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The de Blasio Paradox
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio launched his bid for president last week, amidst protests and jeers.
On Good Morning America, where he was having what should have been his first softball interview as a candidate, chants of “LIAR” could be heard from a rally outside the Times Square studio. The anti–de Blasio protest somehow united the local cop union and Black Lives Matter protestors, along with housing advocates and anti-poverty activists.
While New Yorkers greet de Blasio’s quixotic campaign with hostility or befuddlement, distant observers might wonder how this is more outrageous than, say, Beto O’Rourke or any number of red-state Democrats with thin records throwing away their shot at statewide office for similarly doomed runs at the White House.
Overlooked in all the grousing is Hizzoner’s actual achievements: Bill de Blasio is one of the best mayors that New York City has ever had. But he lacks that easygoing charm with voters (the kind that mainstream political commentators call “likability” when discussing women candidates). And his candidacy is a victim of the rising expectations of the resurgent progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Ironically, his own successful 2013 campaign for mayor—with its Occupy Wall Street–inspired “Tale of Two Cities” rhetoric—helped nurture a political climate that has rendered his race dead on arrival.
None of which is to say that being one of the city’s greatest head honchos is a particularly high bar. We’ve had mayors literally flee the country to avoid prosecution. But for the last half-century, almost every Big Apple mayor who managed to get re-elected left office with delusions of La Guardia–like status and presidential ambitions. De Blasio, by contrast, actually has progressive bona fides that ought to eclipse less-accomplished mayors like Pete Buttigieg and Julian Castro, who are also currently tilting at presidential windmills.
Take the singular achievement of de Blasio’s first term: the introduction of universal pre-K. Studies show that early-childhood education pays remarkable dividends in student achievement for years. And, as Katha Pollitt noted in a remarkable piece of advocacy in The New York Times, market-rate child care “is one of the biggest costs a family faces.” That expense averages $14,144 per child in New York, which can diminish both family wealth and women’s career progress for years.
When de Blasio launched a universal tuition-free pre-kindergarten program, he made a revolutionary improvement in the lives of 70,000 children and their families. His achievement was twofold: First, he found the money to fund it, establishing a massive program of wealth redistribution. Second, his administration mastered the logistical challenges of expanding the country’s largest public-education system by an entire grade level.
Under de Blasio, New York City did it in two years. Rather than take the extended victory lap that most politicians would for lesser achievements, de Blasio followed up by expanding the program by another grade level. Universal “3K”—preschool for three-year-olds—is in the pilot stage in neighborhoods around the city.
The older of my two kids turned three in January. She’ll be going to school tuition-free in September. Bill de Blasio saved my family approximately $56,546 over the next three years! That’s exactly the kind of “free stuff” politicking that Democrats can run on in 2020.
The de Blasio administration has served as an incubator of progressive policy, and not just his own. Freed from a Republican mayor who believed that the most important quality in a City Council Speaker is “keeping legislation that never should have made it to the floor … from ever getting there,” today the City Council often drafts the first versions of future congressional bills.
Just cause for terminations, banning urine tests, and criminal background checks for employment, and mandating paid vacations: These are just some of the reforms getting a dress rehearsal in New York before they become federal initiatives.
As free child care has become a signature issue of Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign, so too could any of these de Blasio reforms become national campaign issues.
The de Blasio administration also pioneered universal free lunches (without the stigma of means testing) in public schools, a fair workweek law, and round-the-clock service on the Staten Island Ferry. It curtailed the police department’s stop-and-frisk policy.
That last policy—combined with his balanced statement about the 2014 death of Eric Garner—provoked an unprecedented mutiny from the Police Benevolent Association. In the least effective job action in our country’s otherwise inspiring recent spike in strike activity, officers stopped ticketing for minor nuisances. Quality of life in the city briefly surged, while 80 percent of New Yorkers thought the union was “too extreme.” Still, de Blasio—who is the father of two mixed-race children and made racist police misconduct a signature issue in his first mayoral run—has mostly backed off from being critical of police actions. He’s remained sidelined on one of the major progressive causes of our time, the demands of the black community for respect and police accountability.
That the police officer who killed Eric Garner is only now facing a semblance of due process—five years after Garner’s killing and at the exact time that de Blasio is presenting himself as a progressive hero on the national stage—partly explains the left’s deafening yawn in response to his candidacy.
There’s also the subway system’s ongoing breakdown, which is not technically the mayor’s responsibility but is often uppermost in the mind of every sweaty, late-for-work straphanger who might rightly resent the mayor for not making this his new campaign. Then there’s the city’s public-housing authority, which is leaving its residents in such squalor that even the TrumpWhite House has to respond. And de Blasio’s failure to challenge entrenched real-estate interests has helped spin a tale of one city for the rich while the rest of us are moving to the boondocks because the rent is too damn high.
Compounding his failure to meet the heightened expectations of progressives, there’s also this: He’s a lousy retail politician. He lacks whatever that “it” is that makes voters like a pol. Being a jerk to a press corps that follows him around and hangs on his every word hasn’t helped either. A New York mayor who actually enjoys his job can hold court on a daily basis with dozens of reporters from around the world and advance his political philosophy and naked ambition. Or he can be defensive, brittle, and petulant and inspire those same reporters to dig a fresh grave for him every morning.
It’s not hard to look at the fawning media coverage of a small-town mayor who’s read a lot of books and an ex-congressman who lost an election to Ted Cruz and view de Blasio’s presidential campaign as an act of spite. If these punks get to set our national agenda, he’s probably thinking, why not me?
Term-limited as mayor, de Blasio has just two more years in City Hall. As a lame duck he has little power to whip votes for another landmark progressive victory, as he did for Councilman Brad Lander’s bill to require a “just cause” for discharging fast-food workers or Rafael L. Espinal Jr.’s bill to forbid bosses from making their employees check their work email after clocking out.
Basically, the mayor is bored. Campaigning for a new office is his way of making his daily rounds fun again. Besides, due in part to that deficit of likability, he lacks the political capital to contest either Senator Chuck Schumer or Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2022 Democratic primaries, though progressives clearly yearn for candidates to take them on. The Intercept has published fan fiction masquerading as speculative analysis about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez getting redistricted out of her House seat so that she simply has to challenge Schumer. And the Working Families Party had to recruit a TV star to run against the vindictive and still unpopular Cuomo last year.
De Blasio is New York’s mayor because in 2013, no other left-winger thought it was possible to beat back the city’s developers and real-estate interests and whomever they would anoint to perpetuate Michael Bloomberg’s dubious legacy. Still, he was a long shot in 2013, too—until former City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s and former Congressman Anthony Weiner’s campaigns both ran aground (for very different reasons). So who can blame the man for thinking he’s got a shot this time, too? But also, who can really blame him for finally taking a victory lap for having re-injected rich vs. poor rhetoric into Democratic politics—two years before Bernie Sanders first ran for president—and putting issues like universal pre-K on the national agenda?
Staten Island Goes Purple
Voters on Staten Island—long the only Republicn corner of New York City—have turned their Republican Congressman Dan Donovan out of office. New York’s 11th District—which the island shares with a couple of neighborhoods across the Verrazanno Bridge in Brooklyn—was the last part of the city to be represented by a Republican in the U.S. House. Although Democrats in the district outnumber Republicans by a 2-to-1 margin, Donald Trump won 58 percent of the vote there in 2016. The President retains some popular support on the island, his policies less so.
The surprising victory of Democrat Max Rose signals that Staten Island is genuinely a swing district—something that New York Democrats have precious little experience with. The combination of gerrymandering and “big sort” demographic shifts created a sort of district-by-district one-party domination in New York State that has resulted, at least within the city, in neither party knowing how to run in competitive elections.
In a deep-blue city like New York, political posts are handed down like family heirlooms. More politicians leave office in handcuffs or a pine box than because of voter will. As a result, the county—or, in NYC-speak, borough—political organizations are hollowed out. They’re less machines than automatons that go through the motions with little if any involvement from actual people.
A Purple Heart military veteran, Rose was recruited to move to Staten Island and run for office by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. His campaign messaging included complaints about “both sides” and swipes at Mayor Bill DeBlasio, a focus on opioid addiction and an allergic reaction to Medicare-for-All, with a wonkish focus on expanding access to health care within the framework of the Affordable Care Act.
Centrist Democratic consultants will point to Rose’s campaign messaging as a lesson for Democrats in 2020, but there’s probably more of an organizing lesson to be learned. The Rose campaign activated hundreds of volunteers who canvassed the district to identify over 86,000 likely voters, and then turn them—and more—out to win with a decisive 52.8 percent of the vote.
Rose has staying power, and Staten Island’s political landscape will never be the same. The election is no less than a political realignment in New York’s most conservative borough, which can no longer be written off as Republican territory. Now comes a day of reckoning for both parties’ local organizations, and some badly-needed soul-searching for New York’s unions about how they approach the question of “electability” and “sure-things.”
WHEN DISTRICTS REALIGN, both parties’ old orders are threatened.
The Republican party operation on Staten Island was once a nigh-unstoppable machine that was crucial to the election victories of Ronald Reagan, Alphonse D’amato, and Rudy Giuliani. In recent years it’s been dependant on low-turnout special and midterm elections to retain its competitive edge.
For four decades, the Staten Island GOP was led by Guy V. Molinari, the politician who first flipped what had been a reliably Democratic congressional district in 1980—the year of Reagan’s presidential election—before moving on to become Borough President. Molinari passed away this summer, but his party machine never outgrew him or his grudges. He openly feuded with Representative Donovan as well as James Oddo, the current Republican Borough President. In a healthy organization either of these elected officials would be their party’s official leader. Instead Molinari threatened them both with primary challenges. He encouraged his protege, ex-con ex-Representative Michael Grimm, to run against Donovan for his old seat. That bruising primary campaign fatally damaged Donovan’s credibility as a moderate by compelling him, as Republican primaries do, to move further to the right.
One party operative publicly blamed “years of neglect and years of trying to make the county organization smaller and subservient to its leaders” for the historic loss of Molinari’s old seat.
Lawn signs ordinarily might not be an indication of anything significant, but it was notable how few Dan Donovan lawn signs could be seen around the island—especially compared to Max Rose’s and even the faded Michael Grimm signs from his failed primary bid. I don’t know a single friend or neighbor who had a Donovan volunteer knock on their door or call on the phone. None of my fellow commuters could recall seeing the Donovan team passing out campaign lit at the Staten Island Ferry, which is the barest minimum that any local political effort must do.
We all assumed that the Republicans had some secret weapon or really reliable internal polling, but the post-election public recriminations in our local paper of record, the Staten Island Advance, confirm that there was nothing; just a misguided assumption that the rubes would keep on voting Republican in sufficient numbers.
It is all but certain that there will be a significant personnel shake-up at the Staten Island GOP.
On the Democratic side, the county committee has been a baffling mess. Earlier in the year, one of Staten Island’s few elected Democratic state legislators, Matthew Titone, decided to forego re-election for his safe seat in order to run for the borough-wide position of Surrogate Judge. Party chairman John Gulino strong-armed his county committee to deny Titone the party’s endorsement—possibly because Titone is an out gay man, and Gulino has some notion that such a thing is political poison in Staten Island’s more conservative enclaves (or it could be for an even dumber reason that we’ll never fully understand).
Nonetheless, Titone trounced the party’s hand-picked mediocrity in the primary and cruised to victory in the same general election that saw Rose upend the borough’s political calculus. In the interim, the rusty S.I. Democratic machine failed to even file the necessary paperwork for its down-ballot judicial nominees, allowing the Republicans to win those races free from competition.
In 2014, with Michael Grimm running for re-election under the cloud of a 20-count indictment, the SI Dems allowed the Brooklyn machine to fob off an inarticulate city councilman from the other side other side of the Verrazzano who bumbled his way to an ignominious defeat. Before that, they ran the son of the crook who had lost his seat to Molinari four decades ago.
Clearly there are going to be big changes in the thoroughly-discredited Democratic county committee, and Rose would be the natural party leader. One close observer of S.I. politics speculates that Rose’s chief of staff, Kevin Elkins, will replace Gulino and turn the party into the kind of GOTV organization that put Rose over the top.
MOSTLY ABSENT FROM THE STORY of Max Rose’s ground-breaking victory are unions. The New York state AFL-CIO endorsed Donovan, the Republican incumbent. Although 1199 SEIU and the Staten Island-based local 1102 of the Communications Workers put a lot of feet in the street on Rose’s behalf, the rest of the labor movement took the cautious approach of issuing paper endorsements of the GOP incumbent who was favored to win re-election.
Their calculation was as simple as it was cold. Donovan picked up the phone when they called. He could do them small favors and GOP leadership gave him permission to vote no on the really big bad bills like the billionaire tax cut and health care repeal. That those bills came to the floor at all was because Donovan caucused with the death cult that is the congressional Republican party, but his permission from Paul Ryan to avoid getting his hands dirty allowed him to avoid hardcore opposition from the unions. For the unions, the question was why risk losing access to a flawed Republican when a good Democrat who wins without labor’s backing can be expected to forgive and forget (and count on their backing for re-election)?
Staying away from Rose’s long-shot campaign was hardly the most embarrassing inaction by New York’s unions this political season. The most electrifying primary election in the country saw newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeat 10-term congressman Joe Crowley. The idea that the fourth ranked Democrat in Congress and chairman of his county’s Democratic machine could be crushed by a 28-year-old democratic socialist with no financial war chest stunned the political establishment. And in New York unions are very much a part of the political establishment. With nearly a quarter of New York workers belonging to one, unions remain powerful and influential—and exceedingly cautious when it comes to political endorsements.In that primary, the unions reflexively endorsed the incumbent, Crowley.
Nationally, 2020 likely will see more left wing primary challenges in deep blue districts—and the general election will see the last of the moderate Republicans in the fight of their political lives. Unions that back centrist Democrats and moderate Republicans will have some difficult decisions to make.
[This article originally appeared at The American Prospect.]
Drop all the bridge tolls, tax the billionaires
The toll on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is too damn high.
I realize that it’s a time-honored tradition for Staten Islanders to beat our breasts and complain about how “forgotten” and taken for granted we are. Don’t let me steal your birthright from ya, but there are hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who have to go over the river and through the woods and across two expensive bridges to get to Grandma’s house in New Jersey. They feel your pain.
A $17 bridge toll, a free ride for tourists on the ferry and $2.75 for a subway train that’s as likely to break down as get you to work on time is an inequitable system for all parties involved.
Writing in these pages, columnist Tom Wrobleski points to the toll-free East River bridges and notes, “They’re one of the few examples of government totally overlooking a revenue source.”
He suggests “toll equity.” I would humbly propose that our problem is one of a lack of imagination and memory.
Once upon a time, all bridges were intended to be free to cross. Tolls were merely temporary fees charged to travelers to pay back the bond money borrowed to fund their construction. The Brooklyn Bridge was a legendary expenditure of time and money to construct. The bridge was never for sale, but horse-drawn carriages had to rent it for the first few years until toll revenue had paid off its creditors. Now it, like the other East River crossings that were built before 1909, is free to commuters.
What changed? A man named Robert Moses began consolidating power as a public works planner in the 1920s.
When it comes to Moses’ legacy, there are two camps. Some give him all the credit for the highways, byways and thousands of acres of parkland scattered throughout our region. The rest of us curse his name during our interminable commutes.
Moses hated buses and trains and wasn’t that fond of the idea of black and brown people having too many of options for traveling beyond their neighborhood slums. His dollars-over-pennies “master planner” budgeting is why traffic is so awful. One example: the reason traffic backs up for a couple of miles before the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, as thousands of cars cram into the one-and-a-half lanes that lead from Brooklyn into Queens, was that Moses was convinced that the vast majority of drivers would always and forever need to get into lower Manhattan instead. (And that we’d all be driving instead of taking buses, boats and trains in to work.)
Moses couldn’t win an election to save his life. But he concurrently headed up various New York public authorities between 1924 and 1981. The authorities were governed by mayoral, county and gubernatorial appointees – none of whose terms expired at the same time – making Moses uniquely immune to direct accountability to voters.
To keep his appointed boards of governors in check, Moses hid behind his fiduciary responsibility to the bondholders who financed the impressive highways and bridges he built.
And he kept on borrowing money to build them and raising the tolls on them in order to maintain that responsibility to the bondholders that he used as an excuse to disagree with and flat-out ignore the governors and mayors that we-the-people elected under the misguided notion that they should be accountable to us and not some megalomaniacal man who didn’t even drive a car.
Restoring the tolls on the free bridges along the East River has been a favorite solution of tax-loathing billionaires like former mayor Mike Bloomberg ever since the city of London introduced “congestion pricing” under socialist mayor Ken Livingstone in 2003.
But all of these bridges really should be free from tolls, and our mass transit system deserves a massive reinvestment and a radical expansion. Staten Islanders deserve everything from high-speed ferries on the South Shore to an R train that crosses the Verrazano and a PATH train that connects a West Shore light rail line to Bayonne, Jersey City and lower Manhattan.
My preferred solution is to do something much closer to the spirit of socialism and tax the crap out of the billionaires who rely on the bridges, subways and buses to help the rest of us schlubs drag our sorry butts to work every day.
[This op-ed originally appeared in The Staten Island Advance.]