Is anybody looking dumber than Bill de Blasio right about now?
Tuesday’s Quinnipiac University poll gave him a 45 percent public-approval rating, down from 53 percent in January. This is consistent with earlier surveys, and it is astonishingly low for a new mayor.
But de Blasio has been stepping in cow pies since he took his hand off the Bible on Inauguration Day. The consequences have ranged from minor embarrassments to the humiliating drubbing he’s now taking from Gov. Andrew Cuomo on education reform.
Really, it boils down to this:
- Some politicians have a sixth sense for reading the electorate. (And awesome polling operations of their own.) In New York, foremost among them is Cuomo.
- And some simply don’t. These seem to include de Blasio.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the pair’s radically different approaches to public education — after public safety, New York’s perennial hot-button issue.
Now, let’s be frank: New Yorkers prefer public policy to be delivered free of distractions. When it comes to education, the rule is simple: More is better. More money, more teachers, more whatever it takes. (The teachers unions has been dining out on this for decades.)
That’s begun to change, because results are so dismal, but it’s a slow process. So when de Blasio dragged universal pre-K center stage last summer, Cuomo saw a winner — and jumped on it like a duck on a bug.
Where’s my checkbook? he declared, in words or substance.
But de Blasio temporized. He had a plan — but it came with a mandatory, punitive tax on “millionaires.” This guaranteed a nasty fight with Cuomo — which the mayor swiftly lost, along with any credible claim that his administration intends to elevate kids over ideology.
Now Gotham will have its pre-K, totally on Albany’s dime, and everything else is just radar chaff; it’s hard to imagine city residents being upset with this.
But, from de Blasio’s point of view, worse was on the way.
It came in the form of another major public-education miscalculation — City Hall’s decision to pin a target on education reformer Eva Moskowitz in particular, and on chartered public schools in general.
Charter schools — public schools under private management — may not work to the full satisfaction of the deep thinkers at Columbia’s Teachers College, and the teachers unions treats them as the existential threat that they are.
But they perform at least as well as — and most often better than — traditional schools, and New Yorkers clearly get that.
Certainly Cuomo has noticed.
So have parents: Admissions lotteries for chartered public schools are vastly oversubscribed; waiting lists stretch to the horizon — and even members of such strident public unions as the Transport Workers Union and SEIU/1199 are (often surreptitiously) enrolling their kids in charters. Results matter.
Not surprising, then, that Cuomo has emerged as arguably New York’s most powerful champion of charter schools — shouting his support before thousands of cheering charter kids, their parents and their teachers during a Capitol-steps rally in Albany this month.
The best de Blasio could do that same day was 700 listless teachers-union types clustered in a cavernous former National Guard armory dating to the 19th century — an apt metaphor, when you think about it.
The book is still open, of course. The new state budget, now being written in Albany, will have a lot to say about the future of charters in New York.
But for the moment, it seems as if Cuomo is very much on the right side of history here — and that de Blasio very much is not. (Indeed, Democratic mayors across the country — including Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel — are with Cuomo on charters, leaving de Blasio looking dated, lost and in thrall to special interests.)
But the rookie mayor’s poll numbers are about much more than public education. His problem is that his young administration lacks animation, imagination and energy.
Yes, it’s early. But he’s closing in on 90 days in office, which is not too soon to notice the lack of a coherent theme around which everything else orbits.
Successful mayors had them: Ed Koch was elected to deal with municipal bankruptcy, which he did with dispatch. Rudy Giuliani was meant to quell crime and social disorder, which he also did. Michael Bloomberg came to office post-9/11 with a mandate for recovery and renewal; mission accomplished.
Unsuccessful mayors — John Lindsay and David Dinkins, for example — brought ideology, resentment and rancor to the job, and precious little competence; the city suffered greatly for it.
De Blasio is about nothing if not ideology, and the resentment and rancor won’t be long in coming unless he gets right with the responsibilities of governing.
Until he does, the polls will only get worse. And he’ll only look dumber.