Seth Barron has written an excellent piece on the vast disconnect between New York City Mayor bill de blasio’s view of himself and who/what he actually is supposed to be. Titled “The Imposter Mayor” (yes, “impostor” is inexplicably misspelled), Mr. Barron details how the city is falling into disrepair as de blasio indulges his delusions of grandeur.
Here are a few key segments:
Mayor de Blasio made a surprise departure from New York City yesterday—just one day after the assassination of NYPD officer Miosotis Familia while she guarded a violence-plagued Bronx corner—in order to attend anti-capitalist protests in Hamburg, site of the G-20 summit. A few hours after de Blasio’s plane departed, a train derailed in Penn Station, where extensive track work is scheduled to begin this weekend. It was the third derailment at Penn since March; the incidents have become so commonplace that New Jersey Transit commuters reportedly showed little surprise when their train car slid off the track.
The mayor has indulged his inflated sense of his own importance before: he loves to attend summits, conferences, rallies, and protests where he can pontificate about inequality.
De Blasio’s meaningless and absurd promise to ensure that New York City adheres to the Paris Climate Accords underscores a fundamental truth about his mayoralty: he has no interest in what his job actually entails. Mayors do important work: they administer streets, schools, and police, and they manage a municipal budget. De Blasio has little interest in such banalities; he imagines that mayors are the true rulers of the world, because, as he told the Conference of Mayors, they “represent the majority of Americans.”
Meantime, homelessness in New York City is up 40 percent, and the subways are a disaster. De Blasio shrugs, effectively dismissing these concerns as outside his purview, or not really problems at all. In a radio interview today the mayor, calling in from Germany, complained that street panhandlers who aren’t “in dire economic need” are making the homelessness problem seem worse than it really is. So instead of dealing with these pedestrian issues, he rushes off to the barricades in Hamburg to fight capitalism, or “fascism,” as his spokesperson put it in a tweet earlier today. Does de Blasio not recognize that Wall Street tax revenue pays for expanded summer youth-employment programs, free suntan lotion at city beaches, health care for illegal immigrants, and the unmatched police force that keeps New York City the “safest big city in the country,” as he likes to say? The mayor should swallow his overweening pride and try doing his job.
de blasio’s Mayoralty is a disaster. And a self-inflicted one, because the voters of New York City elected him…and are poised to do so again this November.
Then who are they going to blame as the city that was turned around by Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg continues its devolution right back to where it was under David Dinkins? Trump? The Koch brothers?
If they re-elect de blasio they will get exactly what they deserve.
