# The NYC mayoral race 2013
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916
**Category:** Politics & Elections
**Created:** [August 11, 2013, 2:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916 "2013-08-11T02:55:21Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 6
### Author:  [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2013, 4:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916/101 "2013-08-23T04:01:34Z")
> [@Marley23](#):
>
> He’s saying the problem in Detroit isn’t just “Democrats broke it!”
Democrats did break it. They made promises to their political contributors rather than representing the interests of the taxpayers.
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### Author:  [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2013, 4:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916/102 "2013-08-23T04:15:36Z")
> [@adaher](#):
>
> New York already has high taxes. If you want to spend more, you need even more taxes. That’s a path to insolvency.
Actually that sounds an awful lot like paying for things.
> [@](#):
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> There are always excuses.
Yeah, stinking reality.
> [@](#):
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> If Bloomberg had been a typical big city mayor, New York would have had a fiscal crisis during his term and he would have blamed circumstances. The reason NYC didn’t have a fiscal crisis is because he made sure to run surpluses in the good times and resist the demands of interest groups to hand out the windfall.
The city is indeed in pretty good fiscal shape. Somehow you’ve decided that means not a single thing can be changed or else the city will be a smoking heap within six months. While things like pension obligations and pay do need to be kept under control, it’s also true that homelessness has gotten a lot worse and hospitals (especially the ones that serve poorer people) keep closing. “Break the unions!” does not address those problems.
> [@adaher](#):
>
> Democrats did break it.
By killing the auto industry and causing people to start moving out in the '50s?
> [@](#):
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> They made promises to their political contributors rather than representing the interests of the taxpayers.
Of course those contributors represented a significant number of taxpayers. Regardless, your analysis of both Detroit and New York leaves out a ton of facts. Almost all of the facts, really.
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### Author:  [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2013, 4:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916/103 "2013-08-23T04:41:33Z")
> [@adaher](#):
>
> That’s the excuse. The reality is that New York was Detroit in 1975. Democrats ran it into the ground fiscally.
That’s not really true about New York in the 1970s. New York’s fiscal crisis was a lot more than “Democrats ran it into the ground fiscally.” A lot of the financial problems the city had with the spending could be traced back to the Lindsay administration, and a lot of the spending, like Medicaid and welfare, was state mandated. And there was a bunch of structural stuff that destroyed the tax base…white flight, New York losing almost all of its industry, etc.
But really, all that happened under Lindsay. Beane inherited a $1.5 billion deficit, and, if anything, the fact that he was able to last 2 years as mayor before declaring bankruptcy was too his credit.
So if I wanted to be meanspirited, given that the poor financial condition of the city happened during the Lindsay administration, I could say that Republicans ran it into the ground. But really, that would be unfair. There were a lot of things contributing to the 75 fiscal crisis, and it wasn’t all mismanagement.
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### Author:  [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2013, 5:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916/104 "2013-08-23T05:28:03Z")
> [@Marley23](#):
>
> Actually that sounds an awful lot like paying for things.
Until the recession hits, and your tax revenues are maxed out and you have a huge hole in your budget. But hey, that’s not the Democrats’ fault, who can predict that a recession will ever come?
> [@](#):
>
> The city is indeed in pretty good fiscal shape. Somehow you’ve decided that means not a single thing can be changed or else the city will be a smoking heap within six months. While things like pension obligations and pay do need to be kept under control, it’s also true that homelessness has gotten a lot worse and hospitals (especially the ones that serve poorer people) keep closing. “Break the unions!” does not address those problems.
Spending more money on poor people actually doesn’t cost that much. Problem is, poor people don’t donate much to campaigns, so they get trickle down from Democrats too. True, breaking the unions doesn’t do much to help anyone, but unions are always first in line with the Democrats, not the poor. And if a choice has to be made between letting city services suffer or paying the unions, well, we saw what choice was made in Detroit. The city decayed, the unions got paid.
> [@](#):
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> By killing the auto industry and causing people to start moving out in the '50s?
By making Detroit such an inhospitable place that new businesses didn’t want to move in. Many cities have lost their core industries and thrived. Detroit cannot, because their whole model was built around support for the auto industry and hostility to everyone else.
> [@](#):
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> Of course those contributors represented a significant number of taxpayers. Regardless, your analysi of both Detroit and New York leaves out a ton of facts. Almost all of the facts, really.
The trigger for a fiscal crisis can always seem unrelated to what politicians did, because cities rarely fail in good times. So then it becomes convenient to blame the bad times, even though normal cities don’t go under in bad times. Only cities that overspent in the good years do.
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### Author:  [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2013, 2:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916/105 "2013-08-23T14:34:28Z")
> [@adaher](#):
>
> Until the recession hits, and your tax revenues are maxed out and you have a huge hole in your budget.
I thought you said tax rates can go up and down. Apparently they can’t. Your quote was kind of brilliant, though, because it does demonstrate why Republicans have given up on being the fiscally responsible party: their platform at this point is ‘you don’t have to pay for anything, especially tax cuts. Just cut taxes and then say you can’t afford services and act like there’s no connection between your tax revenue and your ability to pay for things.’
> [@](#):
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> Spending more money on poor people actually doesn’t cost that much.
And yet services keep getting cut. I am attempting to explain that the city’s priorities need adjusting in this regard, but you’re loathe to acknowledge that it’s an issue or that anything can be done about it. So far all you can say is “Democrats must ignore their supporters or the city will go broke and crime will octuple.” (I’m also not seeing any commentary about how if a Republican is elected, he needs to disregard his own donors and voters.)
> [@](#):
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> By making Detroit such an inhospitable place that new businesses didn’t want to move in. Many cities have lost their core industries and thrived. Detroit cannot, because their whole model was built around support for the auto industry and hostility to everyone else.
If you believe that’s what happened in Detroit, you need to expand your crticism beyond Democrats. There were not a lot of Democratic mayors in Detroit in the first half of the 20th century. While you can’t give the entire city treasury to unions, the problems and solutions both have to be viewed in a balanced way. The general outlook I’m seeing here is that when a city runs into financial problems, the solution is always cutting union pensions and services for poor people- no matter what caused the problems in the first place.
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### Author:  [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2013, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916/106 "2013-08-23T14:51:08Z")
> [@Marley23](#):
>
> I thought you said tax rates can go up and down. Apparently they can’t. Your quote was kind of brilliant, though, because it does demonstrate why Republicans have given up on being the fiscally responsible party: their platform at this point is ‘you don’t have to pay for anything, especially tax cuts. Just cut taxes and then say you can’t afford services and act like there’s no connection between your tax revenue and your ability to pay for things.’
THat’s a fair criticism of what’s wrong with Republican fiscal policy at the federal level, but they are still the better party everywhere else, as the last 20 years in NYC have shown. And all the red states that noticeably are not in any danger of going bankrupt. States and cities go bankrupt because taxes can’t go up anymore. If Detroit could just raise some taxes, they’d do it.
> [@](#):
>
> And yet services keep getting cut. I am attempting to explain that the city’s priorities need adjusting in this regard, but you’re loathe to acknowledge that it’s an issue or that anything can be done about it. So far all you can say is “Democrats must ignore their supporters or the city will go broke and crime will octuple.” (I’m also not seeing any commentary about how if a Republican is elected, he needs to disregard his own donors and voters.)
Aside from the budget numbers, is there any evidence at all that city services perform poorly compared to the Koch/Dinkins era? From everything I’ve heard, services in New York are better than ever.
> [@](#):
>
> If you believe that’s what happened in Detroit, you need to expand your crticism beyond Democrats. There were not a lot of Democratic mayors in Detroit in the first half of the 20th century. While you can’t give the entire city treasury to unions, the problems and solutions both have to be viewed in a balanced way. The general outlook I’m seeing here is that when a city runs into financial problems, the solution is always cutting union pensions and services for poor people- no matter what caused the problems in the first place.
Services for poor people don’t bankrupt cities. Pensions do. So you only need to cut the pensions. Which will happen regardless. It’s not like cities have a choice. Ever seen Gov. Quinn’s video of the “Pension Snake” squeezing the Illinois state budget? They have to cut pensions because that’s where the money went, not in services to the poor. The opposite is true: cities that have to pay the pensions have to cut services for the poor(and middle class).
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### Author:  [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2013, 3:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916/107 "2013-08-23T15:43:47Z")
> [@adaher](#):
>
> THat’s a fair criticism of what’s wrong with Republican fiscal policy at the federal level, but they are still the better party everywhere else, as the last 20 years in NYC have shown.
The facts keep getting in the way here: Democrats didn’t break New York City in the '70s, and Republicans didn’t fix it. Did some of the policing policies of the '90s help? They may have. So did the recovering national economy. That doesn’t mean we need to keep this extraordinarily expansive and random form of stop and frisk, or that if it goes away crime will somehow go back to levels that predate the program by decades.
> [@](#):
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> States and cities go bankrupt because taxes can’t go up anymore.
No, that oversimplification really has nothing to do with the problem. Not everything has a single cause.
> [@](#):
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> If Detroit could just raise some taxes, they’d do it.
For that to work they would need more people who have money. That said, some of the solutions they’ve proposed are absurdly short-sighted.
> [@](#):
>
> Aside from the budget numbers, is there any evidence at all that city services perform poorly compared to the Koch/Dinkins era? From everything I’ve heard, services in New York are better than ever.
Of course the first question that has to be asked is “who are you hearing it from?”
The issue is this: hospitals - particularly ones that serve the poor, since the big and famous ones are generally not going to be in danger - are closing. Homelessness is way, way up - and of course that has something to do with the greater population and the state of the broader economy but it’s been going upward for a long time, and it hasn’t improved even as the economy has found its feet the last couple of years. Large numbers of schools have been consolidated or closed. To a greater and greater extent, local business are getting priced out of their locations. These things do happen on their own and not every single one is a disaster, but the trend is concerning. Your concern for New York’s wealthy is touching - after all, who will speak up for them other than themselves, their friends in politics, lobbyists, and the press? - but other people count, too.
> [@](#):
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> Services for poor people don’t bankrupt cities.
And yet those services are insufficient and improving them doesn’t seem to be a priority at this point. If they don’t bankrupt cities, why aren’t they services better? Could it be because city leadership isn’t that interested? Maybe. Or it could be… something about unions.
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### Author:  [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2013, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916/108 "2013-08-23T18:43:57Z")
> [@adaher](#):
>
> THat’s a fair criticism of what’s wrong with Republican fiscal policy at the federal level, but they are still the better party everywhere else, as the last 20 years in NYC have shown. And all the red states that noticeably are not in any danger of going bankrupt. States and cities go bankrupt because taxes can’t go up anymore. If Detroit could just raise some taxes, they’d do it.
Surely you aware that New York City has a legislature and that it is not Republican. The council has 51 seats, and 47 are filled by Democrats.
More [Bloomberg](http://gothamist.com/2013/08/23/bloombergs_advice_for_success_dont.php) humor.
> [@](#):
>
> If there’s one thing Mayor Bloomberg is good at other than coddling other rich people, it’s doling out unsolicited advice. Bloomberg is gushing with wisdom about everything from dieting tips to average people to Wisconsin. On his radio show this morning, he revealed the true secret to his success: “ **Take the fewest vacations and the least time away from the desk to go to the bathroom or have lunch. You gotta be there.** ” Does this mean Bloomberg wears adult diapers?
>
> It’s also kind of hilarious that he brings up vacations, since Bloomberg has been known to jet off to Bermuda on his private plane for a long weekend here and there, regardless of whether there was a massive blizzard bearing down on the city. But we suppose if you read between the lines, his point is that you need to avoid bathrooms and vacations until you make your first billion—after that, you can do what you want.
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### Author:  [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2013, 6:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916/109 "2013-08-23T18:55:01Z")
Today is turning out to be full of humor. [This](http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2013/08/bill_de_blasio_80s.php) is "1980s Bill deBlasio:
> [@](#):
>
> Hi, can I grab this seat next to you? This coffee shop is always so full! Wait, do I know you? You look so familiar, I just can’t put my finger on it. Oh, you’re Bill de Blasio from the '80s? Sorry, I had you confused for every white hipster I’ve ever met. That’s your target demo, huh? That’s something.
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### Author:  [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2013, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916/110 "2013-09-09T18:58:38Z")
Oh, my! [Bloomberg doesn’t **like** it that De Blasio is the front-runner!](http://www.thenation.com/blog/176066/mike-bloomberg-and-fortunate-ones-versus-bill-de-blasio#axzz2eQAmGZ16)
> [@](#):
>
> It’s not that Mike Bloomberg has much reason to fear that de Blasio would do harm to the city. When Bloomberg was elected mayor in 2001, de Blasio was elected to the city council, and though their positions differ on a good many issues, they have both worked within the broad mainstream of New York City politics and governance ever since.
>
> But Bloomberg does fear de Blasio’s support for a slightly more equitable tax system—of the sort that might make New Yorkers like the billionaire mayor pay a few more bills.
>
> So on the eve of the New York mayoral primary in which de Blasio is likely to beat the mayor’s unofficial favorite (City Council President Christine Quinn), Bloomberg was ripping the public advocate. Most of the headlines from Bloomberg over the weekend related to a bizarre comment he made about de Blasio’s highlighting of members of his family—including his African-American wife and their teenage son Dante—in public appearances and in television ads that focus on, among other things, the candidate’s long-standing opposition to the city’s “stop-and-frisk” law.
>
> It is hard to imagine a more traditional political tactic than a candidate and his or her family campaigning together. But Bloomberg told New York magazine that de Blasio is running a “class warfare and racist” campaign because: “he’s making an appeal using his family to gain support. I think it’s pretty obvious to anyone watching what he’s been doing.”
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### Author:  [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2013, 7:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916/111 "2013-09-09T19:29:35Z")
I think Bloomberg is almost right. “Racist” is definitely the wrong word, but the campaign is divisive and encodes racial issues just like a wink-wink nudge-nudge campaign for white people might.
[This](http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/don-big-bill-article-1.1448237) was yesterday’s big hit piece on de Blasio. It is of course full of insinuations, but de Blasio’s public service has been so thin and he is not an out-and-out criminal, so we probably shouldn’t expect smoking guns. But it is pretty sleazy. I had no idea that his wife was apparently a speechwriter for Chuck Prince right before the financial collapse. Good times.
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### Author:  [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2013, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916/112 "2013-09-09T19:38:47Z")
> [@Maeglin](#):
>
> I think Bloomberg is almost right. “Racist” is definitely the wrong word, but the campaign is divisive and encodes racial issues just like a wink-wink nudge-nudge campaign for white people might.
If being married to a person of another race is divisive and racist, I’m going to go ahead and say I want to see a lot more division and racism in political campaigns in the future. And maybe a little less of the randomly frisking nonwhite people kind of division and racism.
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### Author:  [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2013, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916/113 "2013-09-09T19:57:43Z")
> [@Maeglin](#):
>
> I think Bloomberg is almost right. “Racist” is definitely the wrong word, but the campaign is divisive and encodes racial issues just like a wink-wink nudge-nudge campaign for white people might.
**No,** sir, De Blasio’s campaign is divisive – as it **should** be – in encoding **class** issues, and quite openly with no winks or nudges. From the same article:
> [@](#):
>
> Bloomberg’s biggest gripe was with what he terms “class warfare.”
>
> From the beginning of his campaign, de Blasio has highlighted issues of income inequality, arguing that New York’s story is becoming “a tale of two cities.” One of the candidate’s most popular platform planks is a proposal for “increasing taxes on the wealthy to fund early childhood and after-school programs.” It’s hardly a radical plan, and it comes not as part of a divisive appeal but as part of a platform that calls for “One New York, Rising Together.”
>
> But the mayor does not like that the front-runner in the race to replace him points out a fact of life in the city Bloomberg has led for twelve years: “In so many ways, New York has become a Tale of Two Cities,” says de Blasio “Nearly 400,000 millionaires call New York home, while nearly half of our neighbors live at or near the poverty line. Our middle class isn’t just shrinking; it’s in danger of vanishing altogether.”
>
> Bloomberg complains that “de Blasio’s whole campaign is that there are two different cities here. And I’ve never liked that kind of division. The way to help those who are less fortunate is, number one, to attract more very fortunate people. They are the ones that pay the bills.”
>
> Grumbling about the whole de Blasio campaign, Bloomberg says: “It’s a destructive strategy for those you want to help the most. He’s a very populist, very left-wing guy, but this city is not two groups, and if to some extent it is, it’s one group paying for services for the other.”
>
> The mayor is off-base on plenty of levels. The majority of New York’s revenues come from working people, not millionaires and billionaires.
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> And de Blasio’s “ask” of the wealthiest 1 percent is relatively modest: an increase in New York City’s top income tax rate from 3.876 percent to 4.41 percent. Only New Yorkers with incomes above $500,000 would pay any more.
>
> Yet, the tax increase would yield $532 million to help pay for universal all-day pre-kindergarten and after-hours middle-school programs that would, overwhelmingly, benefit low- and moderate-income families.
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### Author:  [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2013, 8:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916/114 "2013-09-09T20:01:26Z")
> [@Marley23](#):
>
> If being married to a person of another race is divisive and racist, I’m going to go ahead and say I want to see a lot more division and racism in political campaigns in the future. And maybe a little less of the randomly frisking nonwhite people kind of division and racism.
I’m a white male married to a nonwhite female. We have a cute little biracial child.
I don’t think the problem is his family composition, it’s how he deploys images of it while delivering his message of a divided city. None of this is approaches Willie Horton levels. But for NYC I definitely think how he positions his family is pretty cynical and unpleasant.
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### Author:  [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2013, 8:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916/115 "2013-09-09T20:06:55Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#):
>
> **No,** sir, De Blasio’s campaign is divisive – as it **should** be – in encoding **class** issues, and quite openly with no winks or nudges. From the same article:
Nope. There is nothing encoded whatsoever about de Blasio’s class issues. Those are quite out in the open. I do not think you quite grasp the context. The problem is the when de Blasio talks about class, a divided city, a tale of two cities, etc juxtaposed with images of his mixed-race family, he is cynically trying to tell black people that he speaks jive, that he can understand them because he married a black woman, that he is a real man of the people. Of course, that black woman was a highly-paid consultant who made Chuck Prince palatable and worked a sinecure job perhaps on account of his political patronage. This is no insult whatsoever to his wife, who appears to be a very capable woman in her own right.
So interracial marriage is good, fighting income inequality in this town is very good, and Bill de Blasio is quite troubling.
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### Author:  [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2013, 8:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916/116 "2013-09-09T20:12:20Z")
> [@Maeglin](#):
>
> Nope. There is nothing encoded whatsoever about de Blasio’s class issues. Those are quite out in the open. I do not think you quite grasp the context. The problem is the when de Blasio talks about class, a divided city, a tale of two cities, etc juxtaposed with images of his mixed-race family, he is cynically trying to tell black people that he speaks jive, that he can understand them because he married a black woman, that he is a real man of the people. Of course, that black woman was a highly-paid consultant who made Chuck Prince palatable and worked a sinecure job perhaps on account of his political patronage. This is no insult whatsoever to his wife, who appears to be a very capable woman in her own right.
>
> So interracial marriage is good, fighting income inequality in this town is very good, and Bill de Blasio is quite troubling.
Don’t see how the third follows. “It is hard to imagine a more traditional political tactic than a candidate and his or her family campaigning together.” What’s troubling about that? And De Blasio, based on his record and his politics, certainly is far nearer to being a real man of the people than anyone else in the race.
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### Author:  [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2013, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916/117 "2013-09-09T20:16:07Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#):
>
> Don’t see how the third follows.
It doesn’t.
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### Author:  [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2013, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916/118 "2013-09-09T20:31:13Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#):
>
> Don’t see how the third follows. “It is hard to imagine a more traditional political tactic than a candidate and his or her family campaigning together.” What’s troubling about that? And De Blasio, based on his record and his politics, certainly is far nearer to being a real man of the people than anyone else in the race.
Saying that de Blasio is nearer to being a man of the people than the other candidates is like saying that Mercury is closer to the Earth than the Sun. It may be true much of the time, but they are both so far away that it is utterly without significance.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a candidate posing with his family. Romney did not try to pretend to be anything other than what he was, and his family did a great job reinforcing that message. Ann Romney really _is_ the kind of person who spends six figures on horses and does not want to release tax returns to “those people.”
We’ve had a history of significant racial tension in NYC. Now de Blasio is activating the idea that somehow we are divided in NYC. Ok, fine, that is far from wrong. If blacks had the same median income, incarceration rates, and general satisfaction with life that whites and Asians do, then appealing to the underprivileged with one’s mixed-race family would be harmless. But as everyone knows, that’s not the case. So de Blasio is crafting a message that is designed to appeal to people who have it rougher on average than white people and he juxtaposes this message with images of his family to reinforce the message that his promises to underprivileged groups are credible. He tries to get us to believe that he is really _one of them_ because, yanno, he has a black woman willing to vouch for him with whom he was willing to reproduce.
This is a problem. Neither de Blasio nor his wife are _one of them_. It is troubling to see a privileged white man appropriate his mixed race family to try to lend credibility to the message that he will somehow be more responsive to the needs of an underprivileged community than _every other white man ever_. His history in government suggests that he will do exactly the opposite. He is just as much in the tank for real estate developers, the taxi industry, political consultants, and the usual clowns as any other candidate.
I admit to being somewhat more sensitized because I am a privileged white man and I am married to a nonwhite woman. I cannot imagine using my wife to ingratiate myself to a community of interest for votes and to prove that I am somehow more sensitive to their concerns.
None of this is to say that Chirlaine McCray lacks agency here. She is probably as much a part of this strategy as he is and is certainly complicit. But he’s the one up for election and is supposedly running this campaign, so he is the one accountable.
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### Author:  [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2013, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916/119 "2013-09-09T21:50:48Z")
> [@Maeglin](#):
>
> We’ve had a history of significant racial tension in NYC. Now de Blasio is activating the idea that somehow we are divided in NYC. Ok, fine, that is far from wrong. If blacks had the same median income, incarceration rates, and general satisfaction with life that whites and Asians do, then appealing to the underprivileged with one’s mixed-race family would be harmless. But as everyone knows, that’s not the case. So de Blasio is crafting a message that is designed to appeal to people who have it rougher on average than white people . . .
Excellent!
> [@Maeglin](#):
>
> This is a problem. Neither de Blasio nor his wife are _one of them_. It is troubling to see a privileged white man appropriate his mixed race family to try to lend credibility to the message that he will somehow be more responsive to the needs of an underprivileged community than _every other white man ever_. His history in government suggests that he will do exactly the opposite. He is just as much in the tank for real estate developers, the taxi industry, political consultants, and the usual clowns as any other candidate.
Please be more specific.
---
### Author:  [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2013, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-nyc-mayoral-race-2013/665916/120 "2013-09-09T23:07:47Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#):
>
> Excellent!
>
> Please be more specific.
You sure have a lot of opinions for someone who apparently hasn’t been following the race at all.
Well, it’s the night before the primary and I still really do not know who I am going to pull the lever for tomorrow. I doubt there will be any new information that will help me choose. I hope my preferences will reveal themselves when I absolutely have to choose.
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