It’s hard to believe that it has been 20 years since New York City last had a Democratic mayor. I don’t know what you want to call Michael Bloomberg, but he isn’t a Democrat. I don’t know whether or not many people are thinking about it, but a Democratic mayor is going to be a game-changer in the whole culture of liberalism in this country, much like Gov. Jerry Brown is having a big effect on the left coast. It’s going to matter a lot who wins the mayoral contest and then how they perform once in office. This is a point that Benjamin Wallace-Wells touches upon in his piece on Bill de Blasio and the New York Times. It’s time to start paying attention because Quinnipiac just came out with a poll showing de Blasio in the lead and as the winner of any likely run-off. So, what is de Blasio talking about? Turns out, he’s talking about “neglected hospitals, a swelling poverty rate and a broken prekindergarten system.”
It is the campaign season’s riskiest calculation: that New Yorkers, who have become comfortably accustomed to the smooth-running, highly efficient apparatus of government under Michael R. Bloomberg, are prepared to embrace a much different agenda for City Hall — taxing the rich, elevating the poor and rethinking a Manhattan-centric approach to city services.
In a city that is endlessly congratulating itself for its modern renaissance — record-low crime, unmatched crowds of tourists, streets refashioned in European style — a day on the campaign trail with Mr. de Blasio is a reminder of unaddressed grievances and glaring disparities.
Describing what he calls a “tale of two cities,” rife with inequalities in housing, early childhood education and police tactics, he promised those gathered at the Brooklyn bar that this year’s mayoral race was “going to be a reset moment. A major reset.”
That would be quite a change from the Bloomberg Era, and it might reinvigorate a Democratic Party that has grown complacent about income inequality.
Doubtful.
Wall St. runs the joint. This is an early lead. Wait’ll the real money hits the street. Unless de Blasio has already sold out to big money (You know…like da Peace Prez?) then this is just a little sop thrown to the leftiness upper middle class and those nice little hipster/yupster folk in Brooklyn.
Business as usual.
Watch.
AG
Local government is so fundamentally technocratic and managerial that I don’t know if it can ever be the source of an explicitly ideological movement.
If an ideological faction was working to overcome a negative image, then doing a good job sweeping the streets and cleaning up the river banks could help overcome that image, but I think the Obama presidency has already done that job.
Right-wing Republicans should try to run some cities competently for a while. They’ve got some brand-repair to worry about.
“Local government is so fundamentally technocratic and managerial that I don’t know if it can ever be the source of an explicitly ideological movement.”
Milwaukee had its sewer socialists, to be sure — but it never brought the Revolution much closer.
P.S. I just read the Benjamin Wallace-Wells piece. What? Has this guy ever looked out of his limo?
He writes:
The NYC mayor gets “elected” by a sprawling proletariat in the un-gentrified boroughs that obeys the dictates of a yellow press and the local network affiliates, not by Times readers living in Gentrification Central.
Please.
Oh.
Wait.
I forgot.
It’s New York Magazine.
He’s writing for the Sex and the City crowd plus the glitz/hyped so-called “young professionals” who nightly stand in line to be ripped off by awful restaurants trying to pass as gourmet joints.
Nevermind.
Thompson and Quinn will divvy up the electorate. Whoever has the most chips at the end of the race will be mayor.
My guess?
Quinn.
She’s the insider’s insider.
Watch.
AG
Agree with this. Dinkins beat Giuliani in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, but lost in Queens and Staten Island.
The question is whether an aggressive anti-1% liberal will appeal to folks in Queens and Staten Island that trend conservative on a lot of social issues.
P.P.S. The title of this piece:
Only if he can raise the dead, Booman.
Only if he can raise the dead.
Obama done finished off “liberalism.” Obama and Bloomberg, to be more NYC-specific.
Deader’n Lazarus.
Unless de Blasio appears hovering over Broadway in a shimmering white sheet with a halo around his head, ain’t gonna be no second life for “liberalism” in this city.
Bet on it.
Just business as usual.
Dream on.
Money talks, even libruls don’t walk.
Bet on that as well.
AG
Am I wrong in thinking that the possibility of an actual liberal being elected terrifies you? Because that’s impression, reading your comments on this thread.
It’s not terror, Steggies. It’s more like sadness.
I have lived in NYC my entire adult life, mostly in working-class neighborhoods. I have seen the rise and fall of so many “liberal” hopes here, and each one…great and small alike…has described basically the same arc. Initial hope, eventually dashed by the sheer immensity of money and power that really runs this city.
David Dinkins was a good man with fine aims. He managed to slip through a crack in the electoral wall and get elected mayor. He then ran smack into the money power and within a year or two he was just another defeated outlier waiting for his term of office to end.
Like dat.
Bet on it.
If de Blasio is for real…and I really have no idea whether he is or isn’t…the brutal efficiency of the Wall Street machine as it stands now that Bloomberg has had 4 terms to consolidate its power will almost certainly cripple his chances. (Remember, Bloomberg literally bought an illegal 4th term just to make sure that all of the pieces were in place.) Just as the Bloombergians managed to clear the Occupy Wall Street people from
Tianamen Square…whoops, sorry, I meantTahrir Square…oh damn!!!…Zuccotti Park by using the media to paint the people there as shiftless, lice-ridden bums and freeloaders, the same sort of thing will occur to de Blasio’s campaign on another level. And if he is for real, somehow manages to split the insider thing between Christine Quinn and Bill Thompson and actually wins, he will be a lame duck from the time he steps into the Mayor’s office. It’s just the way things work here. There is simply too much power and money at stake for the Wall Street gang to let some interloper mess with their fix.Sorry.
My days of innocence are way behind me.
Bet on it.
AG
Okey. My mistake.
I also don’t know if de Blasio is the real thing, and I do wonder about Dinkins as a political cautionary tale of sorts …
(On the other hand, if I remember correctly, part of what he ran smack into was racial animus.)
They used “race” because it was handy, Steggie. They will use whatever they can get.
And there’s always something…
AG
Yet, one institution, the New York Times, seems fond of him.
One writer at one institution, Booman. Allowed to write that or told to write it? I don’t know, but either way it was published as a sop to the liberals who pay money to their beloved New York Times for daily reassurances that everything is going to be alright in their little upper middle class/wannabe upper middle class world. The experience of watching the New York Times not only fall in line but cut to the head of said line during the buildup to the Iraq invasion thoroughly finished whatever lingering faith I might have had that it could be trusted on any level from restaurant reviews right on through to international politics.
If the people who define the newspaper’s content actually think that de Blasio has a chance of winning the election and then being an effective “liberal” mayor in this town, they are simply too blinded by their own power to actually put on some well-worn, cheap clothes and go walk through the real neighborhoods and gathering places of this city. Let them get on a 2 train and go out to the central Bronx at evening rush hour or on a hot Saturday afternoon. Go drive a 6 year old Honda out to Queens and go into the various ethnic enclaves out there, Go have dinner in working class neighborhood restaurants east of Manhattan, south of Park Slope and north of 96th St. . Go hang out in Bay Ridge around Avenue X, in East New York or Brownsville.
Yeah.
Right.
But they’re not.
AG
P.S. And it wouldn’t be so wonderful anyway. Bet on it. Smugocracy doesn’t work very well either. Ask John Lindsay.
He couldn’t handle the snow, garbage collection or the transit workers.
The Transit Worker’s union president Mike Quill…an ex-IRA guy from the real troubles who insisted on referring to Mayor Lindsay as “Lindsley”…replied to the mayor’s invocation of the Taft-Hartley Act during the Transit strike as follows:
Business as usual, Booman. As always. Business as usual here. Watch.
I hope you saw this. The musicians are backing him.
No, Booman. Sadly, the Musicians’ Union is not “the musicians.” It has its function, but…as in any corporatocracy…it deals only with those who are wiling to sell their souls to corporate interests in the name of…stability, I guess you might say. Safety. Security. And there we are, back in the security/surveillance state. Local 802 is basically owned and operated by Broadway musicians, and Broadway is owned and operated by corporate interests like Disney. That’s better than it was in the old days, when the union was was owned and operated by the Mafia, but still…here we are once again, back in kinder/gentler land, eh? No more exploitation of musicians of color…now everybody is equally exploited. Except of course the people who are making new music. Real music. You know…the kind that progresses from the roughshod early blues and jazz to all of the classic American musical idioms? They work for peanuts. And the musicians union? It spends its time and money trying to preserve the gigs of people who in the digital age are roughly the equivalent of the old railroad brakemen whose jobs the railroad workers’ unions so unsuccessfully…and expensively… tried to preserve way past their usefulness. Machines play machine music aimed at machine-driven people…white, heartland tourists, mostly, with “Nearly Extinct” written in special Ratpublican ink across their foreheads and heartland baseball caps…and it’s only a matter of time before B’way goes almost entirely digital as well.
So The Musicians Union is supporting Mr. de Blasio, eh? That union hasn’t been on the winning side of a fight since a great man named Johnny Glasel snatched it out of the hands of the mafia 30 or more years ago and ran it it well for over a decade. Since then? Down, down and then down some more.
De Blasio ought to try to get some stronger, smarter allies. Bet on it.
I have little doubt that he along with John Liu are probably the “best”…read “the most honest and most well-meaning”…NYC mayoral candidates out there at the present time. I have met John Liu several times and I know where he’s coming from. Neither of them have much more than a snowball’s chance on the stage of The Lion King to win the mayor’s office, though, and as I said before…if they do they will be stonewalled until they can be voted out. The NYC Wall St. hustle will continue until the whole financial system is taken down at the federal level.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to occur, either. All the Elizabeth Warrens in the world mean nothing in the face of people like…oh, like say Larry Summers, our Peace President’s apparently (
unshakably ordered) unshakable choice for Chairman of theFederal Game Preserve…errrr, ahhh…Federal Reserve…in positions of unassailable power.And as long as the PermaGov is in office at the highest positions of power in this country…neither do I.
Later…
AG
Obama done finished off “liberalism.”
That’s nuts. Obama made the world safe for liberalism.
Even if you think he’s Moses, not Joshua.
If a liberal’s liberal gets elected in 2016, it will be because the anti-liberal forces broke themselves on the walls of Fort Obama.
He is neither Moses nor Joshua, Joe.
More like a Judas goat leading the sheeple into surveillance heaven, really.
Bet on it.
AG
Loved the visuals, Arthur. You’ve got a real flair.
There was actually a point in my comment that had nothing to do with opinions about Obama personally.
You didn’t even disagree with it. It just eluded you entirely.
What point was that exactly, Joe?
This one?
Or this one?
These so-called “points” didn’t exactly elude me, Joe. They are just laughably simplistic.
“Obama made the world safe for liberalism?”
Take a good look at “the world,” brother. With the possible…and quite probably temporary…exceptions of several Northern/Western European countries plus Canada (and hat’s a stretch) there is not another truly “liberal” government in power in the world. Not by the following definition, for sure.
I mean…there is certainly a great deal of mouthing off regarding these ideas in the international PermaGov countries, but really. Wake the fuck up.
Free and fair elections? When the corporate-owned media totally dictate who can run effectively and who cannot? Please.
Civil rights? Been to a truly poor neighborhood recently? Have you noticed the color of the skins of the majority of those condemned to live in it?
A free press? Owned by the criminal interests that have brought this country to its economic and societal knees over the past 50 years?
Free trade? Ask Cuba. Examine the NAFTA agreements.
Private property? How many people that you know actually own…rather than rent from one or another financial institution (rent in terms of debtor’s status…you don’t pay, you can’t stay) where they live?
“If a liberal’s liberal gets elected in 2016, it will be because the anti-liberal forces broke themselves on the walls of Fort Obama.”
LORD!!!
Why bother?
AG
Arthur, if you think my use of “made the world safe” refers to northwestern Europe, my comment did, indeed, go right over your head.
Blah blah blah permagov, blah blah blah, change the subject.
Whatever. There is never anything going on except what is flashing through Arthur Gilroy’s head at any particular moment.
Joe, if you think that I was talking about Northern Europe as “the world” rather than the exception to the world then those reading comprehension classes that I have so often recommended to you simply aren’t working.
Oh.
What’s that you say?
You didn’t take them because you are too smart for stuff like that?
Oh.
Nevermind.
AG
I know exactly what you were talking about.
You just couldn’t stand the thought of discussing someone else’s point, as always, so you want off on the latest episode of WHAT’S IN ARTHUR’S HEAD RIGHT THIS MOMENT.
It’s all you ever do. That, and act like, for some completely incomprehensible reason, you have some particular insight about the world that the rest of us lack.
“…some completely incomprehensible reason?”
People like you are the reason I post, Joe.
bet on it.
AG
Serious question: why did you bother responding? Mr. “Condi Rice I Mean Susan Rice” mostly talks to himself, and you know it.
Funny, because I see the current frenzy about surveillance as classic “sheeple” behavior. There are few who were vocal about the erosion of privacy before Glenn Greenwald’s big break, despite no shortage of meat for outrage. Those who didn’t discover concern about the Fourth Amendment before now are taking their cues from a media which with curious timing decided it was finally expedient for people to raise an angry fuss about unreasonable search and seizure. And by people, I mean white people. Stop and frisk? Not an issue if you look like Ed Snowden.
Government surveillance is a legitimate concern. But if you only raise a fuss about it when the gatekeepers tells you it’s safe to do so, it sounds like so much baa.
‘Fraid so.
And the hits just keep on comin’!!!
That’s the beauty of a mediacracy, baudelairien. It can even co-opt itself.
AG
Try Herod
Oh that’s good.
Maybe Saul.
There was actually a point in my comment that had nothing to do with opinions about liking Obama.
Sorry it went over everyone’s head.
Sure went over mine. Would you mind re-stating it in other words. I promise to give it serious consideration.
Also, would you make clear the Moses & Joshua allusion? I really can think of nothing that is remotely appropriate. I really do think AG’s Judas Goat is more appropriate.
The prospects for an unabashed liberal to get elected going forward are much, much better because of the Obama presidency, and the destruction it has wrought on Republicanism and conservatism.
This remains true even if you think that Obama, like Moses, never set foot in the Promised Land of truly liberal governance.
Got it! BTW, my reference was to Herod Agrippa, the Roman poodle, not Herod the Great, the baby killer.
Mmmm, possibly you are right. By letting the wild Loons loose to hang themselves. A variant of 11th dimensional chess. Basically we have three views of Obama’s behavior:
a. 11th Dimensional Chess – an awesomely complicated trap that will eventually reveal Obama as FDR in disguise.
b. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington – a well meaning but inept rube tries to do right but is outsmarted by the satanic forces of the Right.
c. The Trojan Horse – Fiendishly deceptive young man on the make fervently believes in Reaganism and the Chicago School but realizing that the Republican Party will never give the Ultimate Power to a black man disguises himself as a conciliatory Democrat who is really Liberal but is forced to hide it for the sake of bi-partisanship.
I believe in The Trojan Horse, as you surely know. I think that is more respectful than Mr. Smith GTW which pictures Obama as a hapless fool. I view 11th Dimensional Chess with intense skepticism because Obama seems to always lose (if you think his goals are Progressive) making him a very poor chess player. I think this scenario has about a 10% chance of being right, about 85% for The Trojan Horse and 5% or less for Mr. Smith. I give Obama credit for being neither naive nor stupid. Ambitious, tricky and vindictive, yes. He even beat the Clintons at this and who were more ambitious, tricky and vindictive than they?
I say possibly you are right but only because the Right seem to be living in their own schizophrenic dream world. After all, they are homophobic but more and more they reveal their own homoerotic dreams and behavior. They claim to put pure womanhood on a pedestal, but work to put them in purdah. They believe in the Constitution, but do their best to evade the Bill of Rights and Separation of Powers. DOMA stomped on State’s Rights that they profess to champion. They hate Totalitarianism but built their own Totalitarian government to combat it, becoming the thing that they profess to hate. They trumpet the free market but hamstring it with crony capitalism. They love Israel but hate Jews. Such a two-faced schizophrenic paranoiac group must eventually break into fratricidal civil war as Booman thinks they are commencing now. By giving them free rein and catering to them, bringing them into the upper levels of the Cabinet, Obama has hastened this process. But, I believe, by accident not design.
So those are the ONLY three possibilities? Now who’s being simplistic?
No, but these are the leading contenders. Will you offer some scenarios of your own?
You can do some combination of all 3 plus add a few more in recognition of the fact that Obama (and life in general) is not so simple that you can sum it up in a caricatured paragraph.
Since you asked, let’s try this one:
Obama is a basically well meaning politician who prefers to get results rather than take doomed stands or principle. In his efforts to move things to the left, sometimes he gets pretty much everything he wants (repeal of DADT), sometimes he gets half a loaf (Obamacare), and sometimes he doesn’t really get what he wants at all (cap and trade). When he fails to get something, sometimes it’s because he made a tactical mistake (debatable, but we can all think of some instances). Sometimes the issue is Congress. When the problem is with Congress, sometimes it’s because Democrats can’t stick together either due to general disorganization or because of Blue Dogs. Other times, the problem with Congress is that Republicans are insane. In any case, Obama has to deal with the Congress he has, and being a politician, sometimes he says stuff that is infuriating to liberals but which mainstream Americans don’t get offended by. These are just words, however, and they don’t mean much until an actual policy or law has been put into place (thus the everlasting furor over Chained CPI which still hasn’t happened).
Sometimes President Obama has an opportunity to push something and actually make a difference. Sometimes all he can do is take a stand to protect something he wants. And sometimes he perceives his main goal to be preventing a disaster.
So which of these is the truth? To determine that, you take each situation and analyze it in context. There are things you won’t know for certain because after all we are dealing with politicians who sometimes posture. Things are not certain and that’s why we debate this stuff.
Or you can just proclaim that everything is explained by Obama being a conservative Trojan Horse who had a plan all along to get his conservative policies enacted by pretending to be liberal (all in the meanwhile inciting the right wing to completely lose their minds and oppose everything he does even when he proposes a conservative idea). Neat trick, that one.
None of the above.
Obama is in over his head, Xantar. As smart as he most certainly is…and as well-meaning as he may be…he is simply in over his head. What is needed is a form of revolution…peaceful if at all possible…to rid the system of the criminal elements now in command of the real power here. Financial power and military power. Compromise…Obama’s speciality…will not work. Someone is going to have to turn over a lot of rocks and let the people see the truth of the filthy work squirming around just below the surface. This would be a personally life-threatening act…look at what has happened to relatively powerless people like Assange, Manning and Snowden who dared to tip even a few rocks up a little…and whatever Obama may be, his mama didn’t raise no high risk children. Bet on it.
Maybe this is the best that we can hope for.
A kinder, gentler PermaGov.
I hope not.
I really do.
Most of our American forebears…the ones who came here voluntarily rather than in chains…hoped so too.
We shall see, soon enough.
Can the U.S. survive as a corporately-owned PermaGov?
I dont know, but the arc that the country has taken since the JFK coup has been in a fairly consistent downward direction, and that downward arc seems to me to have accelerated mightily over the preceding 12 years or so…the years when the PermaGov really sunk its talons into the American people in the name of national security. Maybe corporate ownership of nations is the wave of the future. It’s been tried before, under another name.
Fascism.
is a technologically enforced fascism better than the old style?
Technologicism?
I suppose it is. Surveillance on little cat feet rather than Gestapo in storm trooper boots.
But is it the way that cultures best progress?
Like I said, we shall soon see.
Fasten your seat belts, though. Any way you look at it we’re in for a rough ride.
Bet on it.
AG
That’s the Mr. Smith scenario.
Well I’ve not often doubted he means well, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions or in this case a burning desire to gut social security, spy on everyone about everything, and cuddle Wall-Street until they purr.
Just because Republicans might be worse or the consensus is just as bad doesn’t make these things good either.
Obama hastened the process by beating them, over and over.
You can’t see this, because you divide politics into the categories of “exactly what I want” and “Complete conservative victory.”
Obama didn’t beat the GOP much. He beat them in the elections but otherwise his victories were because the Republican beat themselves.
What exactly is the difference?
Because it would have happened if Hillary had won too. It’s not specific to Obama.
That depends whether you think it takes active will and political acumen to recognize that your opponents are shooting themselves in the foot and that you had best stay out of their way.
but otherwise his victories were because the Republican beat themselves.
Why, it’s almost as if they were an attacking army that broke themselves on the walls of a castle! I wish I’d thought of that.
Also, MN, how many times would you estimate that you used the phrase “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory” to describe the Democrats? How many times before Obama’s elections, and how many times since?
Yes, it has “destroyed”…or perhaps a more accurate term would be that “it was present when the destruction took place” of what you call Republicanism and conservatism, but the real story is how it did so.
The answer?
It occupied the same ground with a better front during a time when the old guard ran out of steam.
A kinder, gentler “Republicanism and conservatism.”
More efficient, too.
Much more efficient.
Is that the best that we can do?
Could be…
Stay tuned.
AG
Education policy could be an area where the next mayor of NYC could make a huge difference nationwide. With the school “reform” movement going full guns in even liberal Chicago, having a counter-weight to those efforts in the nation’s biggest city could start to change the conversation, especially if he’s successful.
I don’t know much about de Blasio, but he sounds like the type of person who’s skeptical of the “reforms” that are currently in vogue.
I don’t know whether or not many people are thinking about it, but a Democratic mayor is going to be a game-changer in the whole culture of liberalism in this country, much like Gov. Jerry Brown is having a big effect on the left coast.
You mean like Brown has sold out to the frackers?
Jes’ politics, Calvin.
Frack or be fracked.
Jes’ politics as usual.
AG
14th dimensional chess. The plan is to cause and earthquake that breaks coastal California off into the sea and declare independence.