Earth to Blas
You’re a bad mayor — and awful in a crisis
MAYOR de Blasio’s news conferences of late have become a daily exercise in justification, accountability denial and self-aggrandizement. Never shy about trumpeting his insipid accomplishments, as the city teeters on the edge of disaster, the mayor has assumed an alternating tone of paternalism, victimhood and self-righteous vindication as he speaks to an online audience that, on a busy day, hovers in the low three figures.
Hizzoner has never been known for adhering to the same picture of reality as everyone else. But his positive spin on the nightly shutdown of subway service — an embarrassing defeat — expands the meaning of chutzpah into a new dimension.
“This is a game changer!” he exclaimed recently, announcing that of 200 or so homeless subwaysleepers rousted off the trains at 1 a.m. the previous night, about half agreed to be driven to a shelter. “I keep telling you something historic is happening, and, day after day, the facts bear it out,” he crowed, celebrating “this new initiative” as a great moment of social progress.
Back in reality, meanwhile, the mayor increased spending on homeless services by billions of dollars, to no perceivable effect. He turned our city’s transit system into a nightmarish rolling dayroom, where hundreds of mentally ill and drug addicted New Yorkers took up semi-permanent occupancy.
This was a feature of de Blasio’s homelessness policy: He combined neglect in the name of compassion with hands-off policing in the name of justice. He shunted miserable New Yorkers into the de facto underground annex of the shelter system.
After the collapse in legitimate ridership post-coronavirus, the situation intensified, to the point where it was no longer clear that anyone would ever want to ride the trains again. The only solution, closing the system every night to empty it, is like throwing out your filthy dishes and clothes instead of trying to wash them — a desperate move that is the final response to sustained and ingrained neglect. Amusingly,
the mayor is taking credit for this lousy “solution” to a crisis he created, when it was Gov. Cuomo who made the call.
De Blasio has a scolding mood that he adopts whenever the subject of death comes up. Asked about the burial of bodies or the lack of clarity about death rates, the mayor acts as though the topic itself is in bad taste. “This is not, you know, a policy matter,” he sniffs. “This is their lives or family members or loved one’s life, and we want to speak very respectfully about it and keep it a very broad, respectful conversation.”
More than 20,000 New Yorkers have now died as a result of the pandemic, and no one has spoken disrespectfully about the loss of life. But de Blasio, as much as anyone else, owns a large share of the responsibility for the city’s weak, delayed response at the outset of the historic crisis.
It was he, after all, who encouraged everyone to hit the bars while they were still open, who told New Yorkers, based on zero evidence, that the virus dies almost immediately upon exposure to the air.
So it is more than a bit grotesque for him to deflect serious questions by harrumphing: “We all have to remember these are human beings and families.” Maybe he should have thought of them earlier.
The mayor’s aura of self-delusion thickens when it comes to the city’s looming fiscal crunch. Facing a loss in tax revenue and direct aid from the state, New York City will need to cut at least $8 billion, probably closer to $15 billion, from its budget over the next two years. But to hear the mayor talk, this has little to do with him.
Asked about the possibility of furloughing some of the city’s overstaffed municipal workforce, de Blasio calls it an insult toward our “heroes” on the front line in the war against COVID-19. And indeed, many city employees are performing heroically.
But the mayor has radically expanded the number of people of people getting a city paycheck to 330,000 today, up from 297,000 in 2014. And they aren’t all frontline heroes. The Department of Education alone added 2,000 new “civilian” employees — that is, administrators and bureaucrats, not instructors.
The mayor’s insistence that “we can be made whole so we can keep our whole workforce intact” via a fat check from Washington is a fantasy. And at a time when private businesses and workers around the country are suffering dramatic losses, the fact that he is making the preservation of unionized municipal jobs his top priority demonstrates who his constituency has always really been.