If profound challenge forges political giants, does the small stuff fetch out the dwarves?
Well, maybe not exactly dwarves. But of the four plausible Democrats now running for mayor of New York City, none is a natural candidate for the Gracie Mansion hall of fame.
Yet one of them will most likely be living there next year.
Not long ago, this would have mattered a great deal. But today, maybe not so much.
That’s because Gotham’s next chief executive will be following three transformative mayors — men who successively helped to rescue the city from fiscal ruin (Ed Koch), proved that it can indeed be governed (Rudy Giuliani) and then effectively institutionalized the new normal (Mike Bloomberg).
Each man had his flaws, some of them profound. Each exuded controversy. And each — this must be said — wore out his welcome.
Yet it remains that most of the critical municipal-governance reforms of the past generation have either been written into law or incorporated so deeply into social expectations that even a hint of a return to the social dysfunction of the David Dinkins interregnum — theoldnormal — simply will not be tolerated. (You tell a Manhattan stroller mom that she must share a sidewalk with a vagrant.)
This leaves the 2013 candidates free to wage essentially content-free campaigns, and they’re taking full advantage of this opportunity.
Most recently:
* Christine Quinn, the City Council speaker, movedto outlaw discrimination against unemployed people — adding yet another protected class to New York’s already astonishingly long list of groups with the city’s blessing to sue at the perception of a slight.
* Bill de Blasio, the public advocate, formally declared his intentions by informing New Yorkers that he is, in the words of wife Chirlane, a “working dad.” This is so nice, but also probably the minimum to be expected of any father who’s also mayor.
* Billy Thompson, the former comptroller who came tantalizingly close to defeatingBloomberg four years ago, and who has been resting ever since, announced that he’s raised gobs of cash for this go-round. Good to see he has his eye on the basics.
* John Liu, the current comptroller, seems to have at least as much to fear from US Attorney Preet Bharara as he does from Democratic primary voters. But he did take time last week to rip Bloomberg for failing to establish a municipal Bureau of Housing-Mold Mitigation years ago, in anticipation of Superstorm Sandy.
Ah, the deliciously bearable lightness of running for mayor when everything’s up to snuff in New York City.
With one enormous exception, of course — that being the public-education elephant standing over in the corner.
The next mayor will follow two immediate predecessors who ran aground on the public schools — Bloomberg, spectacularly so, as will become more apparent as time passes.
But this had much less to do with the righteousness of their cause than it did — does — with the political purchasing power of the United Federation of Teachers, a union with industrial-era sensibilities, but one lacking a conscience, a soul and a moral compass.
Nevertheless, the four Democrats running for mayor would swap their souls for a full-throated UFT endorsement — and soon enough one of them will.
That transaction likely will take meaningful public-school reform off the table for the next four years — and quite possibly forever.
Not that the candidates will concede any of this.
No, each will be running as the “education” candidate — or the “social justice” candidate, or the “vision candidate,” or whatever the audience of the hour demands to hear.
This doesn’t make them bad people, necessarily. It makes them politicians.
For a politician, nothing is more urgent than the present — than the advantage to be gained in the here and now — and these four seem more likely than most to tailor their convictions, and their promises, to fit the occasion. They don’t have much else going for them.
Happily, in the New York tradition, campaign promises have no real post-Inauguration Day currency — and nobody expects otherwise.
So, to be deemed a success — if not a giant — the winner of this scrum needs only to sit back and pray that nothing destructively unexpected happens. Plus to remember that mayors, as with physicians, must always strive to first do no harm.