Thanks, Ross, you are right and I hope a better evaluation of DeBlasio emerges over time. He had a clear agenda, and really helped modest-income tenants, preschoolers and parents. He was never cowed by the real estate industry as so many other mayors have been! The only people he had to mollify, sadly, were the cops. They did scare him, into letting them run roughshod over our rights. For example, they were very wrong to mistreat Black Lives Matter protesters. Sigh. A later report showed egregious rough and illegal mistreatment by NYPD of BLM marchers. Too bad. Those marches were a moral, civic and emotional high point for which I, for one, am so proud of my fellow New Yorkers. (I only marched in a couple of them.)
One thing about your DeBlasio comments calls up a long-held thought I have had. Hardly anyone in our society - media, academia, pundits - effectively evaluates our elected officials. Your points about DeBlasio are quite legit - but as you seem to indicate, he won’t be remembered that way, or with much nuance.
I know we do the “presidential performance historian ranking thing,” but you otherwise rarely see a serious effort to evaluate elected officials. This is a thing we could do. Seems like an academic field of study to conjure up.
It's also worth noting that it took _years_ for De Blasio's approval ratings to drop to the levels that Adams reached within six months. As late as June 2021 his approval was at 37%; in April 2021 it was at 45%. Adams is at 29%.
BUT if you read the local media in 2021 you'd get the sense that De Blasio was universally despised, and if you read the local media today you'd get the sense that everybody loves Adams except a fringe of cranky lefties for whom nothing is ever good enough anyway. The narrative is just totally divorced from the data.
Thanks, Ross, you are right and I hope a better evaluation of DeBlasio emerges over time. He had a clear agenda, and really helped modest-income tenants, preschoolers and parents. He was never cowed by the real estate industry as so many other mayors have been! The only people he had to mollify, sadly, were the cops. They did scare him, into letting them run roughshod over our rights. For example, they were very wrong to mistreat Black Lives Matter protesters. Sigh. A later report showed egregious rough and illegal mistreatment by NYPD of BLM marchers. Too bad. Those marches were a moral, civic and emotional high point for which I, for one, am so proud of my fellow New Yorkers. (I only marched in a couple of them.)
Enjoying these stories about NY 10.
One thing about your DeBlasio comments calls up a long-held thought I have had. Hardly anyone in our society - media, academia, pundits - effectively evaluates our elected officials. Your points about DeBlasio are quite legit - but as you seem to indicate, he won’t be remembered that way, or with much nuance.
I know we do the “presidential performance historian ranking thing,” but you otherwise rarely see a serious effort to evaluate elected officials. This is a thing we could do. Seems like an academic field of study to conjure up.
It's also worth noting that it took _years_ for De Blasio's approval ratings to drop to the levels that Adams reached within six months. As late as June 2021 his approval was at 37%; in April 2021 it was at 45%. Adams is at 29%.
BUT if you read the local media in 2021 you'd get the sense that De Blasio was universally despised, and if you read the local media today you'd get the sense that everybody loves Adams except a fringe of cranky lefties for whom nothing is ever good enough anyway. The narrative is just totally divorced from the data.