The next mayor of New York City may owe his teenage son a huge bump in allowance—because if any one thing can be said to have changed the dynamic in the disastrous Democratic primary race this year, it was a television commercial starring the remarkably winsome Dante de Blasio, sporting the biggest Afro since Cleopatra Jones.
Pundits and reporters have been trying earnestly to describe why the campaign of Public Advocate Bill de Blasio caught fire this summer, surging as many as 30 points in just seven weeks.
On July 15, according to the pollster.com average, de Blasio was in fourth place at 15.4%, more than 8 points off City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s lead. On Sept. 3, De Blasio was at 34.3% — a full 13 points ahead of Quinn.
One poll has him as high as 43%. That’s 3 points more than he needs to avoid a runoff and a showing so commanding it would make his election in November against Joe Lhota (who I assume will win the GOP primary) all but assured.
The common explanation is that de Blasio has surged because he’s the most liberal candidate in the field, and his campaign has been dedicated thematically to the war between the haves and the have-nots in New York City.
This should make sense. After all, candidates run on issues, and when one pulls ahead of the pack, he or she usually does so as a result of them.
But there’s some reason to be skeptical that this is the story in the 2013 Democratic mayoral primary in New York City.
For while de Blasio is the “most liberal,” the truth is that there is very little real ideological space between him and Quinn, or Bill Thompson, or John Liu — the three rivals he has faced since the race began.
These are all very, very liberal Democrats — the most liberal potential mayors since John V. Lindsay oversaw the exploding crime rate and drove the city into near-bankruptcy in just eight years between 1965 and 1973.
They are not arguing over the proper balance between the economic growth the city needs and how to keep the city livable. Rather, they are fighting over which of them is more hostile to real-estate developers.
They are not arguing over how to improve school performance; they are arguing over which of them will give more to teachers and how to mitigate the damage of poor test scores.
Even after a federal judge effectively ruled the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk approach unconstitutional — which should have moved the campaign onto other topics — the candidates have continued to argue over which of them was even more opposed to stop-and-frisk than the other.
Culturally they are all representatives and proponents of what might be called the new urban consensus. From the 1950s until very recently, in this city as in others, core Democratic voters were actually traditionalists — Catholics who opposed abortion, small businessmen and homeowners who supported tough-crime measures and the death penalty, working-class marrieds horrified by the rise in illegitimacy and fatherlessness.
Many of those voters have died out or moved away. They have been replaced by a new kind of urban voter — the Obama voter, who is as consistently liberal when it comes to cultural matters as the Ed Koch Democrat was conservative.
Consider this profound shift in the city’s touchpoints: Twenty years ago, a frenzy was unleashed in this city when it was discovered the public schools had recommended two gay-parenting children’s books — “Heather Has Two Mommies” and “Daddy’s Roommate” — for 6-year-old readers.
Today the firestorm would come about if anyone uttered half a syllable of protest about such a recommendation — and it would likely benefit Quinn, the openly gay candidate.
The policy differences between de Blasio, Quinn, Thompson and Liu are matters of emphasis, not substance. De Blasio insists he will engineer a tax increase on the rich to pay for universal pre-K. Quinn points out, correctly, that he has no power to do this, that any such increase would have to come from Albany, which would never pass it.
But note Quinn is careful not to object to the substance of de Blasio’s idea, only to its political viability. Indeed, she has not ruled out tax increases, nor has Thompson.
All of this is to say that the differences here are cosmetic, and they are all but invisible to voters who aren’t paying extremely close attention — which is to say, almost all of them.
Quinn and Thompson may be less frightening candidates to the business community than de Blasio, but you wouldn’t be able to tell that from their rhetoric.
After all, de Blasio was a key backer of the city’s biggest real-estate project over the past decade, Atlantic Yards.
Another example of how little ideas matter in this race: Remember how Anthony Weiner only entered the race in June and immediately shot into the lead, only to melt down a month later after the revelation of his latest sexting psychosis?
It would appear that many of those who told pollsters they would support Weiner shifted to de Blasio and helped him zoom ahead.
If issues were the key to the race, this could not have happened. Weiner was actually running substantively as the heir to the Koch-Giuliani outer-borough white voter tradition. He was “the middle-class candidate.” De Blasio’s entire campaign is a rejection of this theme. So why would Weiner voters have moved over to de Blasio?
The answer is: the commercial.
You don’t know who the kid with the ’fro is when he begins to speak in his soft, surprisingly deep voice about how de Blasio will end stop-and-frisk, has the “guts to really break with the Bloomberg years” and will raise taxes on the rich. He’ll be a mayor for “every New Yorker,” Dante concludes, “and I’d say that even if he weren’t my dad.”
The 30-second spot makes no point whatever about Dante being biracial, even though it’s clearly intended to show the African-American community that de Blasio has a black son. The ad softens the class-war aspect of the de Blasio pitch through the implication that he can bring the racial harmony of his own home to the city at large.
This is, without question, one of the best political ads of the past 20 years — a perfect blend of the personal and political. It began running on Aug. 8. De Blasio was on the rise before then, but he gained a full 10 points on the pollster.com chart in the three weeks after its appearance.
In an underwhelming race dominated by politically tentative and overly cautious candidates, a race that was derailed for a month by a sex-tainted clown, the Dante ad was a breakout moment. No one else had one. Give that kid an MVP award.