For all the back-to-the-future chatter about the “bad old days” or “good old days” (depending on who you ask), the past won’t be prelude for Bill de Blasio.
After 20 years of “emergency” non-Democratic leaders, New York City, always a fairly liberal town, now belongs wholly to the left in a way it may never have before.
Aided by a national press eager to portray him as the face of a rising progressive wave, de Blasio has framed his 50-point win in November as a sweeping mandate for change — despite record low turnout, Democrats’ overwhelming voter advantage here and polls showing most New Yorkers fairly happy with the policies of the last administration.
De Blasio first made his bones working for David Dinkins, our last Democratic mayor, but he’s inheriting a very different city and moment . Dinkins, after his surprise primary win over three-term mayor Ed Koch, barely edged out Rudy Giuliani in November only to discover he’d won control over a city on the brink of bankruptcy. He also faced a City Council speaker, Peter Vallone, who represented the city’s then larger, more politically potent and fairly conservative outer-borough middle class, plus Rudy in the wings.
With no crisis this year (and with Rudy and Mike having failed to leave any political operation behind them), de Blasio — aided by a clear message, generous outside money and some good luck — navigated his way through a crowded primary field before crushing a lackluster Republican.
Not only did Democrats win every consequential city office, but farther left Dems bested more centrist ones in most every primary contest — as evidenced by the rise of the City Council’s progressive caucus at the expense of the county bosses, who until now had given the outer boroughs some real political heft (and, more significantly for the bosses, patronage).
So, unlike Dinkins, de Blasio has the run of a fairly healthy city and no local political opposition on the horizon.
He has even interceded in the City Council speaker contest, which mayors have traditionally kept their distance from, as he aims to cash in on his win by elevating labor-preferred candidate Melissa Mark-Viverito to be his junior partner.
Here, the new mayor seems to be following the example of Bloomberg, who partnered for seven years with Speaker Christine Quinn, who contained the Council’s farther left plans on his behalf — an arrangement de Blasio bitterly objected to.
Judging from his appointments and actions so far, the new mayor also seems to have absorbed the object lesson of his predecessor: So long as crime is down and the budget is healthy , you’re free to experiment on social and development policies and to push ahead of the polls.
But as we saw under Quinn and Bloomberg, government without ideological checks and balances is prone to significant blind spots that produce real anger among those unseen. The hurt, resentful rhetoric of many of the speakers at de Blasio’s inauguration was a sign of the pressure on his left for a tyranny of the new majority that could needlessly punish charter-school parents, developers, gentrifiers and others for their profits under previous administrations.
With no political pressure on his right, that will be hard for de Blasio to resist.
On the flip side, the union leaders who got nowhere with the last administration are expecting big things from this one. After five years without contracts, they’ve been waiting patiently for a Democratic mayor to negotiate with in expectation of as much as $ 7 billion in back pay. Since taking office, de Blasio has repeatedly shared the stage with labor bosses, and declared the interests of their members to be all but identical with those of the city at large.
They’re not. That $ 7 billion, for instance, would pay for more than a dozen years of the new universal pre-k and after-school programs de Blasio vowed to provide and insists he needs a new tax to fund.
For all of de Blasio’s promises, finally, mayors can only do about as well as the stock market. Our growing wealth and widening inequality under Bloomberg had less to with him than with the zero-interest-rate federal policies that have been bad for America, but very good for the big banks and Wall St. firms our tax coffers depend on.
And the same Fed-inflated bubble fueled the construction boon here and priced many New Yorkers out of their homes as the global super-wealthy sheltered their dollars in our real estate.
When Washington lets interest rates rise — and it will during this mayor’s term — it may turn out that neither Bloomberg nor de Blasio will have set much aside in the fat years for the coming lean ones.
hsiegel@nydailynews.com
http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info/?p=20312
via Great Local News: New York http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info
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