No, I don’t. He is still Bloomberg lite, perhaps a bit less high-handed. His record on the city council is uninspiring, and he has stood up to Bloomberg when it has mattered the least.
Bloomberg was successful in part because he was so high-handed. I don’t think an essentially Bloomberg agenda with a little more community sensitivity could possibly work, and once you peel back the rhetoric, that is all de Blasio is really offering.
From the debate not five minutes ago:
He may be a weapons-grade douchebag, but he’s right.
I do agree that de Blasio hasn’t actually accomplished much, and I think he’s talking a big game that he’ll quickly renege on if he becomes mayor. I don’t think he’s Bloomberg lite, though; just ineffective.
I’ve been a Liu supporter for a while, and I always considered him the progressive standard bearer, but his campaign went into a nose-dive pretty early. (I voted for Sal Albanese in 97, and he really is the true, true progressive in this race. But he’s a dinosaur who has zero shot at winning anything, and seems to be in the race just for the hell of it.)
Liu was up to his neck in campaign finance investigations from before he even took office. Why he ran for mayor is beyond me.
Yeah, I don’t get Liu either. He came off looking pretty good last night, but he never had a chance. Most of his campaign money is going to pay his legal bills.
Here are some of last night’s put-downs that made it to local news.
This clip from last night’s Daily Show is absolutely spot on.
And lest anyone think that the more well-known candidates capture the full range of crazy, I give you Erick Salgado.
Let’s deal with that *after *we deal with the rent being too damn high, shall we?
Yes, how sad it is when people can afford their apartments. Much better when they’re priced out of their neighborhoods. The rent control program has a lot of problems (and of course we all know people who aren’t poor take advantage of it), and while New York City is always going to be desirable and therefore at pretty expensive, it’s more than fair to be concerned about how expensive it’s becoming and what that means for people who are trying to survive on working class or service jobs- especially since social programs also keep getting cut. The rich and their kids will be fine, and they’re not the only ones who live here.
Not really. The biggest factor there was the economy. There are a bunch of factors at work there and it doesn’t mean we have to keep every absurd police tactic or else everybody’s going to get murdered. :rolleyes:
And likely to remain so.
There’s a glut of awful mustaches on the kids these days, but otherwise there is no chance of your mistaking today’s New York City for the city of the '70s or '80s.
Some voters are seeing in de Blasio an effort to turn back the clock:
But there’s another angle, one that’s a little harder to talk about in liberal circles. When I mentioned de Blasio’s speech to a New Yorker who generally votes Republican, he said, “Yeah, and New York will end up like Detroit”: tax the rich, give to the poor and the mayor’s favored constituents, drive away successful industries like banking, bankrupt the city. He didn’t say, “He has a very nineteen-sixties, nineteen-seventies vision for the city.” That was what Howard Wolfson, a New York deputy mayor, said to the Times, adding, “If you prefer the version of the city that existed then, he’s your guy.” And it’s what plenty of New Yorkers might think, including some who live near de Blasio in Park Slope…
…Implicit in this question is the idea that New York can’t work extremely well for everyone, that it’s something of an I-win-you-lose, zero-sum game here, and if you start undoing a few of the Bloomberg policies that have benefitted prosperous New Yorkers, or at least pulling and poking at them here and there, then everything is going to start ripping open and fall apart. The unions will get too strong, the poor will get too demanding, the tax base will erode, the cops will go on the take, and the subways will start to bear early warning signs of graffiti. You don’t have to be a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute to know that there’s a long way for the city to fall.
That’s my view. New York’s renaissance was not just a factor of economic conditions improving. New York got a LOT better at a faster rate than the rest of the country’s big cities, and the big difference was different political leadership. While almost all big cities stayed Democratic, New York saw something unheard of: 20 unbroken years of Republican and independent leadership. A return to Democratic leadership would plausibly bring back the New York of 20-30 years ago.
The only plausible way to deal with that is to reduce prosperity and stem the tide of progress. Rent control is a proven failure, and it wasn’t the abuse that made it fail. It failed because price controls fail. That’s just what they do. Building more projects isn’t a solution either, because well, you get more projects, and the city goes to hell.
Being concerned about a problem and being able to solve a problem are two separate things. There is no proven solution to expensive housing, at least not one any government has figured out how to solve. Markets can solve that problem(build more housing), but New York doesn’t have space to build on, like say, Houston does.
But then one might say, “We have to try”. Yes, if your solution hasn’t been tried and failed already, many times. Rent control is thankfully not being brought up as a solution, but building more projects is a negative outcome, not a positive one. So they need to come up with new ideas, not the tired old ideas, or follow rule #1: “Do no harm”.
YOu’re right as far as that goes. But New York accounted for something like half the nation’s crime drop in the 90s. It’s impossible to know which tactics had the greatest effects. Seems like the Democrats want to roll back a whole slew of them. That’s going to cause crime to increase. If crime increases under a Democratic mayor’s watch, while still continuing to decline across the country, there’s your definitive proof about Democrats and city government.
adaher, you keep repeating the same nonsense. You are misinformed and seem impervious to correction. Peddle your partisan nonsense elsewhere.
First, Democrats do not want to roll back aggressive NYPD policing. That’s part of the problem. Most of them want to keep Ray Kelly as commissioner. De Blasio, progressive hero that he is, would consider firing Kelly so he can rehire Bill Bratton, the man who brought us the broken window theory. Law & order issues do not neatly break down on party lines here.
Rent control has not exerted much influence on the real estate market in NYC for a long, long time. Rent stabilization is a different matter altogether. This issue is much more complicated but I feel like I would be wasting my breath.
Aw geez, Ben Bratton, not Bill. The perils of multitasking.
You make an argument, I make an argument. You claimed that the crime drop in New York was due to outside factors. I demonstrated that it was not. Your counterargument is? To claim you’re right and that I didn’t listen or something.
The nonsense comes from framing law & order issues as partisan differences between Republicans and Democrats. They aren’t. Support for aggressive policing is a race, class, and geographic issue here. Democrats support it in varying degrees depending on their constituencies.
Exactly the same is true for the (de)regulation of the real estate market. Democrats have both led the charge to deregulate (for instance, Weiner) and others have opposed it. It depends entirely on who your backers are.
Serious arguments can be made that aggressive policing drove the reduction in crime. I don’t believe those arguments, but it is still an open question. But at the same time, the same forces that have made much of Manhattan uninhabitable to middle-income people have also driven out violent crime. It is not clear that NYC is one broken window away from a vortex of violence. One of the justifications for gentrification is that it drives out violent crime. If this is true, why do we need invasive police procedures? Either we trust the market to do its work or we don’t.
Which Democrats want to roll back what? I’m not seeing it. Do you have specifics?
And rent control is dead, and not coming back. Same with projects. If anything, the push is towards privatization. They’re privatizing Mitchell-Lama, for instance.
The only Democrat who has spoken unambiguously on rolling back stop & frisk, surveillance of Muslims, etc is John Liu. The rest of the debate among the other candidates concerns whether the city should appoint an inspector general to oversee these activities outside the police department. The front-running Democratic candidates don’t even want to replace Ray Kelly, let alone roll back invasive police procedure. They are making some noise about it now after the federal court ruling, but this is just positioning.
A quote here from Republican candidate Joe Lhota is especially hilarious. NYC is not a microcosm of traditional Republican v. Democratic politics.
My emphasis.
You were right the first time. It’s Bill Bratton.
What is wrong the broken window theory? While I think some of the NYPD tactics are questionable, the broken window theory itself makes sense IMO.
Anyhow I need to look into this race more obviously, but I’m torn between De Blasio and Quinn personally even if Salgado is an attractive choice as a pro-life Democrat.