How de Blasio Can Succeed

It is far too early to speculate on Bill de Blasio’s ultimate success as mayor. However, it is not too soon to parse the factors that will determine how New Yorkers will judge his mayoralty. 

I was honored to serve on City & State’s panel for the Top 10 Greatest Mayors in New York City history. That review implicitly spotlighted three factors determining mayoral success. 

The first factor is controlled by the mayor himself. Successful mayors ground their missions in achievable objectives. Koch: fiscal balance and independence; Giuliani: breaking the back of crime and restoring the sense that the city was governable; and Bloomberg: rebuilding the city’s economy and spirit in the wake of 9/11—all benefited from choosing and succeeding at salient missions. 

Alternatively, despite significant achievements—most notably that New York never burned from riots—Mayor Lindsay suffered from biting off more than he could chew. Lindsay pretended he could transform New York City into a model for urban rebirth from what the old Herald Tribune called a “city in crisis.” New York’s descent into fiscal crisis inevitably flowed from Lindsay’s overreach. 

Which brings us to de Blasio’s great vulnerability: his diagnosis of the long-term dangers attending rising inequality. His argument is irrefutable, and yet the real question is: Can any mayor successfully combat the underlying forces undergirding that inequality rooted in our newly flat world? 

Might de Blasio be wiser if he confined his diagnosis of inequality to the bully pulpit, but directed his prescriptions to address it toward achievable objectives: excellence in education and the development of a robust affordable housing program? That shift might create a standard de Blasio could meet, rather than setting the bar at a height no mayor can surmount alone: reducing inequality. 

The second factor hearkens back to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s famous (and correct) observation that “There is no Democratic or Republican way to clean the streets.” Mayors should realize that to build up their political bank accounts for programmatic initiatives, they must prove their administrative skills. 

Stan Greenberg, the head of the de Blasio campaign’s polling firm, has long admonished Democrats not to take false comfort from polling data showing public support for many liberal proposals. The reason, according to Greenberg, is that the public distrusts whether progressives can manage the government wisely. Consequently, progressives must succeed in clearing this hurdle of trust. Thus how snowstorms are cleared and garbage is cleaned up will raise or lower de Blasio’s political capital on the big issues. 

The third factor is that mayors must be effective lobbyists for their own agendas, because so much of the city’s budget is dependent upon federal and state funding. Mayor La Guardia owed a large quotient of his success to the fact that he was a magician at securing federal dollars for infrastructure projects. Mayor Robert Wagner was similarly astute in securing state support for his budgets. 

De Blasio must realize that no mayor can take Albany by storm. Institutionally, the governor and the Legislature hold enormous sway over the city. Moreover, New York City has not cast over 30 percent of the state’s gubernatorial vote in over three decades, despite growing to 42 percent of the state’s population and 40 percent of all registered voters. 

Even if de Blasio succeeds in building New York City’s electoral clout, he still must become a legislative coalition builder in Albany across regional and partisan lines. A critical question becomes: Will de Blasio succeed in building long-term alliances with upstate school districts on education funding formulas, and with Long Island and the northern suburbs on the MTA’s Capital Plan? 

The entire state would benefit from a vibrant New York City with a growing middle class as a ladder out of poverty. But rest assured, the long-term political support for any mayor will only accompany governing achievements. That hard and enduring lesson of New York City mayoral history carries the force of gravity.