And so ends the primary campaigns of 2013, the year of the electoral overreach.
The year that saw conventional-wisdom mayoral frontrunner Christine Quinn try to drape the identity politics that work so well in her Greenwich Village City Council district across all the five boroughs, only to discover that New York wasn’t buying it.
The year that Eliot Spitzer tried to scratch the ego itch that’s had him squirming so visibly for years, once again dipping into daddy’s dollars but this time falling to a feisty machine pol that nobody outside Manhattan ever heard of six weeks ago, but who got his own nasty up at the end and slew the ogre.
The year that Anthony Weiner — oh, hell, never mind Anthony Weiner. Nutcase.
The year that John Catsimatidis, the grocer who made a billion dollars selling wilted vegetables and $8-per-pound butter to New Yorkers for decades, and who then thought they would forgive and forget long enough to make him mayor as a Republican, learned they wouldn’t. Silly boy.
The year that Billy Thompson’s comeback, four years in the making, labored its way to the cusp of a primary runoff — while never coming to terms with the fact that his identity-politics base, middle- and working-class African-Americans, has been heading for the suburbs and the South for years. And which, at the end of the day, seemed largely to prefer the white guy anyway.
And it was the year that Public Advocate Bill de Blasio ended Primary Night poised to pull off the greatest overreach of them all — having advanced from a structural sinecure to the top step of City Hall. He did it with a scandalously sparse résumé in his back pocket and a troubling talent for raising unreasonable expectations.
Whether de Blasio ultimately gets to walk through the front door remains to be seen, but barring something truly remarkable, it appears he will inherit one of the most demanding jobs in New York City — its mayoralty.
Credit where it’s due. De Blasio punched all the right buttons at all the right times — that is, just when a restive electorate was looking to throw off the old in favor of the new, along came Bill. Twelve years of Mike Bloomberg seems to have been enough, thank you very much, and that also goes for his cast of supporting characters — Quinn and Thompson chief among them.
It also didn’t hurt that de Blasio has no public record to speak of, and that both Quinn and Thompson very much do.
* Quinn, fairly or otherwise, has been viewed for years as a handmaiden to Bloomberg — if such a characterization is permissible anymore — on a range of budget and policy issues. And she was a very public co-conspirator in the suspension of term limits that allowed Bloomberg to win a third term — stirring bitterness among voters who nevertheless awarded the mayor those additional four years. Go figure.
* Thompson, to put it bluntly, has exceeded his sell-by date. He’s been around, in one incarnation or another, since Ed Koch’s mayoralty, and he really didn’t have anything really interesting to say even then. It would seem that the voters noticed.
They noticed Bill de Blasio, too. It should have come as no surprise.
That’s because the de Blasio coalition very much reflects the one put together by another backbencher from the community-organizing left — Barack Obama — in 2008. And reassembled just last year.
Exit polls last night indicated that de Blasio pretty much swept the city’s demographic board — attracting pluralities in every category save Asians. And he even led the full range of income levels, at least those listed by the pollsters, despite a campaign based almost solely on a promise to pick high-income pockets.
Think of it as the Obama zeitgeist: If it worked so spectacularly in deep-purple America, why shouldn’t it work in cobalt-blue New York City?
Certainly there’s no reason to believe that it won’t work in a Democratic runoff, if it comes to it — that is, if the final numbers work for Thompson, and he insists on a one-on-one thumping.
Which leads to yet another overreacher — a fellow who has the tools necessary to construct a successful mayoralty, if not a bridge over the 6-1 registration advantage Democrats have over Republicans.
That would be Joe Lhota, who laid the Catsimatidis candidacy to merciful rest last night, and whose own résumé makes it clear that when it comes to governing, he gets it.
Will that be enough?
Unlikely, but what the hell.
It’s the Year of the Overreach, right?