“De Blasio’s Advantage: No One Believes Him,” Seth Mandel writes at Commentary:
There’s that condescension again, as the Times translates Bloomberg’s message: governing is “slightly more complicated” than not governing. De Blasio is getting the Obama treatment at this point. The true liberal governing agenda is so reckless that most people on the left just assume liberals are making empty promises, and those on the right hope they are.
It’s the strange reality of post-9/11 politics, and a testament to the success of figures like Rudy Giuliani. New York has suffered through periods in which it was difficult to imagine the city at or near its true potential. It is now difficult for New Yorkers to imagine that mindset, thanks in large part to the public servants who helped rescue the city from the Dinkins era. It is characteristic of this new confidence–which borders, at times, on a very un-New York complacency–that few are willing to believe a progressive will govern as a progressive, that liberalism is fun in theory but there are too many lives at stake to put it into practice.
Sorry, I’m not making that mistake again.
When Barack Obama won in 2008, my immediate thoughts were that, “Sure, all of those community organizer riffs play well to the Kos Kids and the rest of the far left base, but he’s a smart man — he knows that the key to success will be to govern as Bill Clinton ultimately did: pay some lip service to far left social issues, but policy-wise stay close to the center. He’s got to remember Clinton’s disastrous first two years in office after he ran to Bush #41’s right to get elected: Waco, gun control, Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders railing on about masturbaaaaaation being taught in school, don’t ask don’t tell, HillaryCare, etc. The sum total of which exasperated voters enough to hand GOP Congress for the first time 40 years in 1994. He knows not to make those mistakes again. It won’t be too bad, right?”
Well, we all know how that turned out. Like Mr. Obama, de Blasio is a true leftist believer; might as well get a jump on things, and assume that the bad old days will be returning to Manhattan soon enough. Who wants to be myzled yet again?
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Related: “It is almost always popular to promise to raise taxes on the fat cats, and the crude arithmetic of democratic politics means that it is usually profitable to promise to tax a wealthy minority and give the money to a less-wealthy majority. A majority may very well vote for such redistribution — moving is the fat cats’ veto. And as dysfunctional, Democrat-dominated cities around the country have seen, it becomes the middle class’s veto, too.”
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