Well, Joe Lhota seems to have weathered Kittygaffe.
Quinnipiac University’s pollsters yesterday reported that Lhota, a former deputy mayor and a man who speaks his mind, maintains an impressive lead in next Tuesday’s Republican mayoral primary.
So much for the “dis kittens and die” meme that overtook holiday-weekend news cycles, after Lhota averred that he wouldn’t stop subway service because of stray kittens on the tracks.
Sensible. Incomprehensible politics, but sensible.
The New York Republican Party, of course, would be hard-pressed to cough up a quorum for a fantasy-football league — and this complicates polling.
But the numbers seem substantial: Lhota leads the subtly thuggish billionaire grocer John Catsimatidis, 48 percent to 24 percent, with a 9.8 percent margin of error.
He’s consistently led by such margins all along, so it seems that the only real question is this: Apart from the sheer joy of the chase, when you’ve won the GOP nomination for mayor of New York City, what have you won besides another chase?
That is, what next besides the Democratic tsunami?
But this is, in fact, slightly ahistorical.
It may be that Mike Bloomberg’s singular contribution to the health and welfare of New York City came on Election Day, 2001 — when he denied the mayoralty to the Naderite noodge Mark Green, who’d spent much of that campaign as the popularly preordained winner.
Green had big plans for Gotham — most of them involving unaffordable sums of money not his own. Whereas Bloomberg appeared content merely to run the town.
Just weeks after 9/11, that seemed reasonable enough.
Twelve years on, the age of Bloomberg is drawing to an end — and with it, likely, a two-decade Democratic drought at City Hall.
By and large, the Democrats seeking City Hall lack Green’s practiced arrogance, which is a blessing, but like him they are a drearily doctrinaire bunch — displaying spendthrift impulses, instinctive pandering and a distressing lack of personal depth.
Listen to them, and you’d never suspect why a Giuliani administration was necessary 20 years ago. Some 2,200 murders a year, maybe? They say they care about that, but there’s no evidence.
Nor do they display much appreciation of just how good for the city Mike Bloomberg’s own brand of invincible arrogance has been — on balance, of course, and never mind the annoying bike lanes.
But times change, and urgencies ebb — and this explains what looks like an impending Democratic restoration.
Still, there’s an election to be run and — on the merits — Lhota really needs to be a part of it; he seems to be the sole contender of either party who understands the efficacy of saying no.
“For every dollar in the [city] budget,” he said last week, “there are at least two advocates fighting to keep it in the budget, and they all have allies somewhere in the process.
“So a zero-based budget” — nothing new goes in unless something old comes out — “becomes an epic battle,” the only easy way out being appeasement. That is, economy-crushing tax increases.
But it’s a fact that, apart from a stiff tax hike immediately post-9/11, Bloomberg has largely kept the city living within its means — which are not inconsiderable, of course.
Lhota notes that city tax receipts today, adjusted for inflation, are 56 percent higher than they were a decade ago — and he thinks that should be enough.
But too much is never enough for liberal Democrats. While Lhota says he won’t abide tax hikes, the Democratic field is at best ambivalent about them — and, indeed, party front-runner Bill de Blasio is explicitly promising hundreds of millions in new taxes, to be extracted from “the rich.”
That would be the wealth-producing segment of the economy — and those who aspire to join it. And these generally are folks who have their own views on such matters.
For example, urban analyst Aaron Renn — in a startling new report on domestic migration in The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal — says that 2.5 million more people have left the New York metro area for elsewhere in America over the past 12 years than have moved into it.
And they’ve taken more than $50 billionin personal wealth with them.
This isn’t new, and it has as much to do with Albany as it does with City Hall. But it’s not a trend to be encouraged, which is precisely what the Democratic candidates for mayor are doing.
Lhota seems to understand, even if he does need to get a whole lot louder about it. And if he does — well, there are reasons why his party has held City Hall for 20 years, and public safety is only one of them.
As unlikely as it seems now, lightning could strike.