Bye Bloomberg, Hello Blah?

Last week was an exciting one in Boston with the election of Martin J. Walsh to serve as the 54th mayor.  But even with all the Boston news buzzing around me, my attention the past week has still primarily focused on the mayoral election at home in New York City. Last Tuesday, Democrat Bill de Blasio was elected mayor, unsurprisingly beating out Republican Joe Lhota with a landslide vote share of 74 percent. Like the rest of New York, I was positive that de Blasio had the election in the bag. But even though I knew it was coming, I still felt a crushing anxiety and unease when I heard the news that it was official. Quite frankly, I am deeply afraid about what de Blasio’selection as mayor will mean for NYC.

Full disclaimer: I am a democrat and I was not supporting Joe Lhota in this election. But I wasn’t supporting de Blasio either. I understand why he’s a popular choice—he’s charismatic, he has a few excellent ideas, and he has experience as public advocate. I think that his innovative plan to tax the wealthy in order to pay for universal prekindergarten is an outstanding one that he has been passionate about throughout the election. On Monday, this plan received some critical support from the legislature. I also do believe that some of his criticism of Bloomberg is valid. As much as I love Bloomberg (yes, I’m one of those), it is time for him to go.

But I believe the negatives of Bill de Blasio greatly outweigh the positives. Behind his dazzling rhetoric, he lacks two critical qualities it takes to be a good mayor: the ability to follow through on his goals and executive decisiveness. His ideas aside (some of which are very bad), de Blasio will be a failure of a mayor because his character as a leader is fundamentally flawed.

De Blasio has constantly promised change and to end the “tale of two cities” for New York City if elected mayor. But he has shown from past experience that he constantly fails to deliver on his promises. While serving as a New York City Council member representing the 39th District in Brooklyn in 2003, de Blasio often supported affordable housing projects. Wonderful, you might say. More affordable housing is desperately needed in New York. And yet, although he supported projects, most of them fell through. In a revealing October New York Times article, civic advocates expressed that time and time again, “projects supported by Mr. de Blasio in the name of building homes for working-and middle-class New Yorkers failed to deliver as promised.” In his time as councilman, only 530 units of affordable housing were built in his district. In contrast, some districts in Brooklyn had thousands built. For a man who ran a lot of his campaign on understanding the affordable housing debacle in New York City, this should raise some alarm bells. I find it hard to believe he will, as he promises, create 200,000 units of affordable housing within the next 10 years.

There are also multiple reports of de Blasio’s irritating inability to not make up his mind and of his tendency to flip-flop. Personally, I want a mayor who knows how to act and who can act quickly, especially in emergency situations. This will likely not happen with de Blasio.It’s often hard to understand where he really stands. He has touted his achievements in creating the “Worst Landlords” list to hold New York City landlords accountable for bad behavior and yet accepted campaign donations from many of those same landlords. Throughout the election, he blasted Bloomberg and Quinn for their role in overturning term limits but he once supported a very similar proposal in 2005, which pushed for longer terms for the city council. In September, he came under fire for changing his stance on the New York City Board of Health’s controversial decision to require parents to sign a consent form before allowing children to undergo the ultra-Orthodox ritual of metzitahb’pheh. Previously, in May, de Blasio criticized Bloomberg for trying to impose consent forms on parents and promised to meet with religious leaders to try and change the policy. By the end of September, de Blasio backtracked in a typical way, claiming that he would now support the consent forms until his administration could come up with a different approach. The list goes on.

Overall, de Blasiois overly deliberative and inefficient. In an article about de Blasio’s role in the 2000 Clinton senate race, old employees bemoaned his achingly difficult leadership style. By the end of the race, his role had been extremely diminished because of his frustrating tendency to delay. Throughout the article, de Blasio just sounds extremely, well, lame. One sentence in particular sums him up: “Mr. de Blasio emphasized teamwork, tossing around a Nerf toy shaped like a buffalo that he picked up in upstate New York, and invoking sports terms.”

Once the glamor fades and the rhetoric proves to be empty, de Blasio is going to have to prove that behind that affable smile, he can actually get things done. His past record shows otherwise. For people afraid of his ideas and policies, I wouldn’t worry too much. They probably won’t ever get off the ground.