The Prestige Media Catches Up to Eric Adams

The New Yorker digs in at the truth

Photo: Getty Images

How did New York get Eric Adams? A number of people, over the last year and a half, have asked me how he became the mayor of the largest city in America. Two summers ago, Adams was declaring himself the new face of the Democratic Party and national pundits were swooning. Adams, for a certain kind of Left-skeptical Democratic apparatchik, was a breath of fresh air, the tough-talking Black moderate who could smack down the unruly progressives and socialists. The Democratic primary for mayor had been held in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the explosion of the Defund the Police movement. Adams, an ex-police captain, was ferociously opposed to Defund, and happily hobnobbed with real estate developers and financiers at a time when local progressives were trying to impose litmus tests on candidates who dared to accept their campaign contributions. For centrist Democrats in New York and beyond, Adams appeared to be the unicorn: a man of Bloombergian political leanings with an actual working class pedigree. A Black Democrat from Queens, Adams gained a degree of fame as a policeman willing to challenge the department’s history of racial discrimination and abuse. He was later a state senator and a Brooklyn borough president. The latter post, which theoretically gave him dominion over more than two million people, sounded important enough. Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire independent from Massachusetts, never really understood the outer boroughs, the Black churches, or the Democratic machines. Here was Adams, a product of all of three, now ascendant.

Adams, unlike Bill de Blasio, was barely elected mayor. To answer the question that kicked off this essay, Adams ran a good campaign and got lucky. For many months, the polling front-runner was Andrew Yang, the entrepreneur who became famous running for president, and he absorbed much of the media’s scrutiny and the Left’s ire. Progressives grew to revile Yang, who campaigned as a pro-police, tech-friendly moderate, and made it their mission to ensure he failed. Yang never seemed to take the race very seriously, making a number of gaffes that cost him support from college-educated voters. The other top contender, Scott Stringer, imploded after a woman accused him of past sexual misconduct, and progressives struggled to find a viable standard bearer. The New York Times editorial board, meanwhile, decided to endorse another moderate, Kathryn Garcia, who nevertheless appealed to enough liberals because of her technocratic background. Garcia climbed in the polls and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Maya Wiley, another first-time candidate; Wiley, by then, was best known as an MSNBC legal pundit and had spent a few undistinguished years as de Blasio’s counsel. This chaos was good for Adams, who only faced tough questions in the final weeks of the race. His message, too, fit the mood: like Yang, he was against defunding the police and promised to reverse a recent crime spike. Unlike Yang, he was a retired police captain who had credibility on the issue. In New York’s very first ranked-choice voting primary, Adams and Garcia were the top two candidates. Garcia was a political neophyte who caught fire a bit too late, and couldn’t capitalize on reports that Adams may have lived primarily in New Jersey. She would lose by less than 10,000 votes.

In the Bill de Blasio years, I went to many press conferences. In my mid-twenties, as a City Hall reporter, I usually had to go, and I would relish the chance to ask the mayor a biting question. I liked the spectacle of these events. De Blasio, like Michael Bloomberg, possessed a tremendous ego, and he could be a hectoring, brittle presence behind a lectern. It was easy for the assembled reporters to resent de Blasio and his various flights of fancy. Installing a new stop sign, in his parlance, could be “transcendent,” and anyone who didn’t fluff his administration with the proper praise was iced out. Still, history will be kinder to de Blasio as well as Bloomberg, who partially damaged his legacy by strongarming the City Council into handing him a third term. De Blasio and Bloomberg didn’t agree on much, but they were mayors who cared about tangible accomplishments. The mayoralty wasn’t funny to them, or a way to preen in front of the cameras. Bloomberg, for better and worse, drastically reimagined the very topography of the city, as the recent profile of his old deputy mayor, Dan Doctoroff, reminded us. In my first year with the New York Observer, I was tasked with attending many press conferences in the final months of Bloomberg’s tenure, and each was an exercise in genuine legacy-burnishing: here are the dying industrial zones we turned into world-class parks, here are the streetscapes we transformed into pedestrian and cyclist oases. De Blasio would do far less with the physical character of the city, but he was the first mayor in a half century to expand the social safety net in a significant manner.

The New Yorker’s Ian Parker, in a new profile of Adams, gets at this point very directly.

At the eighteen-month point in de Blasio’s administration, tens of thousands of four- and five-year-olds had finished a year in a new program of free pre-K education. The Adams administration—working in admittedly more straitened times—has no equivalent achievement. Mayor Adams can point to any number of smaller initiatives—composting, free Internet in public housing—and can note a plan to create fourteen hundred new shelter beds for people who are unhoused, even as the city contends with an unprecedented influx of tens of thousands of asylum seekers. But if Adams stepped down tomorrow he might be remembered largely for a baffling redesign of the “I ❤️ NY” logo, and for his willingness to recognize—or, in the eyes of critics, to recklessly amplify—the fear of crime felt by some residents. Last year, Adams proposed, with wild inaccuracy, that the city was more crime-ridden than he’d ever known it. (Recent crime increases haven’t brought city crime anywhere close to the peak of the late eighties and early nineties.)

Adams does not care about governing. Not, at least, in the way any mayor in modern times has cared. Even Rudy Giuliani could sweat policy. Adams’ municipal government has bled top talent and many large agencies are struggling to function. Rikers Island, the notorious city-run jails complex, is likely to face a federal takeover soon. Adams makes ceaseless announcements and almost all of them are small bore, the stuff borough presidencies are made of. Adams, along with Gov. Kathy Hochul, did announce new investments in combating gun violence and he has been right to tout, in the last year, New York’s crime decline. This would be a greater victory if he hadn’t spent years wildly fueling fears of a 1980-style crime surge. The migrant and homelessness crises, meanwhile, have been severely mismanaged. Adams is correct to blame the federal government—the Biden administration has been startlingly disinterested in assisting New York—but his own government’s response has been haphazard at best. If this all wasn’t so tragic, you’d almost have to laugh at his plan to hand out flyers at the border warning migrants that New York City is just too expensive for them.

As a state senator, Adams came rather close to getting indicted. As a borough president, a ceremonial post that should probably be abolished, he improperly managed a public nonprofit. As mayor, he appointed a Buildings commissioner who has since been indicted. Close associates from his mayoral campaign have been indicted, charged with running a straw donor scheme. Adams himself has not been charged in any of these cases. It is notable he’s been mayor less than two years.

Parker, in the New Yorker, effectively conveys Adams’ charm, curiosity, and addiction to narrative. Unlike some other reporters, Parker does not spare Adams, and a reader begins to understand that the mayor is someone who is not going to be thinking deeply about universal prekindergarten or the minutia of rezoning waterfronts. Adams lies on a quasi-frequent basis and indulges in cronyism. In a different political environment—like the one de Blasio encountered—he would be much more unpopular. Andrew Cuomo, Hochul’s predecessor, targeted de Blasio to a pathological degree, kicking off personal and policy feuds that consumed many years of governing. The New York Post, a conservative tabloid, vilified de Blasio daily. The mostly white and left-leaning City Hall press corps was not afraid to kick around de Blasio, a gangly white man. Adams, for long stretches of last year, enjoyed a Post that functioned as a personal propaganda organ and still pulls punches. Hochul has been very friendly to Adams. The press has still not been as confrontational with Adams as they could be—no one wants to be called a racist—and the local television stations remain overly defensive of the mayor’s public safety approach.

Now, the turn begins. Journalists are more emboldened than they once were and Adams can’t handle it. He fumes, almost daily, about criticism. His saving grace might be 2025, when he runs for re-election. No one prominent has emerged to challenge him, and given the relative fecklessness of the professional left in the five boroughs, it’s plausible no one ever does. Politicians who could challenge Adams, like the current city comptroller, public advocate, or the borough presidents of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens, seem content to wait until 2029, when Adams will be term-limited. Others, like Garcia and Jamaal Bowman, demonstrate little public interest in such a campaign.

Term limits have many virtues, but they create a great deal of caution during re-election cycles. In 1977, there were no term limits, and the city’s political class lined up to unseat Mayor Abe Beame. If there were no term limits today, a similar dynamic would unfold, and it’s not hard to imagine Adams, like Beame, drifting towards the back of the pack. He is not popular enough to survive such an onslaught. But Adams does have a base, even if it’s shrinking. He won’t lose working class Blacks. He can hold on to Orthodox Jews. Super PAC cash will defend him if a challenger comes from the left. There is a large enough coalition that hates him; a candidate, though, must find a way of galvanizing it and turning it out. The months melt away. Adams swaggers on, sure enough that he’s headed for better days.