Say it out loud: Mayor de Blasio.
Tens of millions of dollars, thousands of events, dozens of candidate forums and three front-runners later, New York’s Democrats appear to have settled in the race’s closing days on Bill de Blasio.
Just weeks after he was mired in a distant fourth place, polls now show the public advocate drawing more support than Chris Quinn and Bill Thompson combined, and over the 40% needed to avoid a runoff — which explains why the two leaders-turned-also-rans spent Tuesday night’s debate ineffectively sniping at him.
If de Blasio’s big lead holds, it would mark two straight open elections where Democrats chose the public advocate as their standard-bearer, which says something about how thin the party has become, despite its overwhelming voter advantage.
Given the huge Democratic registration edge and the absence of a crisis or credible billionaire in the race, the party’s pick (which just a few hundred thousand voters will determine) will be the overwhelming favorite to be our next mayor. Yet the public advocate is a joke of a post, with no real budget, power or reason for being. That uselessness is precisely what’s made it politically valuable, since it leaves the advocate with little record for opponents to attack.
Two serious questions for those intending to vote for de Blasio: Can you name one thing he accomplished as public advocate? Can you name even one of the candidates running to replace him in that post?
What de Blasio has offered is a clear narrative in a race that has lacked them. Anthony Weiner shot to the top of the polls by offering a middle-class mantra that resonated with voters as the rest of the field seemed to be aiming their pitches squarely at core Democratic interest groups, with little to say to the city as a whole.
When Weiner’s personal demons (again) brought him down, de Blasio’s two-New-Yorks message began to resonate among voters evidently more concerned with clarity than ideology, given that Weiner positioned himself at the right of the pack while de Blasio has taken the left.
But because of de Blasio’s late rise, his proposals have hardly been vetted, so he’s slid by on slogans, his impressive intelligence and political talent and his opponents’ ineptitude. De Blasio’s signature plan for taxing the wealthy to pay for universal pre-K, for instance, has little chance of passage in Albany next year, and little chance of living up to his promises for it even if it does.
What’s more, he’s had it both ways with Mayor Bloomberg, running as the replacement who would right this mayor’s wrongs even as he’s implicitly taken the administration’s gains as givens he can inherit and extend. Call it the de Blasio bubble, the idea that the only way we can go is up. While offering plans for new spending, he’s had little to say about nearly 300,000 full-time city employees working under expired contracts and fully expecting the new mayor to provide billions in retroactive raises.
While total education spending is up 50% under Bloomberg, and the city’s contribution has grown even more rapidly, de Blasio has said that record-high level should be a baseline for additional spending. And de Blasio has said almost nothing about terrorism, though New York remains a prime target. He’s vowed to end discriminatory stop-and-frisk — but also promises to keep crime down.
“He is acting as if the gains of the last 12 and 20 years are locked in ,” says Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson, the Bloomberg administration’s most vocal critic of the Democrats vying to replace Bloomberg. “That’s not how the world works. We have seen the city in our lifetime brought down to its knees.”
He adds: “I am astounded as a citizen that nobody is pledging to continue reducing crime, as if they are satisfied with 400 murders.”
What would Mayor de Blasio do if things go south — say, interest rates rise and the market plunges, leaving the city with less money to spend, even as the murder rate ticks back up?
We don’t know, but we may find out very soon.
