His handling of the snowstorm, his war on charter schools, and the stupid little issues he chose to focus on(like carriage rides) that annoyed many people.
What Captain Amazing said is right, plus de Blasio needs to learn how to actually run the city. He has zero experience and this is where he’s supposed to get it, but like many progressives he’s focused on new laws before he’s figured out how to enforce the old ones. He has to learn how to get the streets plowed before he can worry about reforming education.
He’s pretty much the kind of low-grade lousy that I spent the past few pages worried about. He is like Bloomberg without the authority, vision, integrity, and skill. He is not the progressive Muad’dib for whom the whole world waits. He’ll muddle through, pick a few more losing fights with Cuomo, bust on the squeegee guys, and that will be that.
As much as I’d like to rag on the guy some more, I agree with Marley to the extent that he’s just gotten started. The fact that he’s off to a bad start doesn’t mean he’ll stay low-grade lousy. But he has to transition from political activist to one who governs, which is not always an easy transition. Activists tend to think that their job is to fight for things, big things, and then they end up neglecting the little things because they figure that’s someone else’s job.
Again, it’s early. I did not expect New York to suddenly erupt in a crime wave and approach bankruptcy. But I do think it’s possible that in four years New York’s crime rate will be up and they will be running deficits.
He is spending too much time focusing on a far left agenda rather than the populist agenda he ran on. He reminds me of the Faacebook group (the Other 98%) that you subscribe to because you think they are economic populists but then you realize they are the home of every far left group from PETA types to treehuggers tahtwant to live like the Amish.
His attack on charter schools, his push to change the admissions format at the specialized high schools, his failure at basic city management.
He needs to focus on bread and butter issues rather than on issues where he can’t do much more than be a pain in everyone’'s ass. He is in charge and he should start acting like it. Symbolic wastes of time and energy are not really acceptable from the city’s top executive.
New poll finds de Blasio actually has good ratings: 45 percent approve of the job he’s doing so far, and 34 percent disapprove. It’s an 11-point spread instead of the 40-point spread he had upon taking office, but that seems like less of a disaster. And now that I read adaher’s cite, I see the NBC poll results were similar and adaher just presented them in a misleading way: the poll said 39% think he’s doing an excellent or good job, 37% think de Blasio’s performance has been fair, and 20% said it’s been poor. I am stunned. I can’t believe that such a thing would happen.
That’s how NBC presented them, and it’s entirely fair for them to do that, since the term “fair” as applied to approval means at best “meh” and at worst, “Not very good, but short of really bad”.
You should moderate yourself for getting personal, especially since you had no grounds to do so.
It’s not. Politicker (the site you actually linked to) and NBC-WSJ both presented the numbers the same way I did: within the first three paragraphs they both say 39% rated his performance as excellent or good (10% excellent, 29% good), 20% fair, and 37% poor. The only way to arrive at your interpretation - ‘wow, only 39% approve, he’s blowing it!’ - is if maybe you stopped reading after the first sentence. Did you?
Only 39 percent of registered voters in the city approve of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s job performance, according to a new Wall Street Journal-NBC 4 New York-Marist poll.
And the original link’s first paragraph:
Thirty-nine percent of registered voters in New York City approve of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s job performance two months after he took the reins of the nation’s largest city, a poll from The Wall Street Journal-NBC 4 New York-Marist showed Thursday.
Your intrepretation of the data is your opinion. I’m content to say I disagree with it. Be content to disagree with me in the future unless you have actual evidence that someone is presenting a story in bad faith.
I didn’t say that “fair” was approval. I said the way you presented the figure was extremely misleading: you said ‘poll says only 39% approve, he’s blowing it!’ That suggests that perhaps 55%, give or take, disapprove. And that’s nowhere close to true: 20% think he’s doing OK, not great but not terrible, and 37% disapprove, which is about the same as the number who think he’s doing very well. Your counterargument is that your cites agree with you if you focus on certain sentences and ignore others, and that’s kind of my point.
When you get elected with over 60% and fall to 39%, that’s bad. And he was at 53% not too long ago. That shows rapidly declining support, and his missteps have been well documented.
Now I did not mean to imply that he’s already in Obama territory in terms of being unpopular, but he’s well on his way. And he just started.
He won with 73% of the vote in November and was at 53% in the middle of January. Gee, that’s a 20%-drop. Is that cause for concern, or is it just that the excitement of a fresh face is bound to wear off? Without arguing that he’s crushing it, he’s still in positive territory - which is good regardless.
That’s one way to interpret it. 45% approval, even if disapproval is low, is still pretty bad, unless the problem is lack of name recognition. If it’s just people who won’t say approve or disapprove, it means “meh”, which means most New Yorkers either don’t like him or don’t think much one way or the other.
And yes, it’s cause for concern, because he’s screwing up. A lot. He has to change course and learn how to do his job. Since it’s early, he can still do that and go on to be a great mayor. I’m not judging his tenure here, I’m just pointing out that right now, he’s making a lot of mistakes.