I've written, but not published, a long piece on this. I might send it your way! A few thoughts:
1) I don think we can give Adams credit on public safety. Crime rates are dropping nationwide. Meanwhile, he allowed endemic corruption to take hold across NYPD leadership. Just look at his empowerment of Maddrey, despite the knowledge that he'd been sexually harassing underlings. The appointment of Tisch and the house cleaning she performed were despite Adams and at the direction of the governor... not because of Adams.
2) I'll give him the sanitation stuff. If he hadn't done all the corruption, trash is probably what he'd be running on.
3) His work on homelessness is listed as a positive, yet notes that problem has grown since the pandemic. So his approach is clearly not working.
4) The housing focus is great and it is still a drop in the bucket for what is needed in the city.
5) He had no vision on education. Everything positive that was accomplished happened because of David Banks. They severely bungled the mayoral control fight in their first year, trading it for a catastrophic class size law. They were more focused on vegan meals and deep breathing.
6) I really dont think you can give him any credit on governance. He cried wolf and cut budgets several times only to reverse himself when it was evident that the cuts were not needed. Each round of fake cuts threw agencies into chaos. All the good the flowed from the admin happened in spite of him or was done by people the governor said he had to appointment.
Re: public safety, I don’t think Adams gets credit for being pragmatic about jail closures when his admin has done next to nothing to advance the plan in his four years. MOCJ is a shell of itself under Adams, not to mention his budget shenanigans every year celebrating the restoration of proposed cuts as public safety wins. If I have to give credit to Adams for anything, it’s his investments in COLAs for human service workers - a big victory for the contracted nonprofits that do the most to move the trends. That’s still not nearly enough to balance out your first paragraph tho!
I’m inclined to agree with this but I just want to point out that we live in an age of extremely low trust in institutions and the “establishment”. I worry that the hypocrisy of overlooking soft corruption like Eric Adams and previously Hilary Clinton contributed to large scale cynicism among masses, allowing for someone as nakedly corrupt as Trump to become president. It is astounding to me how Trump is able to get away with the crypto grift and just plain bribery. The only explanation is that the public believes everyone is corrupt and with people like you making cases for why we should overlook Eric Adams corruption, we are not exactly putting up a good faith effort to restore public trust and civic institutional trust.
I agree with each and every point but I will be voting for Zohran for 2 reasons 1.) The (far?) left needs to get in touch with reality of governing, and their most high profile star becoming humbled will allow for the new generation supporters to understand why governing is hard and yelling from the sidelines is easy. 2.) we need to restore trust in institutions and put up an affirmative case why Trump naked corruption is disqualifying, we need to clean our own house and Eric Adams needs to go for us to have credibility with the public to prosecute that case
Long term thinking about national politics and coalitions is important. IMO had Bernie been the nominee in 2016 and lost the general election to Trump, the party would be in a better place today. Zohran is a national figure and the amount of money being used to defeat him by Rs and centrist Dems is going to cause lingering bitterness for decades. “Vote blue no matter who” when Dems elect a centrist and try to unite the party is not going to work. They will remember when centrist Ds refused to rally behind the Dem nominee when it was the lefts guy.
The party spent the last eight years bending over backwards to appease the academic far left and in the process lost the working class and moderate vote to trump, to the point where it doesn't have any sort of viable coalition anymore. if they want to win (let alone govern well if they do), it's time to something different.
If you want to make an affirmative anti-trump case, empowering the anti-police pro-intifada far left is the worst possible thing you could do. Mamdani is a walking ad for Republicans.
I agree with you on anti-police vulnerability, but not on Israel. IMO Dems have lots of room to move left on Israel and capture a ton of Obama-Trump voters who don’t want to send money to foreign countries, even though they don’t necessarily care about Palestinians. I think they should move to the center on some issues like immigration and maybe cultural ones, but there is absolutely room to move left on the economy and even on Israel. Just like Trump moved the party to the right on immigration and the left on social security/medicare back in 2016.
It’s just funny that the 2 issues where the Dem electeds are most out of sync with their base is trans youth sports and Israel, and it’s in the opposite direction. They can’t win if they try to run on “intifada” but all the polling shows pro-Israel sentiment is much more pervasive in elite circles than among the public.
This is mostly wrong - while if you ask people about being pro Israel it's slid down, most people still don't like the pro-terrorist protestors (and Mamdani isn't just anti-israel, he's probably *globalizing* the intifada - which New York of all places has experienced personally).
There's also a moral issue with accepting open racism in your party - historically Democrats have based much of their identity on claiming the moral high ground. Embracing racism is the sort of populism that eventually costs you your identity even if it gives some temporary populist energy.
Our country is headed nowhere good. It's only a matter of time, especially now that the OBBB has become law, until the incompetence, blind rage, nihilism, corruption, and chaos of MAGA bring the country to its knees. The question is simple, as I see it: who do you trust to lead you at a time like that? Who is likelier to keep the city from coming apart at the seams? It's no contest.
Given a choice between an incumbent with a mostly solid track record and a challenger whose policies are universally agreed on to be terrible even by his defenders (whose case for him is "he probably won't actually implement them"), who's career is "trust fund baby turned failed rapper turned one-term do nothing legislator who constantly missed votes", the choice seems incredibly easy? And that's without even getting into the support for terrorism and antisemitism.
Great piece. I’m not entirely sure about the first paragraph. I never thought I’d be the kind of person to say this but I have a sense that many of the gut reactions to Adam’s speaking style seem to me classist and dare I say a bit prejudiced…?
The City Charter Commission and new trash bins under Adams have been good too.
I've written, but not published, a long piece on this. I might send it your way! A few thoughts:
1) I don think we can give Adams credit on public safety. Crime rates are dropping nationwide. Meanwhile, he allowed endemic corruption to take hold across NYPD leadership. Just look at his empowerment of Maddrey, despite the knowledge that he'd been sexually harassing underlings. The appointment of Tisch and the house cleaning she performed were despite Adams and at the direction of the governor... not because of Adams.
2) I'll give him the sanitation stuff. If he hadn't done all the corruption, trash is probably what he'd be running on.
3) His work on homelessness is listed as a positive, yet notes that problem has grown since the pandemic. So his approach is clearly not working.
4) The housing focus is great and it is still a drop in the bucket for what is needed in the city.
5) He had no vision on education. Everything positive that was accomplished happened because of David Banks. They severely bungled the mayoral control fight in their first year, trading it for a catastrophic class size law. They were more focused on vegan meals and deep breathing.
6) I really dont think you can give him any credit on governance. He cried wolf and cut budgets several times only to reverse himself when it was evident that the cuts were not needed. Each round of fake cuts threw agencies into chaos. All the good the flowed from the admin happened in spite of him or was done by people the governor said he had to appointment.
Re: public safety, I don’t think Adams gets credit for being pragmatic about jail closures when his admin has done next to nothing to advance the plan in his four years. MOCJ is a shell of itself under Adams, not to mention his budget shenanigans every year celebrating the restoration of proposed cuts as public safety wins. If I have to give credit to Adams for anything, it’s his investments in COLAs for human service workers - a big victory for the contracted nonprofits that do the most to move the trends. That’s still not nearly enough to balance out your first paragraph tho!
I’m inclined to agree with this but I just want to point out that we live in an age of extremely low trust in institutions and the “establishment”. I worry that the hypocrisy of overlooking soft corruption like Eric Adams and previously Hilary Clinton contributed to large scale cynicism among masses, allowing for someone as nakedly corrupt as Trump to become president. It is astounding to me how Trump is able to get away with the crypto grift and just plain bribery. The only explanation is that the public believes everyone is corrupt and with people like you making cases for why we should overlook Eric Adams corruption, we are not exactly putting up a good faith effort to restore public trust and civic institutional trust.
I agree with each and every point but I will be voting for Zohran for 2 reasons 1.) The (far?) left needs to get in touch with reality of governing, and their most high profile star becoming humbled will allow for the new generation supporters to understand why governing is hard and yelling from the sidelines is easy. 2.) we need to restore trust in institutions and put up an affirmative case why Trump naked corruption is disqualifying, we need to clean our own house and Eric Adams needs to go for us to have credibility with the public to prosecute that case
I am going to vote for Zohran so the city goes to shit so far leftist shut up?? Are you a serious person.
Long term thinking about national politics and coalitions is important. IMO had Bernie been the nominee in 2016 and lost the general election to Trump, the party would be in a better place today. Zohran is a national figure and the amount of money being used to defeat him by Rs and centrist Dems is going to cause lingering bitterness for decades. “Vote blue no matter who” when Dems elect a centrist and try to unite the party is not going to work. They will remember when centrist Ds refused to rally behind the Dem nominee when it was the lefts guy.
The party spent the last eight years bending over backwards to appease the academic far left and in the process lost the working class and moderate vote to trump, to the point where it doesn't have any sort of viable coalition anymore. if they want to win (let alone govern well if they do), it's time to something different.
If you want to make an affirmative anti-trump case, empowering the anti-police pro-intifada far left is the worst possible thing you could do. Mamdani is a walking ad for Republicans.
I agree with you on anti-police vulnerability, but not on Israel. IMO Dems have lots of room to move left on Israel and capture a ton of Obama-Trump voters who don’t want to send money to foreign countries, even though they don’t necessarily care about Palestinians. I think they should move to the center on some issues like immigration and maybe cultural ones, but there is absolutely room to move left on the economy and even on Israel. Just like Trump moved the party to the right on immigration and the left on social security/medicare back in 2016.
It’s just funny that the 2 issues where the Dem electeds are most out of sync with their base is trans youth sports and Israel, and it’s in the opposite direction. They can’t win if they try to run on “intifada” but all the polling shows pro-Israel sentiment is much more pervasive in elite circles than among the public.
This is mostly wrong - while if you ask people about being pro Israel it's slid down, most people still don't like the pro-terrorist protestors (and Mamdani isn't just anti-israel, he's probably *globalizing* the intifada - which New York of all places has experienced personally).
There's also a moral issue with accepting open racism in your party - historically Democrats have based much of their identity on claiming the moral high ground. Embracing racism is the sort of populism that eventually costs you your identity even if it gives some temporary populist energy.
Our country is headed nowhere good. It's only a matter of time, especially now that the OBBB has become law, until the incompetence, blind rage, nihilism, corruption, and chaos of MAGA bring the country to its knees. The question is simple, as I see it: who do you trust to lead you at a time like that? Who is likelier to keep the city from coming apart at the seams? It's no contest.
Given a choice between an incumbent with a mostly solid track record and a challenger whose policies are universally agreed on to be terrible even by his defenders (whose case for him is "he probably won't actually implement them"), who's career is "trust fund baby turned failed rapper turned one-term do nothing legislator who constantly missed votes", the choice seems incredibly easy? And that's without even getting into the support for terrorism and antisemitism.
Great piece. I’m not entirely sure about the first paragraph. I never thought I’d be the kind of person to say this but I have a sense that many of the gut reactions to Adam’s speaking style seem to me classist and dare I say a bit prejudiced…?