NYC Mayor Thoughts
As I have watched Zohran Mamdani’s ascent, I have found two things very appealing. One is that he is smart and thinks well on his feet. I realized, watching a clip the other day, that he reminds me of when I first started paying attention to Pete Butttegieg–just smarter and more articulate than a typical politician and able to speak in a way that doesn’t sound cliched. The second is that he has a clear and positive vision for governing. He actually wants to do things that improve the lives of citizens.
Now, he is not my ideologically perfect fit. I am skeptical, for example, for a number of reasons that rent control is a good idea. But it seems worth noting that it isn’t like the notion of rent control is something he is seeking to implement, but rather is a policy that dates back to the 1940s.
The other major planks, free buses, public childcare, and publicly run groceries, hardly strike me as a communist revolution. The devil is, as with all public policy, in the details, especially funding.
I would have voted for Mamdani had I lived in NYC. At a bare minimum, the other choices were a disgraced, arrogant sex pest whose closing argument was based on fear-mongering about Trump taking over the city, a gimmick candidate, and the corrupt outgoing mayor. As such, what other option did one have apart from abstention?
To dovetail with a previous post on this topic, I have doubts that Mamdani will be able to pull off his goals, and I also think that pundits, both on the left and right (broadly defined), will draw too many conclusions from the win. This is not to say, by the way, that there are no lessons to learn from his campaign, nor that there will not be lessons to learn from his time in office.
I will note this, in terms of a lesson from his campaign: his rhetoric is affecting the current occupant of the White House.
For anyone unaware, “affordability” has been Mamdani’s watchword.
So, look, we wait and see about how all this plays out. The mayoralty of NYC is a hard job, and so we shall see what Mamdani can do with it. I am, I think understandably, skeptical that he will be able to accomplish his stated goals, but he now has the opportunity to try.
A lot of this made me think about what past mayors of NYC have done after their time in office. On paper, being mayor of NYC should be a springboard to state, if not national, office. It is the case in Latin America, for example, (Mexico and Colombia come to mind), where being the mayor of Mexico City or Bogotá is a springboard to more prominent jobs, to include the presidency (recognizing that Mamdani, as an immigrant, cannot aspire to being POTUS).
It is interesting to me that none of the mayors of NYC in my lifetime have gone on to elected office after their time in Gracie Mansion. It is true that Rudy Giuliani ran in the 2008 Republican primary, and Michael Bloomberg ran in the Democratic primary in 2020, as did Bill De Blasio (both briefly in their own ways). None came close to their party’s nomination. De Blasio made a brief run at Congress in 2022 as well.
Here’s the list in reverse chronological order.
- Eric Adams (2022-2025): prediction: Fox News Contributor.
- Bill de Blasio (2014-2021): failed congressional and presidential nomination runs.
- Michael Bloomberg (2002-2013, 3 terms): failed run at presidential nomination.
- Rudy Giuliani (1994-2001, 2 terms): failed run at presidential nomination.
- David Dinkins (1990-1993): did not pursue a further political career.
- Ed Koch (1978-1989, 3 terms): no further political pursuits, but did have two years as the judge on The People’s Court.
- Abraham Beame (1974-1977): no post-mayor political career.
- John Lindsay (1966-1973, 2 terms): failed presidential nomination bid.
It is striking that none of the mayors in this period were able to translate that office into any additional political success, even ones who achieved a sort of celebrity status (Koch, Giuliani, and Bloomberg).
I think this speaks to the specificity of the New York City political context. Being Mayor definitely elevates one’s profile, but history dictates that it is not an especially good springboard for additional office. This also suggests that translating the unique political brew of winning and governing in NYC is not, even in the abstract, likely for statewide or national politics. I think it also speaks to how hard the job is.
None of that says anything about whether or not Mamdani can get free buses in NYC, but it does provide a context for whether his win is a pathway for Democrats nationwide.
********************@
Given that he lacks the financial power to achieve his most grand goals, he still has an opportunity to make life better for the typical city resident. I’ll repeat something that I wrote the other day, that whatever reason that the voters elected him, when Mandani is sworn in they will judge his success as to whether they perceive that the streets are safe, the garbage is picked up, the streets plowed and the kids educated.
He could do well by spending sometime speaking with successful progressive mayors like Michele Wu in Boston, Brandon Scott in Baltimore and after stumbling out the gate, Brandon Johnson in Chicago.
With the exception of De Blasio, those who did seek higher office focused solely on The Big Job. De Blasio may not have been able to pull of a congressional primary win, but I would wager that if more of them focused on Legislative or Gubernatorial races we’d be seeing more post-mayoral success.
Big ideas are great but what he needs to demonstrate is basic competence. If he can do that and then add in some, even just parts, of his big ideas he is a winner. If he gets some of his big ideas in but the city doesnt run well he is doomed.
Steve
@Neil Hudelson: On the one hand, fair enough, maybe they all made poor calculations. But it is still telling, in my mind, that in roughly 60 years, none of the mayors of NYC made the calculation to run for Governor, Senate, or even Congress.
Rudy flirted with the Senate in 2000, but did not run.
MAGA is finding out now the problem with running on extravagant promises a politician cannot keep, doubly so given Trump’s unfixable deficiencies of morals, ethics, basic character, appropriate temperament, and competence.
Now the inexperienced Mamdani shouldn’t be as awful since he’s not a malignant narcissist and insecure, pathological lying pedophile. If things go well, it’s possible he could upend national politics by transforming New York into a modern socialist paradise with free food, free transportation, and free childcare.
The more likely best case scenario is that Mamdani turns out — like the beloved aforementioned Michelle Wu — to be a relentlessly competent progressive administrator. That would be a big win in my book; any mayor who could solve New York’s atrocious sanitation problem would automatically be an all-time hero. But given the expectations he’s set, would competence alone be enough of a win for his pro-socialist fans?
Many liberals never forgave Obama for just being a decent, competent, flawed MOR president — not the Nobel Prize worthy transformative hopey changey peacenik Magic Negro he ran as. Especially since Hillary offered competent, experienced, humanly-flawed MOR 90s nostalgia, and Obama had ripped the 2008 nod from her by insisting this was not good enough.
@Sleeping Dog: @steve222: Indeed–but part of my core point is that getting a massive urban center like NYC to “run well” is very, very, very hard.
de Blasio passed universal Pre-K and it’s been very popular. Mamdani wants to expand it to universal childcare, and that would be way bigger than a few grocery stores. Bill was not a great politician. If he delivers on universal childcare, everyone will be hearing about that forever.
Overall, the big story is that Mamdani isn’t Buttigieg, who went from McKinsey to the military. The nationwide hope is that he succeeds and social workers and organizers prove to be acceptable pathways into liberal-left politics. just like consulting, prosecuting, the CIA, or the military. America is so biased against things that aren’t ‘tough’ and ‘masculine’. It’s hard not to believe that a gay man like Buttigieg felt he had to prove himself politically by joining the military. Mamdani didn’t do that. He didn’t calculate that a Muslim man needs to prove his cred by signing up for the FBI.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Well, New York has never really been run well, and the grand disasters involve things far beyond the control of a single mayor. We’re talking about a place which has millions depending on a minute by minute basis on public transit, and yet the city has no control over the MTA’s budget. And that’s intentional.
@Modulo Myself:
He might have if his vision board had included dreams of winning Pennsylvania and Arizona, not just Bushwick and Chelsea.
@Modulo Myself: Exactly.
And hence the long odds and no post-mayoralty political careers
I too would have voted for Mamdani had I been a resident of NYC, and, given the other sadly deficient candidates. However, it is not encouraging that Mamdani, or any other similar political candidate for a managerial/administrative post, is lacking extensive experience in things managerial, financial, and logistical, that would translate into the office they seek to fill.
On-the-job-training for our elected administrative posts comes a high cost both in terms of time and resources. Failures resulting from the steep learning curve also reaps cynicism in the body politic.
I anticipate there will be much made of missteps by the knee-jerk reactionaries, with excessive misrepresentation of facts and perhaps a bit of skullduggery by those who need him to fail.
But I do wish Mamdani well, and a thoroughly successful term which will be more likely if he maintains an eye on the “bottom line” realities and logistical choke points.
As to the utter “communist” epithet hogwash:
Europeans recognize Zohran Mamdani’s supposedly radical policies as ‘normal’
MAGA traffics in “red scare” revivalism — as well as other 1950’s artifacts like male chauvinism and occasionally slicked back hair. Jeeze, can we just not get back to the future present, and smell the globally warming coffee.
There are many power centers in the NYC government, never mind the private sector. Just dealing with the police and sanitation workers is tough enough.
What I find amusing is that the Republicans in other parts of the country are running against the newly elected Mamdani as if he has anything to do with their local issues and policies. Ted Cruz, excrement that he is, is all over social media, calling him a communist jihadi as if that makes any coherent sense at all. It is political Tourette’s.
BTW, I got curious and decided to look up which branch of Islam does Mamdani practice. For those that are curious, here are a couple of articles. Sounds like not the scary jihadist Sunni branch but more open and liberal South Asian versions.
https://www.beliefnet.com/celebrity-faith-database/m/zohran-mamdani.aspx
What Mamdani’s Muslim-Shiite faith means
Zohran Mamdani becomes New York Mayor: What is his religion?
As my wife posted on social media…
Mamdani, unlike Trump, doesn’t have a servile legislative or judicial branch that will cater to his every whim.
I’ll wait and see what happens.
He’s smart and wants to help people.
That’s two strides in the right direction.
I do know that the same people calling Mamdani a Communist think Trump is a Christian.
Also, as many of you know, I have deep ties to NYC.
Most of my cousins, an interesting mix of personality types and politics, all openly voted for Mamdani.
As one cousin said to me, “I voted to Mamdani as a “fuck you” to Trump.”
Another one told me, “I voted for the Socialist because I like the shit he’s proposing.”
I’m surprised two of my cousins voted for Mamdani because they have strong anti-muslim views, due to us losing another cousin on 9/11, yet they still voted for him due to hatred of Trump and his policies.
Interesting….
@Modulo Myself:
Putting on my absolute crank hat for a moment:
This is one of the things that is driving me to become a Chicago* Separatist. I am beyond sick and tired of listening to Ex-urban and Rural citizens absolutely trash places like Chicago and NYC and then hamstring us from solving any of our problems. Chicago has this issue with IL underfunding the CTA and CPS. You don’t want our money and taxes, great, let us keep them.
I am 100% a crank on this issue.
*my preference for the Republic of Chicago would be Cook and the Collar Counties, plus Lake and Porter Counties, Indiana. Greater Chicago would also include Kenosha, Racine, and Milwaukee Counties, Wisconsin.
@Steven L. Taylor:..none of the mayors of NYC made the calculation to run for Governor, Senate, or even Congress.
I will pick this nit again.
The United States Senate is the United States Congress.
Source:
@Sleeping Dog:
@EddieInCA:
I think one of the things that I am most aggravated about is how the GOP is grinding me into socialist. There is enough money for OpenAI to lose $48 BILLION a year and produce nothing of value. There is all the money in the world for anything Elon Musk wants. To demolish a 1/3rd of the White House. We have all the money in the world to bailout squirrelly little perverts to hide in their mansions and demand we adore them for their perverse greed and lies.
@Gregory Lawrence Brown: I tell you what people who write for free love, is some picked nits.
It all comes down to money.
New York seems to have had problems affording its prior levels of provision ever since the late 1970’s after the decline of local industry.
Given that its tax levels are already pretty high, and companies and indivualdual paying them tending to either avoid by financial engineering, or escape by moving, betting on a fiscal bonanza seems a bit unlikely.
So, New York as Utopia: probably not.
But if Mamdami just combines being an effective city manager with increasing housing, that should be a reasonable enough outcome.
As an aside: being a Marxist communist and an Islamist would seem a bit ideologiaclly fraught.
Therefore the obvious conclusion is, he’s most likely neither of thos things.
Just a social-democrat who would be in the mainstream of any European centre-left party.
An interesting artifact from pre-NYC mayoral election:
Columbia’s Republican students are excited about Curtis Sliwa. Here’s why.
One might expect Columbia’s students to be among the brighter bulbs in the box. Does not bode well for our future. Note the lack of substance in their attempts to articulate support for Sliwa and rejection of Mamdani. What the heck is going on in our American educational process these days? Too much homeschooling? You can’t sustain civilization on empty memes.
I don’t know about Colombia, but the mayor of Mex City is more like a state governor than a city mayor. For one thing, the city is huge and shares streets and other infrastructure with the State of Mexico. For another, there are actual rural areas within city limits (mostly to the south). And I mean working farms that raise produce.
And then there’s the matter of party structure and all. Still, the last two presidents were mayors of Mex City, but not all other former mayors ran for any other office. One who did, Cuauhtémoc Cardenas, los the presidency to Vicente Fox in 2000.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Absolutely
@DK:
If Adams is given any credit for his administration, it will be that he got most of the trash into bins rather than plastic bags. But yeah, it’s still horrible.
@JohnSF:
Except, they don’t, they really don’t move away.
Hell, Ken Griffin, LOUDLY whined about how he was leaving Chicago for Miami (and did), but he’s still fucking all over Chicago. He just can’t stay the fuck away.
@Sleeping Dog:
Cuomo was talking about getting rid of those. I wonder how much that effected his campaign.
@Kathy:
Admitting at the start that I know very little about Mexico, I just looked it up and apparently it has a larger population than every Mexican state. NYC has a larger population than 38 US states.
@Beth:
Heinlein had a geographically ill-defined, authoritarian Chicago Imperium in the balkanized North America in his novel “Friday.”
@Kylopod:
I was about to go into the recent change of name of the Federal District for Mexico City. The latter previously was the term for the whole metro area encompassing the District and surrounding municipalities in the State of Mexico.
But you’re right. the 9.2 million people in Mex City proper make up a larger population than most US states.
That’s why I joke about passing more people on the street on the way to work than the population of some small “cities.”
Anyway, the metro area clocks in at about 21.8 million people.
@Steven L. Taylor:
You write for free love?
No money might be exchanged, but if you have to write for it, is it really free?
@Gustopher: Ha!
@Gustopher:
It’s still better than paid lust.
@Beth:
The figures for the NYC vs out-of-city suburbs populations and income levels suggest there has been considerable movement.
There is little doubt that the overall NYC tax income relative to costs has changed for the worse since the period prior to 1975.
The obvious solutions are region-based taxation, and a higher national level of corporation tax.
But I suspect holding ones breath while waiting might not be sensible.
What mega-city mayors have actually parlayed that position into higher office (query whether Congressman even meets that criteria – plenty of mid sized city mayors did that)? Newsom became governor. Feinstein became a Senator. There anre’t very many examples.
Some if it is probably the difference in running a campaign for a single city versus state or nation wide positions. There’s the rural-urban gap for one thing.
@DK:
Can we pause for a moment to stare with wonder and contempt at the Trump unfixable deficiencies on display in his TS post shared in the OP? We have our first indication of how Orange POTUS is going to respond to the signal from voter’s that his administration is directionally wrong on kitchen table issues. And it’s not going to be course correction. No dialing down of tariffs to mitigate the inflationary impact on cost of goods. No concessions the ACA subsidies. No plans on soaring energy costs.
Nope. Instead, Trump is going to claim he is already delivering on Affordability through a BOOMING economy with Costs coming way down despite what your lying eyes are telling you as you shop for groceries and pay your utility bills. It’s going to be extravagant promises “kept” through pure post-fact gaslighting. It remains to be seen if MAGA will actually find out the problem now.
@Scott F.:
El Taco has already claimed that. At best, or worst, he’ll claim it again. 😉
More seriously, schools should tech the basics of finance and economics. Nothing fancy, just how crippling compound interests can be on debt, and in particular how inflation works
Specifically that some commodities are volatile, like oil and food, and its prices fluctuate for various reasons. But that inflation increases all prices and these are the basis for such prices going forward. That prices don’t come down if the inflation rate goes down (they just go up more slowly).
El Taco did not run on lowering inflation. He ran on lowering prices. I truly wonder how many fewer people would have voted for him if they knew such a thing is just not possible.
@Pylonius: This is kind of my point: the media, because of when the election happens and because so many of them are proximate to NYC, blow the office out of proportion.
@Beth:
And yet I no longer live in 13% state income tax California, but in 0% state income tax Nevada. Nevertheless, you’re right, we are outliers. I’ve lived in more than 50 homes, in 14 states and three foreign countries, and we do not put down roots. And we work wherever we can carry a laptop. It’s not surprising we left LA, it was surprising we stayed as long as we did. And of course we are currently working on going Expat.
But 99% of people have roots and local connections and in NYC a love for restaurants, theaters, clubs and the general excitement of one of the greatest cities on Earth. Not to mention that for normal people, even normal rich people, relocating is a huge hassle. I’d be amazed if 2% of the rich left New York in the next four years.
Being president has at least extended Trump’s vocabulary. For instance there was “groceries” – a “very useful word” he told us. And now:
@Michael Reynolds:
The other option for the reasonably rich in NYC would surely be a clueful tax lawyer.
“What, me wealthy? Why I’m merely a self-employed contractor for a company incorporated in North Carolina, and owned by some folks in the Cayman Islands, who pay me expenses very stingily. Look, they even own this apartment they rent to me! What, the board happens to be my Aunt Ethel, her cat, and the janitor? My, will such coincidences never cease?”
@Kathy & @Ken_L:
Trump’s entire existence, from his inexplicable electability as a political leader devolving back to the OG grifts of Trump, Inc., is built on the premise his customers (or voters) don’t know that the things he is selling them are “just not possible.”
Trump Steaks tasting better than the local butcher? Not possible.
Trump University will put you together with his experts so TU students are ensured to be independently wealthy entrepreneurs like Donald. Not possible.
The Trump Wall will stop illegal immigration and Mexico will pay for it. Not possible.
Trump Tariffs will lower prices. Not possible.
Trump will gaslight the results. Same as it ever was.
@Scott F.:
No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people, right?
Except, this old saw applies to just about every other country in the world. The average person is, well, of average intelligence. The problem is they are of average knowledge as well.
People tend to confuse intelligence with knowledge. I know people think I’m smarter than I am because I’ve a broad base of knowledge. I’m not. I think at best I’m on the upper end or average or maybe a bit above it*. But I read a lot and have a decent average memory, so I know a lot of stuff.
It’s not as though one has to think hard and deep about most things in life. Just a little critical thought is all it takes most of the time, especially involving politics. Provided you have the knowledge base to understand such things and place them in context.
*My parents told me a bunch of times I scored “high” on an IQ test when I was very young. I recall a lot of visits to psychologists in my childhood, but not why or what took place (other than pointless talk therapy that went on until junior high school).
One time cleaning out some old papers my mom threw away, I found a written evaluation about me from some time in the 70s, which seemed to support their contention (they did get right I’m an introvert).
I don’t know. I haven’t taken an IQ test I can recall, and I’m not particularly interested in taking one.