By Tom Allon
It is Sept. 11 as I write this, and I can glimpse the new World Trade Center towers from my office window.
It is hard to believe it has been a dozen years since that tragic, fateful day. We have been extremely fortunate to have a police commissioner and a police department that has combatted terrorism and brought down crime with 5,000 fewer officers in the past few years. As he leaves the New York stage, Ray Kelly should receive some applause.
But now it’s almost time for the next chapter in our city’s history, and we know that our new mayor will either be Bill de Blasio or Joe Lhota, with a slim chance Bill Thompson will be in the mix for a runoff, pending a recount. There are two other third party candidates, Adolfo Carrion and Jack Hidary, both intelligent and well-intentioned men, but those closest to them know there chances of winning are somewhere between slim and none.
What are the lessons to be gleaned from the primary results? First, on the Democratic side, the “hope and change” candidate won and his ascension was not unlike President Barack Obama’s steady rise in 2008. De Blasio used Mike Bloomberg as a foil throughout the campaign, and he benefitted from the public’s weariness with the three-term mayor, the minority community’s rising anger over stop-and-frisk and the cozy relationship City Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan), another mayoral hopeful, had with Bloomberg.
Identity politics also helped de Blasio’s late surge. The television commercial optic of his appealing son with the Afro was one of the most effective campaign ads I’ve ever seen.
De Blasio, who worked at HUD in the Bill Clinton administration, also learned an important political lesson from his boss, one of the canniest politicians of the past generation: It is important to have empathy and say, “I feel your pain” to those in the middle- and under classes.
De Blasio’s populist message of “two cities” resonated in 2013 in a way it didn’t, for some reason, for Dem mayoral candidate Freddy Ferrer in 2005. In the wake of a recession, the subprime mortgage crisis and Occupy Wall Street, the public was looking for a class warrior, which is a role de Blasio seems suited for.
On the Republican side, Joe Lhota emerged victorious in a close race against John Catsimatidis because voters seemed to want someone with vast government experience in addition to a private-sector background. Lhota’s effective campaign slogan, “Ready to Lead on Day 1,” is a different message than de Blasio’s “two cities” approach.
Lhota faces an uphill battle in a city with a 6-to-1 voter registration advantage for Democrats, but Rudy Giuliani and Bloomberg have proved that party demographics is not destiny when it comes to mayoral races. Lhota’s victory speech on Primary Night did a good job of explaining the stakes in the upcoming Nov. 5 election: If you believe the city has made dramatic progress in public safety and business friendliness in the past 20 years, then Lhota’s the right choice to continue in that path.
If, however, you believe the city has done too much to help business at the expense of low-income New Yorkers and has paid too high a price in civil liberties for our public safety gains, then de Blasio is your man.
These candidates now have almost two months to lay out their different visions for the city’s future and voters will have a real choice.
In the days after, as we pause to remember our brethren who perished a dozen years ago, we should gently lean into our city’s future and imagine what we want our city to become in the next decade.
De Blasio or Lhota will inherit the mantle of a city that has made great strides during the past dozen years: New Yorkers are living longer, we have many new parks and thriving neighborhoods, our economy is doing better than most and our streets have never been safer.
Just like Giuliani and Bloomberg did, these men will have to convince voters that their vision will continue bending the arc of history toward progress, equality and a better city.
Tom Allon, president of City & State NY, was a Republican and Liberal party-backed mayoral candidate in 2013 before he left to return to the private sector. Reach him at tallon@cityandstateny.com.
