Detroit’s affordable. Mogadishu is even more affordable. That’s the way things are in cities where people want to live: expensive. The exceptions are fast growing cities with loose building standards so that supply of housing can keep up with demand.
And the repairs will be paid for by somebody else down the line.
I should hope you wouldn’t want to live in any of those, if NYC is your ideal.
You mean like gun control and nanny-state bullshit that conservatives so love?
Anyway, I thought we were supposed to be discussing the election here, not playing a NYC version of Dem vs Repub gotcha.
So it’s pretty clear that there is gonna be a runoff, and that Quinn is gotta get one of the slots. Who do you think will be the other candidate to make it to the runoff, DiBlasio or Thompson? And in a runoff of Quinn vs. “anti-Quinn,” do you think Quinn can manage a win?
Apropos of nothing, old NY joke:
“What’s your name?”
“Anthony P. Quinn.”
“How do you spell ‘Quinn’?”
“C-O-H-E-N.”
“What does the ‘P’ stand for?”
“The ‘P’ is silent, like in water.”
“There’s no ‘P’ in water.”
“I can see you was never swimming in Coney Island.”
I think de Blasio is in better shape than Thompson, and no, I do not think he can beat Quinn. I think that the only one who could beat Quinn was Weiner, and that is obviously no longer the case. I did not think this race could be more dismal two months ago, but I sure was proven wrong. So you never know.
I wouldn’t write off Thompson so quickly. He’s been making a big push for the black vote–there’s a Thompson ad I’ve been hearing constantly on black radio for the last week or so about how he’s “one of us” and how he was the only one to stand up to Bloomberg. If I didn’t already dislike Thompson, I might have been swayed to give him a second look. And he does have the backing of the teachers, police, and firefighters unions.
I actually think Weiner would have been an easier matchup for Quinn. His negatives were always higher than hers, even when he was leading in the polls. For people looking for an anti-Quinn, Thompson and DiBlasio are both pretty unobjectionable, even if they’re both uninspiring.
Oh, maybe we’re both wrong:
Like I said, de Blasio is in better shape than Thompson. Unions are more or less split between them (de Blasio has SEIU 1199, which is enormous) and the unions that endorsed Thompson did so because back then, de Blasio’s numbers were horrendous.
This is the first time de Blasio’s numbers have had any signs of life. It’s just flirtation. The election is getting close and no saviors are forthcoming. I would be more optimistic if he were any kind of real progressive candidate. De Blasio, Thompson, and Quinn melted down in a crucible add up to one progressive. It’s really just a matter of which one motivates his/her little coalition enough to show up next month.
Great, they’re back to interest group politics again.
Who’s “they,” New Yorkers or Dems?
We’ve gone from candidates with broad appeal(Giuliani and Bloomberg) back to balkanized politics.
Uh, no one ever left interest group politics. No one ever does.
That’s hilarious.
Bloomberg and Giuliani have supposedly “broad appeal” at the national level because people who read about them outside NYC have absolutely nothing at stake and no sense of the peculiarities of local issues. Bloomberg’s and Giuliani’s politics goes through a national level filter. In NYC they are balkanized players just like everyone else.
What nonsense. We’re still closing in on the primaries, and it’s a primary with no incumbent, so of course things looked divided. Soon we’ll get to the general and things will start to coalesce. And I think you’ve just assumed Giuliani and Bloomberg were always broadly popular and won election easily. Dinkins narrowly beat Giuliani in 1989 and that was reversed in 1993. Giuliani won pretty handily in 1997 but it wasn’t a landslide. Bloomberg beat Green by about 50%-48% in 2001, and he creamed Ferrer in 2005 (60%-39%) but scraped past Thompson in 2009 (51%-46%) in an election that everybody assumed he was going to win easily. There were certainly swathes of time where Giuliani and Bloomberg were very popular, but they were not universally acclaimed throughout all of their terms. It wasn’t even close to that.
It is worth pointing out, yet again, that Bloomberg was a lifelong Democrat before running for mayor, whereupon he switched parties to face a much easier primary challenge. Mark Green and Fernando Ferrer were much more serious opponents for Bloomberg than Herman Badillo, whom the latter defeated handily in the primary.
Giuliani is a tougher nut to crack. His first term was very, very different than his second. He probably had broad appeal briefly but squandered it quicker than boiled asparagus. The rest of the country thinks of him as the 9/11 mayor. Opinion here is quite different.
It’s a feature, not a bug. Read The Federalist. Same reasoning applies at the local level.
You don’t consider de Blasio a real progressive? Why not?