The New Yorker: A True Liberal At City Hall

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http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2013/11/11/131111taco_talk_cassidy


Liberal Agendas
by John Cassidy
November 11, 2013


New York is often described as a liberal city, but it is a long time since it has had an avowedly liberal Democrat as mayor. David Dinkins governed as a moderate, and so did Ed Koch. Abe Beame, who held office before Koch, was a Brooklyn clubhouse pol of the old school. (John Lindsay, Beame’s predecessor, was a liberal, but he was a Republican when he entered City Hall—as was the great Fiorello LaGuardia.) Now comes Bill de Blasio, who, on the eve of the election, was trouncing the Republican candidate, Joe Lhota, by almost forty per cent, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. From Pelham Bay to Staten Island, New Yorkers seemed to be ignoring Lhota’s warnings that a de Blasio victory would return their neighborhoods to the days of rampant crime and burned-out buildings. The voters are “not caught up in what the city was like twenty years ago,” de Blasio said last week, in the final mayoral debate. “They want to talk about solutions today.”

That, certainly, is true, and the six-foot-five resident of Park Slope has been commendably clear about his priorities throughout the campaign. During the debate, he reiterated that his primary aim was to “address the inequalities of this city.” Last year, the poorest twenty per cent of the city’s households earned, on average, $8,993, and the richest five per cent earned, on average, $436,931. De Blasio spoke again of “doing something very meaningful to increase wages and benefits”; expanding pre-K and after-school programs; repairing the relationship between the police and the residents of many communities; and making “substantial progress” toward his goal of constructing two hundred thousand affordable housing units.

Since the days of Bill Clinton and the New Democrats, it has been a totem of faith in some liberal-progressive circles that the key to lifting up the lower ranks lies in downplaying social and economic conflicts, cozying up to business interests, and tackling inequality covertly, through largely invisible subsidies such as the Earned Income Tax Credit. De Blasio, in pledging to raise taxes on the rich to finance his education programs, has challenged this formula, and turned himself into the standard-bearer for what some see as a new era of urban populism.

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Will de Blasio be able to make the step up from critic and advocate to leader and administrator? Will he be able to reach agreements with the municipal unions and wring out of the budget more services for the city’s residents? Can he persuade Albany to raise taxes on the rich? Does he have the flexibility to deal with upsets, such as last week’s federal appeals-court decision to block a court order reforming the stop-and-frisk policy? Some people remain skeptical, especially the establishment types who would gladly have handed Bloomberg yet another four years. But, given the skillful campaign that de Blasio has run and the huge mandate that a record-breaking victory would confer, he could well prove to be a more formidable mayor than they suggest. In any case, a de Blasio mayoralty will be widely viewed as a test case for liberal reformers everywhere. ♦