NO REAL CHANGE, PLEASE -- WE'RE CORPORATISTS

There have been several recent editorials in the major newspapers about the New York mayor's race, which appears to be a two-person contest between thuggish sex pest Andrew Cuomo and charismatic but inexperienced social democrat Zohran Mamdani -- but this editorial, from The Washington Post's David Von Drehle, gets right to the point about what the corporatists who hope to maintain control of the Democratic Party in perpetuity really want:

For Democratic Party malaise in the age of Donald Trump, proposed cures are a dime a dozen. But a couple of ideas stand out. Find some fresh, inspiring candidates to replace the 20th-century relics. And put the kibosh on left-wing ideas associated with decline and disorder in some of America’s bluest cities.

There you go: The Democratic Party desperately needs fresh blood -- but please, no "left-wing ideas"!

Von Drehle cites a New York Times editorial published on Monday that begins with Murdochian scare tactics and doesn't get much better after that:

Many longtime New Yorkers have had a sinking feeling at some point in the past decade. They have worried that their city was heading back to the bad old days of the 1970s and ’80s.

Subway trips can have a chaotic or even menacing quality. Nearly half of bus riders board without paying their fares. The number of felony assaults has jumped more than 40 percent over the past decade. The city’s fourth graders, after significantly outperforming their peers in other large cities during the early 2000s, have fallen back in math and reading. Housing has become even less affordable, and homelessness has risen. In the most basic measure of the city’s appeal, the population remains well below its pre-Covid peak.

We believe that New York is the world’s most dynamic and important city, thanks to its energy, diversity, creativity, prosperity and history. And though some of the complaints about the city today are overstated, we are also worried. The quality of life has deteriorated over the past decade. On some issues, like crime rates, the city has recovered modestly over the past few years, and it remains in far better shape than it was 50 years ago. Still, New Yorkers deserve better than the status quo.

"Some of the complaints about the city today are overstated"? Then why begin by validating the fears of those who believe the city is as dysfunctional and dangerous as it was at its worst in the late twentieth century? New York City had more than a thousand murders every year from 1969 through 1995. It had more than two thousand murders in 1990 and again in 1991. But there hasn't been a year with even five hundred murders in the city since 2011. Crime in the seven major categories is down more than 72% since 1993.

The Times editorial was apparently written in a state of desperation: Mamdani continues to rise in the polls, and denunciations of him don't seem to be working, so the editorial shifts to a different tactic: portraying Mamdani as the second coming of the widely reviled Bill de Blasio.

New York needs a mayor who understands why the past decade has been disappointing. Crucial to that understanding is an acknowledgment that a certain version of progressive city management has failed, in New York and elsewhere.... At the municipal level, this liberalism was skeptical of if not hostile to law enforcement. It argued that schools needed more money and less evaluation. It blamed greedy landlords for high rents, instead of emphasizing the crucial role of housing supply.

Bill de Blasio, whose eight-year tenure as New York’s mayor began in 2014, came from this wing of the Democratic Party. And he had some successes, including his expansion of preschool and his curtailment of widespread stop-and-frisk policing. Overall, though, he bears significant responsibility for the city’s problems. He did not take disorder seriously enough, and he set back the city’s K-12 school system. His main legacy is to have contributed to the city’s recent decline.

We're told that de Blasio "did not take disorder seriously enough" and "contributed to the city’s recent decline," but do you know which years had New York's fewest murders in living memory? The years 2017 and 2018. New York had fewer than three hundred murders in each of those years, for the first time since World War II. Do you know who was mayor then? Bill de Blasio.

Also, when the editorial says, "The number of felony assaults has jumped more than 40 percent over the past decade," it's comparing 2024 figures to figures in 2014 -- when de Blasio was mayor.

But the editorial gives the game away when it defends greedy landlords and underfunding of schools: This is an effort to persuade voters not to try to move the Democratic Party of the Second Gilded Age to the left economically. The ed board's ideal candidate would be a Chuck Schumer with Mamdani's charisma -- or Cuomo himself without the baggage.

I expect Cuomo to win the primary. If he doesn't, he'll have a third-party ballot line in the general election. Mamdani might be on the ballot as the Working Families Party candidate if he loses the Democratic primary.

If both Cuomo and Madani are on the November ballot, I expect an even more brutal smear campaign against Mamdani than we've seen in the primary. And on whose behalf? Well, let me show you a campaign mailer I received this week...

The billionaires want to retain control of the Democratic Party and New York City -- and the ed board of The New York Times wants that too.