We’ve got 22 months left of asking: Where in the world is Mayor Bill de Blasio? Afterward, we should pick a mayor who actually wants to, you know, be a mayor.
You can find Hizzoner on Twitter, yelling at Joe Biden. There he is on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” telling black people they voted wrong. He’s at his gym in Park Slope for hours at a time.
The mayor checks in with us, from time to time, mainly to lob crazy leftist rhetoric before taking off again. I’m a lifelong New Yorker, and I’ve never seen a mayor less interested in the job.
But de Blasio won’t be mayor for long. In November 2021, New Yorkers will have a chance to elect someone new. And we badly need an anti-de Blasio.
Gotham is a liberal place, but the city that elected Rudy Giuliani to two terms and Michael Bloomberg to three should know to reject fantastical woke-ism in favor of moderate pragmatism.
There’s often talk about a “return to normalcy” on a national level; New York could use its own return to normalcy. Under de Blasio, New York has been transformed into a petri dish for progressive radicalism. The results of the experiment are hideous.
The homeless are everywhere — dejected, confused, arms often riddled with needle marks. In October, an MTA task force found a huge spike in the number of homeless people living on trains, up 20 percent from 2018.
Ordinary New Yorkers know this, but de Blasio, who likes to be conveyed around town via SUV convoy, doesn’t. Let our next mayor be a subway rider, someone who walks the streets and dives underground and doesn’t cloister himself away.
Then there is the growing criminal disorder. The mayor vacillates between defending the no-bail law he supported and admitting it has been responsible for a 20 percent spike in serious crime this year.
Last month, at a forum in Queens, he railed against “right-wing propaganda” that linked higher crime to bail reform. But last week, he was forced to admit the law is a disaster: “There’s a direct correlation to a change in the law, and we need to address it.”
Automatically releasing suspects in many serious crimes is so obviously a half-witted notion that a wise mayor would have led the charge in opposition when there was still time to abort the misbegotten law. But not Blas.
Oh, and New Yorkers, let’s not choose for our next mayor someone with seething resentment for the New York Police Department. The mayor and the NYPD have to work hand-in-hand. Sowing suspicion of the police, as this mayor routinely does, harms the city and is dangerous to us all.
Finally, there is schooling. The next mayor will also have to rebuild parental trust in our public-school system, frayed in the last few years. The de Blasio administration took aim at the best schools in the city while doing bupkis to improve the worst.
When de Blasio installed people like the incompetent and divisive Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, he told New York parents that his ideological vision mattered more than their kids.
Ideally, the next mayor should have kids in the public-school system, so that he — or she — will have skin in the game (this mayor sent his kids to the selective schools he has tried to destroy). We should pick someone who cares about educating all kids, not bringing “equity” to schools by mangling the best ones.
If President Trump wins re-election in November, the Democratic candidates for mayor will make the race about him. Don’t fall for this smokescreen, New Yorkers. Don’t let your feelings on Trump affect whom you pick to run our city. Trump — his achievements and his many antics — have little to do with the day-to-day running of this city.
New Yorkers deserve a mayor who will work for them, sometimes even before 10 a.m.
Twitter: @Karol
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