David Handschuh/New York Daily News
Bill de Blasio, daughter Chiara, right, and wife Chirlane McCray.
Give Bill de Blasio credit for political smarts: He topped the field in the Democratic mayoral primary by effectively channeling the anger of working- and middle-class New Yorkers who have had their fill of falling standards of living and rising expenses.
De Blasio’s first-place finish over better known rivals — he hovered within a hair’s breadth of hitting the magic 40% threshold needed to avoid a runoff — will shape the general election competition with Joe Lhota in a debate over who would better spur creation of well-paying jobs, halt wage stagnation and ease the cost of living.
Lhota would be well-advised to pay heed to the Democrats’ primal economic scream.
During an election season when crime is at a record low and the streets are clean, de Blasio seized on the worsening state of paycheck-earning New York and found an easy sell by promising relief to people who need it. And, damn, do people ever need help.
Though less than 20% of the city’s registered Democrats turned out to vote, the message resonated across racial, ethnic and gender lines — with de Blasio running strong against his black rival among blacks and his gay rival among gays.
No wonder. While the city has more working men and women than ever, earning enough to pay for the basics, including decent housing, has become ever more difficult. Jobs paying $ 50,000 and above are vanishing while positions with salaries of $ 35,000 and less are booming. There’s shrinking call for $ 60,000-a-year construction and factory workers but high demand for home health aides and retail clerks on subsistence salaries of $ 30,000.
Raises are hard to come by. The unemployment rate has topped a crushing 8% for more than four years — and reaches a killing 15% when you count tens of thousands of the idled who have given up looking for jobs and tens of thousands more who have been forced into part-time slots.
One in five New Yorkers is classified as poor while hundreds of thousands of middle-class families might as well be when fully half of middle-income families cannot afford the city’s median rent, rising property values have priced them out of buying and, for too many, the cost of housing makes up 50% of the cost of living.
Mark Bonifacio/New York Daily News
Bill de Blasio chants at a rally outside of Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn.
In that painful environment, de Blasio’s tale-of-two-cities pitch — one for the rich and one for the rest of us — resonated powerfully, not least because the median wage for the upscale has increased by 17% these last few years while low and middle salaries fell. Cast Billionaire Bloomberg as the villain — better yet prod him into sourly attributing de Blasio’s success to his winsome son’s skin tone — and he surged further.
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