That was a big wide smile on Bill de Blasio’s face the other night, and why not?
He sure as hell earned one.
He was the only Democrat in a cluttered primary field to recognize — and then to capitalize on — the lesson Barack Obama taught the nation in 2008: That is, it is no longer necessary to do important things to win high office; it is only necessary to talk about doing important things.
Obama rode that insight into the White House, and de Blasio — bless his progressive heart — is at the cusp of the New York City mayoralty.
They have, not surprisingly, much in common.
Each wandered into his respective spotlight from stage (far) left, audaciously ambitious bit players with inauspicious résumés — Obama with minor local credentials and a partial term in the US Senate; de Blasio with thumb-twiddling time in the City Council and as New York’s institutionally do-nothing public advocate.
But never mind that. They understood that perceptions matter far more than substance; they were young, adept in the social-media arts — and, in the aspiring president’s case, there was real history to be made.
Scruples? Not so many.
Certainly the opposition was tired and too familiar — pointed straight at the past, an unappealing option in times of economic and social uncertainty.
There is, in fact, a potentially crippling disadvantage in having acquired a record; they make one vulnerable to out-of-context attacks, snarky tweets and late-night-comic ridicule.
Beyond this, Obama and de Blasio grasped something truly fundamental: That America no longer has much patience for difficult problems, to say nothing of plodding problem-solvers, but it has a prodigious appetite for unserious solutions.
And their eagerness to exploit this insight was manifest.
They did so in many ways. Here’s a handful:
— Economic hard times always exacerbate class resentments, a pot that each man stirred with gusto. Obama had his “America’s millionaires and billionaires” who must be made to “contribute just a little more” to make things right. There was no policy attached to this meme — not surprising, because the only point was to generate votes. The politics worked, of course. Too bad the same can’t be said of the national economy.
Now Bill de Blasio has his “Two New Yorks” pitch and an inchoate “tax the rich” scheme — neither a solution to anything, and the latter all but guaranteed to depress the local economy further. But both are vote-getters — and that, too, is the point.
— The president has ObamaCare and de Blasio has his advocacy of the failed Long Island College Hospital. The former is an unaffordable overreach now being strangled by bureaucratic inertia and political backlash — the latter a symbolic effort to preserve equally unaffordable 20th-century health-care infrastructure (and union jobs) in the face of far better, digital age, alternatives.
ObamaCare dwarfs de Blasio bunkum in scale, of course, but politically they are peas from the same pod: Advertised as avenues to health-care access and affordability, neither addresses the essential problem.
Which is that Americans want their health-care when they want it, in the quantities that they want, and they want it at virtually no cost — if not for free. It’s pixie dust, but there are votes in pretending otherwise.
— War is wearisome, and when threats recede — or are perceived to have receded — the urge to nap can be overwhelming.
Enter Obama and de Blasio, with nostrums.
Obama preached a wrong-headed but winning message in 2008 — that Islamic terrorists, and an otherwise fractious world, are open to reason. He has since learned otherwise — Vladimir Putin spent much of last week playing with him like a bored cat with a crippled mouse — but the ploy worked on Election Day 2008.
Here’s hoping de Blasio doesn’t find himself in a comparable situation sometime soon. Odds are he will, though.
For he contends that New York’s own security crisis has passed — that the city long ago won its war on crime and that focused, aggressive policing is now a provocative anachronism.
His shorthand bugbear is stop-and-frisk — the NYPD strategy that has so clearly helped keep most of the city safe.
But what de Blasio really objects to — as did all of the Democratic candidates in last week’s primary — is effective policing, pure and simple. Why else would he favor federal oversight for the NYPD — at best, the creation of a debilitating leadership vacuum in the department; at worst, effective federal control of its command structure?
That’s a dangerous game. Again, most city streets are safe, but far too many are not, and the city is only one timorous police commissioner — or one super-assertive federal overseer — removed from a return to the dangerous days of David Dinkins.
But there are votes to be gathered, so never mind all that.
Other dots connect Obama and de Blasio: the similarities in their educations, their early careers and their hard-left political alliances are striking. And each comes with an extraordinarily winsome family — always an electoral asset.
But they are truly political twins in this regard: Each came to prominence untested, hawking superficialities and promising what amounted to the unattainable.
Obama, it has become clear, also lacked competencies. Five years on, he has finally compiled a record — and it ain’t pretty.
So, will New Yorkers some day look back on a de Blasio mayoralty and ask themselves, as they did with Dinkins, “What in the world were we thinking?”
Perhaps. But one thing is for sure: They won’t be able to say they weren’t warned.
The Obama precedent, stark and forbidding, is there for all to see. For all who will see.