No doubt Mayor de Blasio was relieved to beat it out of town Thursday and leave behind inconvenient questions about the botch of this week’s snowstorm. Plainly he is more comfortable on a stage in Washington, where he declared to his fellow mayors that it’s their job “to address the root causes of inequality.”
Now, this week’s snowstorm was not on the scale of the one that so damaged Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s reputation in 2010, much less the one that forever tarnished John Lindsay many decades earlier. But it carries a warning especially apt for a man who views himself as a national voice: In the end, mayors are judged on how they deliver the day-to-day services that make the most difference for ordinary New Yorkers.
Rudy Giuliani understood this. Though he is best known for the initiatives that took New York out of chaos and put it on the path to becoming America’s safest city, that was also the spearhead for other reforms aimed at making city government more accountable and transparent. In this way, a mayor who started with broken windows ended up launching a revolution that took nearly 600,000 people off the welfare rolls.
Or take Bloomberg. Like de Blasio, he had ambitions beyond providing basic city services. But he was shrewd enough to understand his political capital depended on maintaining Giuliani’s gains on crime — which he then took to new lows. Put it this way: If he hadn’t delivered on crime, Bloomberg would never have gotten away with the nanny issues dear to his heart, like trans-fats or smoking.
De Blasio sees himself as thinking big, and insists he has a mandate for his ideas. Maybe. We’ll just note that the evidence of the last 50 years suggests the progressive agenda may be less the answer for so much of what ails our big American cities than the cause.
And at this early stage in his tenure, Mayor Bill would do well to recognize that a man who can’t get the streets plowed is not going to persuade anyone he can end inequality.