No one knows what kind of mayor Bill de Blasio is going to be after just six weeks, even if you get the idea that he wants to make sure even people in outer space know how good he is at shoveling his own snow as if he ought to get some kind of Olympic gold medal for that.
He probably wishes he could eventually win some kind of medal for the pre-k swinging contest he is having with Andrew Cuomo.
You don’t judge de Blasio because he didn’t cancel school in New York City the other day. Don’t judge him on making a call to the police about a political crony, Bishop Orlando Findlayter, taken into custody after cops pulled him over for a traffic violation and then found two outstanding warrants.
You don’t even judge de Blasio for responding to criticisms from Al Roker, the “Today” show’s weatherman, about the mayor not closing the schools when the latest snowstorm hit.
But de Blasio shouldn’t have responded to Roker. And shouldn’t have acted as if the weather forecasts were kind of murky for the latest storm, when he knew better because everybody did. He also shouldn’t have said “end of story” after he gave his explanation about that phone call he made to one of his top cops about Findlayter, who seems to be the most fun bishop in town.
The new mayor has to know that’s not the way it works with anybody working a big job here. He has to know that the city, especially when you are trying to prove you have the chops to govern it, is in a hardball league, and you need to wear a helmet.
So there are not lasting judgments to be made about him, other than the fact that he has been outboxed, and badly, by Cuomo so far on pre-K, even if de Blasio made a half-baked attempt at making nice with the governor on Sunday.
And perhaps there is one other judgment here:
That de Blasio thinks he has more political capital, here and in Albany, than he actually does.
Sometimes you get the idea that de Blasio, who seems to be intent on setting a record for visiting Albany, thinks that upstate lawmakers get weak in the knees because he gave Joe Lhota the kind of beating he did in November.
You also get the idea that de Blasio thinks that the progressive ideology on which he ran and won — even if Christine Quinn and Anthony Weiner and Bill Thompson and finally Lhota were the only ones he had to beat — is somehow sweeping the country when it isn’t even sweeping his own city.
One day last year, de Blasio was asked if he might change his politics if things changed on the ground once he became mayor.
“This is the ideology that I ran on and that is how I will govern,” he said.
This will be the great drama with de Blasio, of course, finding out if he will make the city fit his ideology, or if he will be the one to adapt now that he is running something other than a campaign for the first time in his life; finding out if he is the same kind of ideologue on the left that somebody like Rudy Giuliani was on the right. Giuliani thought he was the leader of some sweeping political movement, too, then found out no one wanted to vote for him once he got out of town and ran for President.
This isn’t about one snow day; there would have been enough people yelling if he’d canceled school because of the storm. It isn’t even about the call he made regarding Findlayter, a guy who supported him even when he was running behind Weiner.
It isn’t even about the way de Blasio ran against Mike Bloomberg and Ray Kelly and stop-and-frisk, then admitted once in office that stop-and-frisk had already been changed, and more than somewhat. This was Bill de Blasio talking out of both sides of his mouth and getting away with it, mostly because he was still in his honeymoon period.
“At a certain point, the mayor and the police commissioner backed away and started to modify their policies,” de Blasio said after being sworn in, this after months spent demonizing Kelly in particular. In that moment he was a change candidate talking about a policy he himself said had already been changed.
He was still being carried along by the roar of the crowd at that point, about taxes and his tale of two cities and all the rest, sounding as if he were still running for mayor. Now the new mayor actually has to run the city, even if he occasionally acts as if he thinks he is running the whole state. Now comes the hard part for Bill de Blasio, now that the cheering has stopped.
