Facing multiple investigations, how can de Blasio recapture the narrative?

For a couple of months now, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has had trouble maintaining control of the thing most critical to being successful: the narrative. With multiple investigations into his political fundraising and his former advocacy nonprofit, and a police corruption scandal, it’s the anonymous source or document leaker that can end up setting the agenda and shaping the mayor’s storyline.

There are already signs this crisis is taking a toll with voters. According to a recent Wall Street Journal poll, de Blasio has the lowest job approval rating since taking office. Only 35 percent of the voters surveyed told pollsters the mayor was doing an excellent or good job with 62 percent saying his performance was fair or poor. Fifty-one percent said the city was headed in the wrong direction.

Criminal investigations can take months, even years to resolve. Coping with the daily tick tock of these probes is not unlike learning to live with a chronic illness that’s ever present. You can live with it, but to insure it doesn’t define your life, or your tenure, at least one experienced hand says there has to be a disciplined strategy in place.

George Arzt, a Democratic political consultant, knows something about helping a sitting mayor navigate the choppy waters that come when an administration finds itself at the center of a feeding frenzy driven by multiple scandals playing out simultaneously.

Arzt was Mayor Ed Koch’s press secretary during Koch’s third term in the 1980s when City Hall was rocked by corruption probes spearheaded by a hard-charging U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani. 

Giuliani’s prosecutions produced the criminal convictions of Democratic Party power brokers and one-time Koch supporters Stanley Friedman of the Bronx and Meade Esposito from Brooklyn. Another Koch ally, Queen Borough President and Queens County Democratic Chairman Donald Manes, committed suicide when his name surfaced in connection with the roiling scandal that was linked to the city’s parking violations bureau. 

While Giuliani was busy dismantling the Democratic machine that helped elect Koch, Bess Myerson, a former Miss America and a key Koch ally, had to resign her post as Koch’s commissioner of cultural affairs. Myerson was indicted for allegedly trying to bribe a judge. Ultimately Myerson was acquitted, but the case was tabloid fodder for months.   

In the case of Koch, Arzt concedes that even though the mayor himself was never implicated in the multiple scandals, there was a cumulative impact that limited how much the mayor could accomplish going forward. 

“We were able to get across our $5 billion housing program, which remade the city and also the gay rights bill, which was historic at the time,” Arzt said. “What we could not do, and we couldn’t do several things. The unification of the three city policer forces – we just did not have the clout. We were weakened by the corruption trials.” 

“I would always tell the mayor, let’s stick to our agenda,” Arzt continued. “Let the lawyers do what they have to in collecting information, subpoenas and preparing people for grand juries.”

For Arzt, the key to keeping control is being very circumspect when taking questions from the press about pending probes. “Just short answers,” Arzt said. “You just try to tell people” these matters “are under investigation but we will have no further comment.”

Arzt reasons that volunteering any additional comments on the investigations risks looking defensive. “The idea is you can’t go down the slippery slope and undermine your own credibility with law enforcement officers,” Arzt said. “At the same time, you can basically give a short answer to a reporter’s question so they’ll have your voice on tape.”

Recently on WNYC, de Blasio was pursuing a very different strategy from the Arzt prescription. He was pressed by host Brian Lehrer for details on his involvement with Democratic Party efforts to raise money to help their state Senate candidates. 

Asked if he knew the “chain of custody” of the funds, de Blasio said he “was certainly not involved in any of the specifics of the day-to-day in different – different efforts.

“And again, I’m not going to speak to specifics because of the investigation that’s going on. I’m going to speak to the overall reality, which is the truth,” de Blasio continued. “Everything was done very carefully, meticulously with legal guidance all along the way – and consistent with what so many other people have done, so that’s why I’m saying it’s very interesting that now it becomes a subject of these questions. And I think we have to find out some of the motivations behind this because we specifically followed – every step along the way – legal guidance – and did what other mayors and other leaders have done for years and years under the laws of this state – following the letter and the spirit of the law. Well, that’s how we’re supposed to comport ourselves, and that’s how we did.”

But Doug Muzzio, a professor of political science at Baruch College, said de Blasio needs to change the conversation.

“It’s not going to work to say, ‘It’s not my fault, people are trying to take me down,’” Muzzio said. But he “can’t just pivot to policy on something like the homeless or education” because it  “will sound like just blah, blah, blah to the public. It can’t be a five-word bumper sticker.”

Muzzio said Koch was able to salvage so much of his third-term agenda because he was never directly implicated in any of the scandals. Koch had also already served two prior terms that Muzzio says were perceived as successful.

“There were bombshell stories exploding but nothing actually touched Koch directly,” Muzzio said. “Koch was credited with getting us out of the fiscal crisis so there was a backlog of good will.

By contrast, Muzzio says, de Blasio spent too much time early on trying to play in a bigger arena than the five boroughs he was elected to govern.

“He was a legend in his own mind,” Muzzio said. “He went national and international before he consolidated his city base. You do well by doing good and getting things done competently like removing the snow and providing public safety, keeping the public order.”

Mickey Carroll, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said de Blasio has “lots of parallels” with former Mayor John Lindsay – “the fiasco with the snow storm in Queens and Lindsay being inaugurated as the savior, not just of this city, but all cities in the same way de Blasio came in to be the world’s most progressive mayor.”

“The worst thing you can do is to be seen playing to an international or national audience without putting the story out there first,” Carroll said. “The mayor just did it. The press secretary has to shape the story as it goes along. So far he has not had a savvy advisor to see the trouble ahead.”