History-Blogging: Rating NYC Mayors
By Anonymous asked:
Why is that every Mayor of NYC, regardless of party, becomes some variety of a–hole? Are there examples of non-a–hole NYC mayors?
This seems a bit facile to me, and overlooks the nuances of a lot of NYC history. So let’s look through the last fifty years of mayors and see whether it’s actually true that they all become an asshole.
John Lindsay (1966-1973):
Like a lot of mayors in this period, Lindsay’s main problem was NYC’s long-term economic and demographic decline and the knock-on effects on the city’s finances and resulting conflicts over public spending. To give him credit, while Lindsay did start the process of borrowing from Peter (the capital budget) to pay Paul (current expenses) and taking on debt to cover the hole in the capital budget, he also tried to deal with the problem by lobbying the state legislature to let him raise taxes and thus increase revenues.
That being said, the hate that Lindsay got as mayor, and he got a lot, didn’t come from balanced-budget advocates. It came from white people in the outer boroughs who hated the fact that Lindsay tried to desegregate the city by pushing scatter-site public housing, that he backed a civilian complaint review board, and was otherwise viewed as being too sympathetic to black people, Latinos, and hippies.
Verdict: not an asshole. Fuck the haters.
Abe Beame (1974-1977):
The first (observant) Jewish mayor of NYC, Beame was a man tortured by the contradictions between his desire to maintain NYC’s social democratic traditions and the awful economic situation he inherited. Beame became mayor during the 1973-1975 recession, which was at the time the worst since the Great Depression, and pretty much immediately had to deal with the NYC Fiscal Crisis, and was also mayor during the 1977 Blackout because clearly the Fates just fucking hated this guy.
If Lindsay was hated by white people for being too friendly with black people, Beame brought white people and black people together in their hatred of him for his public sector layoffs, his wage freezes, and his cuts to public spending. And while it’s true that Beame absolutely adopted the logic of austerity and should be criticized for that, it should also be remembered that he was dealing with a well-organized and highly politicized capital strike that was backed up at the Federal level by the Ford Administration.
Verdict: kind of an asshole, but largely because he got mugged by Wall Street and the White House.
Ed Koch (1978-1989):
I think Ed Koch is the first person so far on this list that I’d call a genuine asshole (albeit a popular asshole for much of his career, hence his three terms). Starting with the fact that he got his start as a crusading left-wing politician in the Village and then abandoned his principles to run as a “law and order” candidate in the 1977 mayoral election, Koch had a long track record of running to the right whenever it benefited him personally, no matter who it hurt.
So what’s on Koch’s list? Well, we’ve got more budgetary austerity for working people while hiring thousands of more cops, starting the process of handing over the city to the developers, his opportunistic support for the death penalty, the massive corruption scandals in the Transportation and Parking departments, ettc.
However, I think the single biggest black mark on Koch’s record is his abysmal handling of the AIDS crisis. Despite being a (closeted) member of the LGBT+ community, or perhaps because of it, Koch was both inactive and silent on the epidemic for years. Not only did the city spend almost no resources to deal with AIDS in the crucial early years, but a lot of ugly shit happened in NYC public hospitals that mayoral intervention could have put a stop to – but Koch did nothing.
There is a good reason why, if you talk to surviving ACT-UP members today about Ed Koch, they will spit at the mention of his name.
Verdict: asshole.
David Dinkins (1990-1993):
New York City’s first black mayor, Dinkins reminds me a lot of John Lindsay, in the sense that his detractors were overwhelmingly motivated by racial animus refracted through the lens of policing. The fact that crime rates in NYC began to drop significantly during his tenure as mayor (well before Guiliani), or that he massively expanded the police force – none of that matters because he tried to make the Civilian Compliant Review Board legitimately civilian and independent of the NYPD.
That was enough to touch off a massive, and openly racist, police riot at City Hall, which Guiliani happily attended and stoked the flames of resentment against a black mayor who dared to tell the NYPD what to do.
Verdict: not an asshole. Fuck the haters.
Rudy Guiliani (1994-2001):
In the wake of the 2020 election, a lot of columnists wrote breast-pounding op-eds, asking themselv es what went wrong that America’s Mayor had seemingly lost his mind in service to the Trump campaign.
As someone who grew up in Guiliani’s New York, let me state with confidence: he was always a fascist loon, he just used to be better at it. Having ridden a wave of racist law-and-order politics to victory, Guiliani took personal credit for the decline in crime rates that was taking place nationally – to the point where he actually fired Bill Bratton for being more popular than him – and established the “Broken Windows” policy that would give rise to “Stop and Frisk.”
Guiliani’s alliance with the NYPD was based on the understanding that he would vocally take the NYPD’s side in any police shooting or brutality case no matter how blatantly unjustified and depraved it might have been, whether that was the shootings of Amadou Diallo or Patrick Dorismond or Gidone Busch, the torture of Abner Louima, the racial profiling of the plainsclothes Street Crime Unit, and on and on.
And then there’s the fact that, having made the frankly insane decision to place the Office of Emergency Management headquarters at the World Trade Center (this after the 1993 bombing), Guiliani took a frankly unwarranted level of press adulation at a time of national trauma and used it to try to illegally install himself as the unelected mayor of New York City.
Verdict: fascist asshole.
Michael Bloomberg (2002-2013):
More genteel and a better administrator than his predecessor, Bloomberg nevertheless pursued a raft of policies that were largely harmful to NYC. His housing and economic development strategies were designed to market NYC as a “luxury good” to the world’s economic elite – seriously, read up on the history of the Hudson Yards development – to the detriment of affordability, beginning the process of gentrification that has left much of this city unaffordable to the majority of residents.
The main thing that makes Michael Bloomberg an asshole is his record on policing, where he doubled down on the “stop and frisk” strategies of Rudy Guiliani, going to the absolute wall in defense of them even when the courts began to knock them down as blatantly racially discriminatory. Then add to that his creation of a massive surveillance state aimed at NYC’s Muslim population.
He routinely used his wealth to bribe would-be critics into silence, and then strong-armed the City Council into letting him run for a third term.
And there’s the fact that he stilll owes me $200.
Verdict: plutocrat asshole. Where’s my money, Michael? Where’s my fucking money?
Bill De Blasio (2014-2021):
I’ve gone on record as saying that Bill De Blasio’s first term was actually remarkable for progressive policy accomplishments, from establishing universal pre-K to raising the city’s minimum wage to capping rents to ending stop-and-frisk, and so on and so forth.
That being said, there were two forces in New York politics that he was never able to deal with: the first was the rampant hostility of the NYPD (I was never much impressed by De Blasio’s failure to stand up to the NYPD; say whatever else you will about David Dinkins, but he didn’t mince words when thousands of drunk cops screaming the N-word invaded City Hall), and the second was the constant and malicious obstruction of supposedly Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo on every single conceivable political and policy issue.
However, at some point very soon after his re-election in 2017, he just lost interest in being mayor of New York City. He still turned up for work, but even his political allies could tell that he had mentally checked out. If you’re going to seek the job, you gotta do the job.
Verdict: not an asshole for four years, then an asshole for four years.
Eric Adams (2021-now):
Terrible on every conceivable aspect of public policy, but especially policing (because he’s an ex-cop who ran on law-and-order politics and then found that didn’t stop people carrying out random shootings) and housing (because he’s an absentee slumlord who keeps getting fined for rats in his buildings).
Verdict: asshole, possibly crazy?
(A similar list of NY governors will follow tomorrow.)