Photos by Harry Benson, Getty Images(L)
Andrew Burton, Getty Images(R)
John "I am the Mayor" Lindsay was an inspiring leader. He warned the power brokers he was coming for them. When asked by a reporter who the power brokers were, Lindsay replied, "They know who they are." He stood up to the TWU and the sanitation union, which went on strike. Lindsay was so successful standing up to them Rockefeller had to bring in the National Guard to collect the mountains of trash. Michael Quill had a heart attack and died in jail. Lindsay won that one. DeBlasio lacks the spine of Lindsay and would never stand up to unions.
[From article]
The Yale-educated Lindsay—who, as a congressman from the Upper East Side, was one of the chief architects of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act—promised to bring the glories of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society to the Big Apple. Similarly, the Columbia-educated de Blasio successfully won the mayoralty as a five-borough version of Barack Obama’s Chicago Way of politics. Both men rose by promising to resolve the irresolvable issue of race.
[. . .]
Liberal politicians like Lindsay believed, like the architects of Johnson’s Great Society, that the knowledge to solve social problems was at hand, and so they judged the situation not by comparison with earlier times—which would have shown them that things were actually quite good—but by the standard of what could be, if only men of vision had the money and power to remake the world.
[. . .]
third-party candidate William F. Buckley, who ran on the newly formed Conservative Party line. The silver-tongued Buckley, who called for the legalization of drugs and gambling, aroused enormous anger on the left by backing the city’s cops against accusations of racist policing and by proposing that welfare recipients work for their benefits. In his campaign—and in his subsequent memoir, The Unmaking of a Mayor—Buckley rejected the proposition that men and women had suddenly become far wiser than their predecessors
[. . .]
De Blasio narrowly won election in a three-way primary, barely achieving the 40 percent of the vote needed to avoid a runoff. He won a huge majority in the general election—a formality in an overwhelmingly Democratic city—despite a record-low 22 percent voter turnout.
[. . .]
The underlying problem with both mayors is that they proposed, as Buckley warned, to do the impossible when they promised to straighten the “crooked timber of humanity.” But government, let alone local government, can do no such thing. As New Yorkers who are angered by de Blasio’s ideological tours in Iowa understand, mayors must stick to the prosaic problems—union contracts, road repairs, and taxation. When a mayor neglects these responsibilities, he ends up as Lindsay did— an exile in his own city.
http://www.city-journal.org/2015/eon1117fs.html
Fred Siegel
Mirror-Image Mayors
Like John Lindsay, Bill de Blasio conjured up crises to win the mayor’s office—and, like Lindsay, he may soon face the real thing.
November 17, 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment