If a mayoral debate happens in a landslide, does it make a difference?
That is, is there a ghost of a chance that anything said Tuesday night by Bill de Blasio or Joe Lhota will move votes? At least in the numbers that Lhota needs to move them?
He’s so far down that all he has is up — and while he was nobody’s patsy at the CUNY Graduate Center, he’s necessarily running as the defender of 20 years of policies and personalities that far too many New Yorkers are simply tired of hearing about.
They’ve long since turned to the gauzy generalities de Blasio’s been peddling since the outset, and in that respect the Democrat didn’t disappoint last night. Much manna was promised, with scarcely a mention of a bill.
Plus, de Blasio was quite the bully — which was a little tough to take in the self-described champion of municipal reconciliation, but which probably won’t hurt him any Nov. 5.
That’s because New Yorkers like mayors who talk tough. It’s not until they actually are tough that the trouble begins — a good example being de Blasio’s ceaseless dogging of Rudy Giuliani’s “divisiveness” last night.
Imagine a mayor with the smarts, guts and determination to pacify a city mired in gore, a city where babies in their beds were killed by stray bullets crashing through walls — they used to call them “mushrooms,” remember? — now being castigated because his tool kit lacked diplomatic skills.
Giuliani probably wouldn’t fit in today — his work here was done, as they say — but it was to Lhota’s immense credit last night that he forcefully and unapologetically defended his former boss in the face of de Blasio’s witless slanders.
This marked a change — the passion, not the Rudy shout-out — and maybe if Lhota had gotten his dudgeon up earlier he wouldn’t be in such a precarious position today.
On the other hand, yes he would.
That’s because he’s a wonk, right down to his DNA, and wonks rarely do well in politics because they generally insist on talking about governance — and that just bores the hell out people, journalists especially.
The facile dissemblers — lookin’ at you, Mr. de Blasio — spread snake oil on the waters while insisting that any discussion of history, context and possible consequences are out of bounds because of, well, racism or something.
De Blasio last night insisted once again that the NYPD has nothing to fear from an independent inspector general because the CIA has one — leaving Lhota to address the corrosive impact of an IG on command integrity and strategies in a 30-second rebuttal.
He couldn’t. But who could?
In that vein, de Blasio says everybody loves neighborhood schools, so none should ever be closed — even the ones that are so wretched that nobody learns to read, write or do numbers, but the teachers’ union loves them.
And, by the way, tax the rich — to fund another teachers’ make-work program, universal pre-K — no matter that the top 1 percent of New York taxpayers already pay 49 percent of the city’s income taxes, and that their patience isn’t infinite.
These are not policies, but rather slogans — facilely delivered by de Blasio without any detail attached and accepted by the electorate because apparently it’s pie-in-the-sky time and details don’t matter.
But even if they did, there’s no room for the nitty-gritty in televised debates — which are about smiles and wit and the occasional stiletto jab. Plus, last night, de Blasio got to stomp all over Lhota’s time allocations with only rare objections from the moderator.
To be sure, Lhota was nobody’s pushover — but he could have had the whole hour and it wouldn’t have changed a thing.
The wonks have had their 20 years, and now history is moving in the other direction. Now it’s time for the folks who can’t, or won’t, say no.
Now it’s de Blasio time.