Lucky stretch
How is it that our mayor continues to fail upwards?
MAYOR Bill de Blasio’s approval rating has just ballooned to 60 percent, up 10 percent since February. The latest Quinnipiac poll also tells us he’s likely to handily trounce his opponents for re-election.
His miserable record makes his popularity hard to swallow. De Blasio came within a whisker of being indicted by state and federal prosecutors over campaign-finance abuses that filled the newspapers for months. He’s turned a blind eye to the city’s worst street-homeless scourge ever. On de Blasio’s watch, schools have gotten worse, kids are murdered under the eye of the Administration for Children’s Services and crumbling streets and sidewalks are left to rot.
Except for the teachers union, it’s hard to find anybody who doesn’t hate de Blasio. His cop-bashing outbursts convince crime-fearing, middle-class whites that he isn’t their mayor. His unexpected coziness with gentrification-pushing real-estate moguls tells nonwhites that—notwithstanding the 96 percent of the black vote he wonin 2013 — he isn’t their mayor any longer, either.
But sometimes, good luck trumps all. De Blasio’s hot streak takes “Teflon” to a higher level. He’s the antigravity mayor, immune to any and all forces and factors that typically pull even better-liked vote-seekers down to earth.
Not since the Mets’ 1969 World Series victory revived then-Mayor John Lindsay’s fading re-election prospects, has a sitting mayor been so blessed by chance.
Back then, photos of Lindsay getting doused with champagne in the Mets locker room made the elitist, WASP-y Republican suddenly likeable to bluecollar and ethnic voters — although he didn’t even know the rules of baseball. But at least Lindsay pretended to be a Mets fan. De Blasio is an avowed Red Sox fan who hates the Yankees. Yet every bounce of the ball has gone his way. He’s enjoyed one unearned, champagne-dousing moment after another.
The first came during his 2013 longshot campaign when the supposedly rehabilitated sext maniac Anthony Weiner led the pack in the Democratic primary. Suddenly, “Carlos Danger” resurfaced and became a break out of the blue for de Blasio. The littleknown but handsome, well-spoken candidate with an attractive, biracial family blew the doors off hapless Christine Quinn, Bill Thompson and John Liu, whose combined charisma wouldn’t fill a thimble.
Now in 2017, de Blasio has been unwittingly rescued by President Trump, who lost five votes out of six cast in the city last November and has avoided setting foot here ever since. Even de Blasio’s detractors were fired up by his “standing up” to Trump over “sanctuary-city” status and immigration.
Having drawn a pair of aces like those, de Blasio can’t be blamed for dreaming of a run for higher office. Yet his good fortune goes beyond the fact he’s been lucky in his opponents. Try as he might to ruin the schools and streets in the name of “progressive” priorities, the city remains stubbornly in great shape and continues to get better, although for reasons that have nothing to do with our mayor.
We rarely hear him praise gleaming skyscrapers or great museums the way every predecessor routinely has. He balks at visiting the High Line because, as The New York Times gently put it, the elevated park is “associated with the themes Mr. de Blasio railed against in his campaign . . . when he denounced the ‘almost colonial dynamic’ between a gentrifying Manhattan and the city’s other boroughs.”
Voting habits are also on his side. Overwhelmingly Democratic city voters hate to dump an incumbent except at moments of desperate crisis. It last happened in 1993 when Rudy Giuliani toppled David Dinkins, whose aloofness from the job helped turn the streets into a free-fire zone. It took the city’s near-bankruptcy and massive service cutbacks for voters to oust Abe Beame for Ed Koch in 1977.
Today New York’s economy and employment rolls are at record levels, according to state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. This, despite City Hall’s relentless onslaught of taxes, spirit-crushing micro-regulation and anti-business rhetoric.
Plus, of course, crime is at historic lows — which is de Blasio’s biggest blessing of all. People of all races and classes care more about their families’ safety than about charter schools, zoning or parking placards.
Is de Blasio a closet law-and-order man for choosing tough, uncompromisingly proficient police commissioners and — mostly — letting them do their jobs? Or are the cops succeeding in spite of the mayor’s order to all but end stop-and-frisk, among other police-hobbling commands?
It hardly matters to the electorate. Like Julian Edelman’s famous Super Bowl catch, no one cares if the miracle is due to luck or skill. All that’s important is that he moved the chains. Same with our mayor. De Blasio may deserve some credit for keeping the streets safe. But, more than likely, he’s just lucky to be the wrong mayor at the right time.