the millennium than we do about what the mayor-elect’s own vision for the city will mean in practice.
It’s his show now, and we’ll find out soon enough. Let’s wish him well.
hsiegel@nydailynews.com
