Working Hard, Not Smart

The ethos of Eric Adams

On average, Eric Adams begins his workday at 7:57 a.m. This is much earlier than the notoriously tardy Bill de Blasio. Adams is a proud workaholic, keeping a packed public and private schedule, racing across the city to attend ribbon cuttings, galas, and community meetings. Adams relishes showing up at crime scenes. He is the action mayor, always in motion, his delight for the performative aspects of the mayoral role readily apparent.

None of it, quite frankly, has amounted to much. The Adams administration is now building far less affordable housing and express bus lanes than its predecessor, and walking away from a planned expansion of universal prekindergarten. The city is bleeding top talent at key agencies and there are no plans to replace them. Dying men are being transported out of Rikers to artificially suppress the death count there. The Adams solution to the migrant crisis is a tent city in a Bronx parking lot. New policy initiatives of any significance are mostly absent from this City Hall.

Adams, you see, is working hard. The trouble is that he has always equated the appearance of hard work with actual hard work. There is, of course, a profound difference.