There are three questions about Bill de Blasio. First, and most obvious, is how he will do as mayor when it comes to the things that really matter — providing basic services, maintaining public order, keeping the citizenry safe.
Second, and most important to de Blasio, is how effective he will be at implementing his activist agenda, with its emphasis on somehow altering the nature of the city’s economic and social “inequality.”
Third, and most fascinating for the future, is what the success or failure of his mayoralty may mean for the country as a whole. De Blasio may be the most left-wing politician ever to win a major executive office in the United States, and as a result of the rules laid out in the City Charter, New York’s mayor is an exceptionally powerful official.
It’s therefore logical to think that de Blasio’s mayoralty will be a test case. His success or failure will provide crucial guidance to the Democratic Party and to the nation about the viability of unabashed left-wing governance.
Or will it?
Living as New Yorkers do inside the famous Saul Steinberg illustration in which Manhattan eats up seven-eighths of the United States, we’re always inclined to believe that what’s happening here is more important politically than what is happening anywhere else in America.
The thing is, we’re almost always wrong about that. In point of fact, New York is and always has been sui generis — a political case unto itself. This is, after all, a famously liberal city with a tiny number of Republicans that had been run by center-right mayors (elected on the GOP and minor-party lines) for 20 uninterrupted years.
Then, in November, a candidate preaching radical change won the mayoralty in a colossal landslide — even as a majority of those in the exit polls actually professed satisfaction with the status quo.
That’s just weird, and should demonstrate once and for all that New York is a wildly idiosyncratic city whose politics and politicians are basically non-transferable.
Indeed, not since Theodore Roosevelt became vice president in 1900 has a major local politician gone on to do anything of consequence nationally — and TR wasn’t even an elected city official, but rather a one-time police commissioner who only became veep after winning a term as governor of the state.
Roosevelt left the job of top cop in 1897. That was 117 years ago, if you need help with the math. Since his day, not one mayor or high-ranking city official has even gone on to win statewide in New York, not for governor and not for senator.
After the wildly successful mayoralty of Rudy Giuliani altered the dynamic of American cities by demonstrating it was possible to reverse crime sprees and reestablish public order — and after 9/11 made Rudy a national hero — many people believed he’d figured out how to crack the national political code. Here was a nationally famous and even revered politician with a proven record and cross-party appeal.
Yet his presidential bid in 2008 was a disaster, as Mayor John Lindsay’s bid had been in 1972.
Perhaps the issues Bill de Blasio raises as mayor will help guide his party later on — or perhaps his failure will scare his party away from them. But as history suggests, it’s far more likely that what happens in New York City will stay in New York City, as it almost always does.