Bill de Blasio’s first-place finish in Tuesday’s Democratic mayoral primary, says conventional wisdom, was a wholesale rejection of Mayor BloomÂberg and everything he stands for. But was it really?
It’s understandable why, after 12 years, Mike Bloomberg is disliked. There’s his nanny-state attempts to micromanage New Yorkers’ personal choices on everything from salt to cigarettes. Not to Âmention his perceived detachment from ordinary New Yorkers.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the Bloomberg that de Blasio and the primary voters who backed him are rejecting. If Bill were running against Bloomberg’s bike lanes, his war on the Big Gulp or his ban on trans fats, we missed it.
Instead, the Bloomberg that de Blasio is running against is the good Bloomberg. This is the Bloomberg who brought crime to historic lows with policies such as stop- and-frisk, who took on the public unions and their bloated contracts, who gave hope to thousands of schoolchildren by opening up charters and trying to hold teachers accountable, who has pushed rezoning and development to revitalize entire neighborhoods, and who has remade the waterfront, expanded parks and public places, rebuilt lower Manhattan, expanded jobs, avoided budget deficits and made New York synonymous with resiliency.
These are the best parts of a genuine BloomÂberg legacy designed to keep New York as a dynamic city of hope and opportunity. It is the legacy most threatened by de Blasio and his divisive class-warfare rhetoric aimed at persuading voters that the only way one New Yorker can succeed is at another’s expense.
Bill de Blasio is running as the anti-Bloomberg. But in vowing to dismantle so many of the policies that have shaped the city’s renaissance, he’s more likely to undo the best of Bloomberg without getting rid of the worst.