Since the winner of the New York City Democratic mayoral primary is the candidate most likely to win the general election, my deepest sympathies to New York, arguably the greatest city in the world. It had a good run. Billy Joel was just a little off in the timing when he envisioned the city’s decay, abandonment and destruction in “Miami 2017.” I look forward to the Jets relocating to Fairfax, Virginia.
As centrist Democrats awake this morning, fuming that “the only candidates who genuinely excite our voters are the ones making absolutely insane promises on politically toxic positions,” let us point out that the New York City Democratic establishment chose to bet all their chips on a nationally-disgraced former governor. I’m not going to begrudge any conservative who looked at the options of Andrew Cuomo or Zohran Mamdani and concluded Cuomo was the lesser evil. But I will begrudge the movers and shakers among the allegedly sensible non-socialist New York Democrats – the Wall Street crowd, Mike Bloomberg, Bill and Hillary Clinton, etc. – for not recognizing what damaged goods Cuomo was.
From the first inkling of a Cuomo mayoral bid, I was pointing out that he set new records for gubernatorial shamelessness. Cuomo corrupted almost everything he touched, from the Time’s Up organization to his ludicrously generous book deal to his brother’s work at CNN. Throughout his mayoral campaign, Cuomo offered no sign that he had been the least bit humbled or changed by his fall from the highest heights of political power. The disgraced former governor left a trail of slime everywhere he went, and his shameless abuse of power was a non-ideological issue, the sort of thing that bothers people across the political spectrum. He left office with an abysmal approval rating, 28 percent or 38 percent, depending upon which pollster you ask.
(Notice that disgraced former congressman and mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner is running a distant fourth, with just over 10 percent of the vote, a bit more than 2,700 votes, in New York City Council Second District Democratic Primary. New Yorkers’ appetite for scandal and willingness to forgive is not infinite. Weiner lost to Harvey Epstein, the most unfortunately named politician in the city.)
The notion that New York City Democratic voters were going to forget history – very recent history! – and hand the mayor’s office to Cuomo was never a safe bet. This year’s Democratic mayoral primary needed a non-socialist, non-corrupt, standard issue safe-streets option, and the city’s movers and shakers just couldn’t find one that would stand out.