PERSPECTIVES
NATIONAL GOP SHOULD REALIZE THE NEW YORK CITY MAYORAL RACE DOES MATTER
By NICOLE GELINAS
S
ince the mayoral race started nearly a year and a half ago ago, Republicans have looked for an excuse not to win. Anyone who’s gone to an “experts” panel has heard that with New York’s six-to-one voter registration in favor of Democrats, a Republican can’t win unless there’s a crisis. The crisis for Republicans, then, is that there is no crisis. But the GOP lets itself off the hook too easily. The Republicans’ looming loss isn’t somebody else’s fault—but it is a sign of the party’s national difficulties. New Yorkers often hear from sages how hard it is for a non-Democrat to win the city. The only fair reading of recent history shows the opposite. New York hasn’t elected a Democratic mayor in 20 years. If you’re 38 and have lived in the city your whole life, you’ve never voted for a winning Democratic mayor. (Mayor Mike Bloomberg ran three times as a Republican despite switching his personal regis-
tration to independent in 2007.) It does the voters a disservice to blame crises for voters’ fair-mindedness. Mayor Rudy Giuliani won re-election in 1997 after having cut the number of murders by 49.5 percent. Bloomberg won a third term a year after Lehman Brothers had collapsed. Giuliani and Bloomberg won once and again for a good reason. Each man was the better candidate than his opponent. Whom would you have preferred to have serve as mayor, out of the following: Mayor David Dinkins (again, 1993), then Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger (1997), then Public Advocate Mark Green (2001), then Bronx Borough President Freddy Ferrer (2005), or then Comptroller Bill Thompson (2009)? None of the above presented a case why he or she would be better than his opponents. The voters were smart enough to figure it out. This time around, it’s hard to make a case that the Republican candidate, Joe Lhota, has made a better argument for himself than has Bill de Blasio, the Democratic public advocate and front-runner by far. True, de Blasio is a weak candidate running on superficial ideas. And he has benefited from good luck. Many voters
strongly disliked City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the conventional-wisdom victor. But part of de Blasio’s good luck is that Lhota has run a lackluster campaign. Lhota looked terrific on paper. He ran the city under Giuliani, and as MTA chief he did a bang-up job in getting the transportation authority running after Superstorm Sandy. And he has a great personality that often came across publicly during his MTA tenure. Not that winsomeness is a prerequisite; people always complain about Bloomberg’s alleged coldness. But Lhota has run on two platforms: fear of crime and demand for tax cuts. He seems to think people will automatically be so terrified of Dinkins-era crime rates that they won’t vote for a Democrat when reminded of this terrible history. But most voters were not living in New York, at least as adults, when Dinkins was mayor. Nor does Lhota realize that voters aren’t exactly clamoring for, say, a cut in the hotel tax. That young people and newcomers don’t remember high crime and that people don’t view corporate tax cuts as a priority isn’t an excuse for Lhota. It was a reason for him to do better. He needed ideas—any ideas. He could have seized on Bloomberg’s inattention to
quality-of-life issues like illegal construction and noise. He could have pushed for a better NYPD website so that people could look up, via a real-time map, why they or their children were stopped. He could have pushed for neighborhood-based pre-K, saying he’d work with landlords on using empty retail space for preschools so that no 4-year-old would have to take a bus. He could have seized on de Blasio’s flipflopping on the Times Square pedestrian plaza. Sure, Republicans’ toxic national reputation hurts Lhota, too, more than it hurt Giuliani. But that’s not an excuse, either. That’s a reason for Republicans to do better. Voters under 40 don’t associate Republicans with Ronald Reagan and growth. They associate Republicans with George W. Bush, a decadelong war and financial crisis. When Lhota—absent a shocking upset—loses, Republicans should care. New York isn’t an outlier. The rest of the country is looking more like New York. If Republicans can’t make it here… Nicole Gelinas (@nicolegelinas on Twitter) is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
INCONVENIENT POLITICAL TRUTHS
By BRUCE N. GYORY
I
want to make a contrarian case for climate change some day becoming the fundamental factor realigning American politics. In the wake of the debacle surrounding the 2011 debt limit crisis, The New York Times’ David Brooks reminded us of Samuel Lubell’s observation that American politics thrives when one party acts as a sun and the other as a moon. Brooks argued that we have two moons and no sun, as both parties are acting like minority (moon) parties. Brooks concluded that a devastating fiscal crisis would be likely to bring a political flood realigning our politics. I believe the flood precipitating this realignment could well be a real flood. I can hear the naysayers now. Polling data shows climate change is not a frontburner issue for voters. Climate change is currently dormant on the cutting edge of our politics. Nevertheless, some inconve28 NOVEMBER 4, 2013 | cityandstateny.com
nient truths may be headed our way. Our nation has been witnessing catastrophic and contradictory climate-based disruptions. In the Southwest we have had droughts and massive tornadoes, while in the far West alternating bouts of drought and horrendous forest fires have been followed by severe flooding. The Northeast has been hammered by superstorms emanating from tropical storms. Here in New York, within the span of 14 months upstate’s Hudson Valley was ravaged by Irene (which also clobbered Vermont) and Superstorm Sandy devastated the shores of New York City and Long Island (along with New Jersey and Connecticut). In the Midwest, Chicago is wisely planning for what the scientists tell them is coming: Within several decades Chicago is likely to have the climate of a southern city. That could wreak havoc through rising water levels to the communities along Lake Michigan. For the most part the political dots have not yet been connected on a national level or in our state, but at some point events could lock in not just perceptions but conclusions. Voters will ask questions not unlike those asked after Pearl Harbor,
which devastated the political standing of isolationists. This time voters will ask, “Where were you on climate change?” Woe to those elected officials with no good answer. If events lead the American people to conclude climate change is a clear and present danger to their quality of life, then the Republicans are in a deep hole. Congressional Republicans have functionally denied climate change is a problem. National Democrats are not blameless either, for they have been afraid to engage on climate change in the absence of the old bipartisan consensus on environmental issues. But Democrats could rebound, while the Republican’s congressional wing has left the Grand Old Party to stand in the political cold, if global warming catches political fire. If climate change strikes politically, it will hit with devastating force, precisely because of those communities that will be hit hardest: the American suburbs, where fully half the nation’s electorate resides. New York and New Jersey are talismans for this potential political tsunami. Irene devastated the smaller suburbs of the upper Hudson Valley, while Sandy
devastated Long Island. If suburban voters, so sensitive to market factors, shift away from the Republicans nationally over climate change, the Democrats would become a true sun party again. Just imagine the political implications of drastically altering the home values in America’s wealthiest suburban markets. The GOP has a choice to make. There was a reason that Republicans like Nixon, Rockefeller and Pataki put so much effort into building a green agenda. Smart politics would reconfigure a bipartisan consensus on behalf of a purposeful climate change agenda. Regrettably, that accord is unlikely today. We don’t know when climate change will reconfigure the contour of our nation’s political riverbed. In anticipation, the Democrats would be wise to find their courage on climate change, while the Republicans should recover their brains in what could become a political land of Oz should real floods realign our nation’s politics. Bruce N. Gyory is a political consultant with Corning Place Communications and an adjunct professor of political science at SUNY Albany.