Let’s call it Chartergate, because the parallels between Mayor de Blasio’s charter-school closure Thursday and Chris Christie’s Bridgegate are striking.
Consider: Bridgegate was meant as payback for a mayor seen as a foe of New Jersey’s governor. Chartergate targeted the mayor’s archrival, Eva Moskowitz.
Recall the infamous e-mail from a Christie aide that green-lighted Bridgegate: “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” Well, here’s what de Blasio himself said publicly about the charter-school leader: “Time for Eva Moskowitz to stop having the run of the place.”
Recall too the phony traffic study invoked by Christie aides to justify the lane closures. Turns out de Blasio has his own dubious study, a review of 49 plans for siting schools in New York. Wouldn’t you know it, only Eva’s charters were found a poor fit for space they were promised.
So what’s Bill got against Eva? Maybe he blames her for his failure to become council speaker in 2002, after she backed Gifford Miller instead. Maybe he resents that she became Education Committee chairman and not him.
Or maybe it’s just that by running public schools where black and Latino children learn, Eva makes it hard for de Blasio and his union pals to excuse the massive failure of the traditional public schools here.
In Bridgegate, Christie aides inflicted a severe inconvenience on innocent motorists to get back at a political enemy. In Chartergate, de Blasio is taking good schools away from disadvantaged minority children to get back at his enemy.
The one difference? In Bridgegate, the orders came from aides. In Chartergate, they come straight from the mayor himself.