De Blasio’s city haul
Mayor Bill de Blasio's many scandals may look like good news to people who don't want to see the mayor re-elected next year. They're not. Though the mayor is doing badly, the city is doing well, and any challenger will face the same problems that the mayor's opponents faced the first time around.
The enduring myth is that de Blasio won the mayor’s race nearly three years ago because the public rose up against capitalism after 12 years of tyrannical billionaire rule. The truth is that de Blasio won office because of Bloomberg's successes, and on crime and the economy, New York today doesn't look much different from the New York of three years ago.
With record-low crime and a thriving economy, New York was doing so well in 2013 that the mayoral race was an afterthought to the voters, if not the press. In a year of record-low turnout, de Blasio won on two issues that determine elections only when people are pretty happy: hike spending on education so that all 4-year-olds can go to school, and curtail the NYPD's use of stop, question and frisk. If people had been terrified of a fiscal crisis, they wouldn't have voted for someone pushing the first issue. If people had been terrified of a crime crisis, they wouldn't have voted for someone pushing the second issue.
The corruption charges that currently plague de Blasio were already apparent back then. Take the horse carriages. Way back in July 2013, two months before the primary election, one commentator wrote, “A candidate who opposes the carriage horses is inadvertently showing that he … is easily spooked by powerful interests.” Even then, it was obvious that de Blasio supported getting rid of the horse carriages because his powerful donors wanted him to.
It might have been too much to expect the voters to parse de Blasio's vulnerability to corruption and vote for someone else. But even if the voters had done this, they had few choices. Save for one candidate, Christine Quinn, de Blasio's opponents – even Republicans Joe Lhota and John Catsimatidis – actually agreed with the mayor on getting the horse carriages off New York's streets, despite no facts to back this policy proposal. And certainly no candidate was entirely clean from a fundraising perspective. De Blasio was just better at it.
Fast-forward nearly three years, and it's hard to see what will be different in 2017. Barring a sudden crisis, the city is still in good shape. Through mid-April, the murder rate for the year was down 18.8 percent. Shootings, too, are down 11.5 percent. Assuming the city can keep crime at record lows through the hot summer months – something that it did last year – de Blasio will be holding a press conference in December to tell the city that violent crime has never been so low. As for the economy: New York has a record number of jobs, 172,800 more than when Bloomberg left office. That, too, could change; but so far, it hasn't.
And though the mayor's recent scandals are more complex than the initial horse carriage scandal, they follow the same pattern: powerful people giving the mayor money and wanting something in return, and he often either did that thing for them, or tried to. The latest investigation into campaign-finance practices is slightly different, but it’s also far more difficult for a busy person to follow. Headlines sharpen with each scandal, but de Blasio has never been very good at communicating. He's suffered relentlessly bad headlines since before his election – and ultimately, so far, they have not mattered.
Of course, what could be different by next election time – and what would make the voters pay attention – is an indictment of the mayor. But criminal charges won't solve New Yorkers' electoral problems. Real estate and other donors and their lobbyists might tone it down for a while. But they'll just find the next candidate willing to do their bidding. Without some sort of crisis that affects them directly – be it crime or economic – voters still won't be paying attention. And even if they do, they may not have any better choices.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. Follow her @nicolegelinas.