DE BLASIO: TOO BIG FOR NEW YORK

PORTRAIT OF A BOURGEOIS PROGRESSIVE

1. FAILURE AS A PATH TO POLITICAL SUCCESS

There was once (and perhaps still is) a notorious policy in certain schools to pass along failing students to the next grade to avoid acknowledging, explaining and recording their inadequate performances. In the corporate business world an analogous convention to promote individuals to positions beyond their capacities was titled the “Peter Principle.”

The same dubious practice also evidently applies to politics. Bill De Blasio is no managerial mage. Under his stewardship, New York continues to limp along like Ratso Rizzo in the classic Midnight Cowboy. De Blasio has presided over a city with a troubled transit system, high levels of evictions and homelessness, and many quality of life issues for urbanites of all strata. Nevertheless, he survived one term and was re-elected by a large majority.

For a corrupt or lackluster “machine” political hack, such dogged survival at the top of this magnificent anthill would come off as an impressive overachievement. But Bill De Blasio is a self-identifying progressive. He is supposed to breathe new life into dormant institutions and improve the existences of the city’s persevering denizens. He hasn’t done this.

Yet, having failed to have much impact on a complex city of eight million constituents across five diverse boroughs, De Blasio is determined to take his dearth of accomplishment to another level, the White House, where he may lavish his progressive lack of progress on 330 million people in 50 diverse states and numerous territories.

Yet before focusing on Bill de Blasio, his background and qualifications for higher office, it is only fair to describe the office he holds.

2. MANAGING A CHRONIC DISEASE

The mayor of New York is the political equivalent of a rheumatologist. He is confronted routinely with chronic and systemic problems he is expected to analyze and deal with but not to solve. Hizzoner is expected to fail, so he cannot disappoint or fall short of expectations. He can do no better than improve certain malfunctions and make others worse. More often than not, even a mayor’s attempts to be innovative result in making people’s lives more difficult.

While the mayor/rheumatologist mulls, putters and prescribes, New York hobbles along with chronic pains and steady decline. Mass-transit runs the gamut between frustrating and deplorable. Traffic is like drying cement. Vehicles of all makes and sizes double-park in the middle of busy thoroughfares, turning boulevards into parking lots and putting other motorists at risk when they are forced to circumvent them into oncoming lanes. Meanwhile, traffic police, who could ease congestion and make traffic flow by putting pressure on double-parkers to move, issue summonses to vehicles parked an inch too close to fire hydrants.

De Blasio did not create New York’s many problems. He only presides over them. And to be fair, since no mayor of New York will solve them, none will be held accountable for an inability to do so. Conversely, if any mayor were to make a palpable difference in New Yorkers’ lives, he would be deemed a miracle worker and receive special attention.

Mayor De Blasio made housing a cornerstone issue. He set out to build or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing; meanwhile, homelessness has surged and become a local epidemic with an estimated 60,000 people in streets and shelters. Low-income housing has fared no better. This mayor has been unable to control the New York City Housing Authority, which prompted the appointment of a federal monitor. Meanwhile, the progressive “green new deal” mayor takes a city-owned SUV 11 miles from his official residence to his old neighborhood gym in Park Slope so he can run on a treadmill everyday.

It has not been all bad news for De Blasio. He has instituted universal pre-kindergarten education and established a citywide ferry system connecting such far-flung destinations as Astoria and Wall Street, Bay Ridge and DUMBO. He has also struck a few blows for social and economic justice, by putting a stop to stop-and-frisk police actions that targeted men of color, championed a law establishing a living wage and mandating paid sick leave for workers.

However, all of these initiatives took place in De Blasio’s first administration. While this mayor showed an aptitude for getting things started, he has not excelled in maintenance and oversight. He considers himself an “idea man” and lacks an appetite for administration and day-to-day operations. This is no small leadership deficit in a city with so many neighborhoods, (micro-cities, really), and such a multitude existing in close proximity.

Everyday life is not sweeping but granular, small—even petty. Improving people’s lives does not demand grandiose visions so much as a myriad of small nuances and adjustments. To know what changes need to be made, a leader must be on the ground, looking, probing, seeing what works and what doesn’t in order to refine and improve.

Yet despite having lived and worked in New York for much of his life, De Blasio does not descend into the marketplace, like Zarathustra, to see how people manage. And this indifference to the perfunctory details of city life has made De Blasio seem more like a name people know than a person in people’s lives. Many New Yorkers are adversely impacted by his mayor’s lack of imagination and sensitivity to the needs of his constituents even if they don’t notice it because they expect so little from their elected officials.

3. A POLITICAL PARADOX: THE BOURGEOIS PROGRESSIVE

One area in which Mayor De Blasio has not thought to make innovations where they are drastically needed is in personal transportation. Due to the poor state of mass-transit, 45% of New Yorkers own and rely on their vehicles. But the city does nothing to make itself a better place for New Yorkers and visitors to operate their cars.

New York steadfastly, conveniently, cynically continues to see itself, sell itself, and organize itself as a mass-transit city. According to this self-image, car ownership is a luxury, though buses crawl at five miles per hour and a subway trip from uptown to downtown takes an hour on a good day, less than a drive to Morristown, New Jersey 40 miles away on the Interstates.

New York City’s antipathy or insensitivity to motorists is clear by the number of parking spaces that have been eliminated in order to accommodate city bike racks, improbable pedestrian malls in the center of the city—both incongruous novelties—and an inordinate number of school zones that have reduced parking spaces to an intolerable scarcity.

Compounding the problem is that anyone from anywhere can park in a neighborhood and leave a vehicle there for a week while neighborhood residents must drive in circles for hours, in vain, to find a spot, wasting energy, polluting air and putting lives on hold.

What does Big-Idea De Blasio propose to relieve these beleaguered neighborhood vehicles owners? If he is stumped by such a mundane problem, he might ask his peer, Mayor Eric Garcetti in Los Angeles, about L.A.’s zone parking, which permits anyone to park most places in the city until a certain evening hour, when only residents of a neighborhood (zone) can park there. This innovation would reduce stress and enhance quality of life for many New York car owners. It would also make their neighborhoods feel more like their own.

New Yorkers with wheels are not the only middle and working class constituency Mayor De Blasio has ignored or potentially offended. He is leading an effort to change admissions criteria for New York’s eight specialized high schools, which are famous (or notorious) for their selectivity and reliance on testing.

While De Blasio is trying to make these schools more inclusive and diverse (Of the 5,000 admissions offers to specialized high schools in 2019, only 370 (.75%) went to Black and Latino students), he has drawn the ire of parents whose children have tested well due to aptitude or focused preparation. These parents believe that broadening admissions standards to special high schools will unfairly diminish their own children’s chances of attending them and dilute the rigorous curriculum.

In addition to De Blasio’s thorny initiative to broaden admissions to the competitive high schools, the School Diversity Advisory Group he empaneled recently recommended eliminating gifted and talented (primary school) programs, in which 16,000 pupils are enrolled, 75% of whom are white or Asian. While “G&T” programs have been an elite and largely segregated track in a two-tier system, even De Blasio’s panel expressed the concern that eradicating G&Ts might prompt a flight of the affected students into private schools and the suburbs, making it even more difficult to achieve De Blasio’s objective of creating high quality integrated schools in New York City schools.

For Bill De Blasio, a bourgeois progressive, the specialized high school and G&T matters cut to the heart of his political paradox. His school diversity panel reported that a system which depends on placing students by academic ability “is not equitable, even if it is effective for some.” Yet De Blasio’s son attended a specialized high school before attending Yale. Will De Blasio, the parent who wanted to do the best for his children, now turn into a dogmatic progressive who prohibits other parents from doing the same? That’s a lot of cognitive dissonance to handle even in New York.

4. WHAT IS DE BLASIO REALLY LIKE?

An honest portrait does not stop at a likeness, or merely reveal what the subject has said and done, or dwell on the status he has achieved. It must also inform one about his character and personality, the effect he has on those who know him. It ought to reveal a particular light in his eyes, the depth of his gaze, the set of his jaw and the manner of his bearing.

By the same token, a political profile is not just the sum of an elected official’s policies and programs; it is na?ve to portray a leader only by the record of what he has proposed and done and failed to do.

Fiorello LaGuardia, for instance, arguably New York’s greatest mayor, presided over many changes and held New Yorkers’ hands in spirit through the Great Depression, yet he is best known for his integrity, his warm and generous personality, his willingness to be close to people, even to read them the Sunday funnies over the radio.

By this qualitative assessment, how does one describe the inner Bill De Blasio? Does he have the common touch? Is he lively and affable or crisp and curt? De Blasio’s most salient attribute is his confidence. He exudes a self-belief that plumbs deeper than his talents. He has an innate certainty of rightness and regardless of how much censure his actions and decisions bring down on him, he deflects it. He is a master of his trade.

Beyond his professional aptitude and competence, one attribute De Blasio has which is critical for success in New York, (though it doesn’t work for everyone) is chutzpah. De Blasio is a Red Sox fan in a city of Yankees and Mets and eats his pizza not by curling it between his fingers like a hammock of sauce and cheese, but with a knife and fork. He does not apologize for anything, nor does he shrink from whatever animadversion his foibles attract. He is also not timid about falling in the paradox many call hypocrisy: as a left-wing Democrat, who is also a landlord, De Blasio raised the rents on his properties while advocating a rent freeze for landlords, in general.

Before putting the final touches on a portrait of De Blasio, one needs to step back and see him in the context of his professional genre, homo politicus. Within that category, two species exist—those political animals who must master and succeed at every job they hold and the others who have an aptitude for getting by within the range of acceptable failure. De Blasio belongs to the latter category.

Perseverance in spite of one’s limitations is a necessary adaptation for a politician in a democratic morass of more needs than resources. The leader of a grand, old city must not merely know the Serenity Prayer by heart but live by it. He must be adept at identifying things he can’t change and diverting attention from them. He must see the underlying propinquity of governance and baseball—both require that one master simple skills, apply them under pressure and expect more failure than success.

This failure factor defeats many idealists who enter public service determined to create résumés based on solid achievements. For others, however, failure as a default is a liberating exemption from proving themselves. Their inability to overcome complexity makes them normal so failure is not their fault. De Blasio thrives in this model to such an extent that he is happy to parlay a handful of achievements in over six years into credentials to run for president.

This may explain how the mayor of this challenged and challenging municipality can be on a deluxe vacation tour, i.e., the presidential race. He can afford this great escape because whether he is in the city or not little matters—New York muddles through with and without him. New Yorkers give De Blasio a pass on his truancy because our colloquial motto for elected officials is one often reserved for physicians: “Just don’t mess us up.”

The best endorsement Gotham can give its peripatetic highfalutin’ mayor is this: he’s a big man who leaves a small footprint. In a city where nearly every innovation makes things worse, having no effect can be a sterling attribute.