Eric Adams's Administration of Bluster

August 11, 2023 3:31 PM

The Mayor of New York City tells a personal story that is compelling and often untruthful. With a thin list of accomplishments so far, can he address the city’s problems? [original link]
posted by Selena777 (52 comments total)

Direct link to The New Yorker for anyone who prefers it.
posted by eponym at 3:50 PM on August 11, 2023 [7 favorites]

Betteridge's Law of Headlines strikes again.
posted by star gentle uterus at 3:55 PM on August 11, 2023 [12 favorites]

Ross Barkan: "The Prestige Media Catches Up to Eric Adams"
posted by Apocryphon at 4:31 PM on August 11, 2023 [5 favorites]

De Blasio: ‘Well, Well, Well, Not So Easy To Find A Mayor That Doesn’t Suck Shit, Huh?’
posted by lalochezia at 5:13 PM on August 11, 2023 [33 favorites]

yes but you have to admit he’s one of the funniest guys to be mayor of anywhere in a while
posted by dis_integration at 5:28 PM on August 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

it is indeed on some level a “fascinating mayoralty” (his words per the link)
posted by atoxyl at 5:35 PM on August 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

yes but you have to admit he’s one of the funniest guys to be mayor of anywhere in a while

I don't. We don't need a guy who repeatedly calls for the end of separation of church and state and spends his time attacking people who he feels don't sufficiently respect him rather than actually doing anything. His constant gaffes and idiotic comments were funny in the beginning but at this point it's clear that's all there is to him and it's not going to get better.

Sorry, I don't mean to be personally aggressive towards you, I'm just sick of our Mayor's shit. We need an actual leader to help with our many problems not some blustering pompous moron. We missed out on Garcia, an actually competent leader, by the tiniest of slivers; it's such a damn shame.
posted by star gentle uterus at 5:36 PM on August 11, 2023 [47 favorites]

What a fascinating article - I knew virtually nothing about him other than his name until now. He is...odd. It almost seems unpossible that he got elected, with such quirks and his (apparently) strained relationship with the truth (albeit in ways that are not "important" in some ways, I guess).
posted by davidmsc at 5:43 PM on August 11, 2023

All these words for someone who was pretty clearly an establishment Democratic candidate
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 5:47 PM on August 11, 2023 [6 favorites]

Are they just all like that over there, DeepSeaHaggis?
posted by Selena777 at 5:58 PM on August 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Surely not funny haha. Such cringe.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 6:04 PM on August 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

he's managed to slow David Simon down a mite
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:07 PM on August 11, 2023 [9 favorites]

Yeah, my gut feeling is he will be re-elected all while everyone keeps hating on him and then it's on to the next hated mayor.

One thing I've come to understand is the incredible power of the NYPD, and after that, real estate.

There are some pretty great people in the City Council though, including my own City Council person Crystal Hudson, I take comfort in that.
posted by maggiemaggie at 6:08 PM on August 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

No. The answer is no.
posted by praemunire at 7:18 PM on August 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

Maggiemaggie, I can't say I agree with you on Crystal Hudson, who is also my council member. She didn't cosponsor Int. 500-2022 or 501-2022 (to fix placard abuse), and she showed up at a meeting that my neighbors held to try to get vast swaths of Crown Heights landmarked. I can't think of anything she has done that I actually like -- maybe some lgbtq rights stuff, I guess? She wanted to do rent control on commercial real estate, which is just so bonkers that I don't know where to begin. Like, sure, Adams is worse, but that is not a high bar
posted by novalis_dt at 7:39 PM on August 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

we're stuck with this dunderhead (no impeachment here, I'm afraid) through 2026.

Seriously? There's no way to get rid of him? That is wild.

He does seem like someone who is likely to be arrested on corruption charges sooner or later, but so far he seems to be free and clear.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:18 PM on August 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

We missed out on Garcia, an actually competent leader, by the tiniest of slivers; it's such a damn shame.

Hard agree. She would have been fantastic.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 9:03 PM on August 11, 2023 [5 favorites]

“We knocked some folks off the ballot, … Some other folks, we spoke to.” doesn't sound like something a legitimate campaign manager should say in public
posted by scruss at 9:05 PM on August 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

I think DeepSeaHaggis is right to observe that he governs like an establishment Dem. And that shouldn't work, because he openly flouts some of the supposed basic principles of American democracy, and indeed seems to be phoning in from a different parallel universe every day. But of course the machine isn't that fragile. He's genuinely off his gourd, but he's keeping the right promises to the right people, so they let him be mayor. For him to do otherwise he would have to somehow strike an incapacitating blow against the political establishment before reaching the halls of power. He's the liberal Trump in every sense.
posted by jy4m at 9:06 PM on August 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

I know servers who've served him red meat before; nothing he says can be trusted.
posted by Pitachu at 9:45 PM on August 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

I generally don't trust people who tout so-called "plant-based diets" anyway; if you're a vegetarian just say so, and if you eat meat then it's just food.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:49 PM on August 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

When the age of the Vikings came to a close, they must have sensed it. Probably, the gathered together one evening, slapped each other on the back and said, "Hey, good job."

Jack Handey.
posted by clavdivs at 10:15 PM on August 11, 2023 [10 favorites]

Mod note: added original link to the post
posted by taz (staff) at 10:37 PM on August 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

Adams reminds me of the old Joe Namath (a great NYer) line, "I can't wait until tomorrow because I get better looking everyday."

Top ten self promoter.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 11:23 PM on August 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think DeepSeaHaggis is right to observe that he governs like an establishment Dem.

He is far more pro-police state and anti-other public funding (for, e.g., public libraries) than even most establishment Democrats.

He's a corrupt embarrassment.
posted by Gadarene at 2:17 AM on August 12, 2023 [16 favorites]

I don't know why anyone would want to be mayor of NYC. It's where political careers go to die. I'd love to see NYC get rid of the whole idea of an executive and make the city council functional enough to run the city. It's been so long since there's been a great mayor.
posted by kokaku at 2:26 AM on August 12, 2023 [8 favorites]

He later added, “Anyone who believes there’s not a God, they need to watch my journey.”

It’s true, no god would allow such a dipshit to be the mayor of New York.
posted by Jon_Evil at 8:18 AM on August 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

Maggiemaggie is correct, the NYPD is the actual most powerful political force in the city and in Adams they got someone who will only increase their ability to rule over it.
posted by Jon_Evil at 8:21 AM on August 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

NYPD is the actual most powerful political force in the city and in Adams they got someone who will only increase their ability to rule over it.

now, now, don't slight the real estate lobby.

non-overlapping magesteria and all that!
posted by lalochezia at 9:10 AM on August 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

He put himself on my shitlist when he told women they shouldn't be out alone late at night.

I'm from LA, Tom Bradley--who also had been a cop-- was mayor for most of my childhood. He made a point of meeting with members of NOW and is fondly remembered to the point that a terminal at LAX was named for him.


I've called Adams a DINO for a long time and this article proves it. De Santis and Abbott should realize that he has a lot more in common than they think.
posted by brujita at 9:31 AM on August 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

I don’t generally hate politicians — doesn’t seem to be much point. But I hate this man with a passion. His lecturing a Holocaust survivor who tried to hold him to account on rent increases by likening her to a “plantation owner” was enough for me.

And fuck Bill deBlasio, who’s largely responsible for Adams getting elected.
posted by holborne at 9:32 AM on August 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

fuck Bill deBlasio, who’s largely responsible for Adams getting elected.

Nah, this is on the cops and the aging racist NIMBYs of the city, who were happy to vote for the Herschel Walker-equivalent candidate.
posted by praemunire at 9:56 AM on August 12, 2023

I'm sorry, praemunire, but that may not quite be the case. Here's a pretty good analysis.

That said, I find Adams extremely disappointing and problematic. I feel badly that I made a donation to his campaign, just to gain access to an event and hang out with him. He was inevitable by that point (time between the primary and general), and in case you'd like to know, he is a pompous ass in person.
posted by ExpertWitness at 10:38 AM on August 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

give adams some credit, he’s bizarre, he’s a cop, his politics suck and he has the most interesting relationship with the truth of any living politician but compared to herschel walker he’s a two time nobel laureate in physics
posted by dis_integration at 10:56 AM on August 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

acab, remember?
posted by kokaku at 11:07 AM on August 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

personally i do NOT like it that the original charter of new york city states that the mayor must be "of limited intelligenfe and poccefing the sparke of madness"

Couldn't help but think of that tweet when I read, "The Mayor apparently reserves the right to mix incidents from his own life with material from his quantum lives: things that could have happened, or almost happened, or happened to someone he once met. All potentials exist simultaneously."

Lately, I've been a little obsessed with his catchphrase "let your haters be your waiters when you sit down at the table of success." It's the most Joker-ass meme thing I've ever heard. I mean ...
posted by Countess Elena at 11:15 AM on August 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

compared to herschel walker he’s a two time nobel laureate in physics

Fair; I meant he's in the same genre of "black guy that certain racist voters are comfortable voting for because he's so plainly a buffoon who threatens neither their interests nor their ideas of who is actually capable of good government."
posted by praemunire at 12:45 PM on August 12, 2023

DeBlasio absolutely bears a lot of the responsibility for Adams. He didn’t endorse Adams himself, but worked to make sure Adams got major endorsements from unions like SEIU. And even apart from that, he defended Adams in the press a bunch of times, including when Adams publicly supported stop-and-frisk. Kathryn Garcia lost by such a slim margin that deBlasio may well have made the difference.
posted by holborne at 1:48 PM on August 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

Speaking as a left-leaning white person, I've been struck over the last few years by how many left-leaning white folks don't seem to have a very good understanding of how black people vote.

Polling data show that black voters were primarily responsible for electing Eric Adams (as that Bloomberg article linked by dis_integration above detailed). They also played a central role in Joe Biden's winning the Democratic nomination in 2020 (and HRC's winning it in 2016).

But I've encountered so many progressive white people who don't seem to have absorbed this kind of information. This includes people who explain Biden's victory with DNC "election-rigging" conspiracy theories worthy of Trumpworld, or attribute Adams' victory primarily to racist whites.

To truly understand why so-called "establishment Dems" keep getting elected, we should pay less attention to vibes-based internet theories, and more attention to detailed exit polls that include demographic breakdowns. Black voters are one of the most reliable blocs in the Dem coalition. And -- while there is obviously a range of opinions within the black community, as in any community -- most black voters simply do not vote like DSA members.

The Pew Research Group's Political Typology has some useful information in this regard. According to their research, most black voters fall into the largest Dem voting bloc, which Pew refers to as Democratic Mainstays -- i.e., moderates who believe in compromise, and have somewhat conservative views on crime, immigration, religion, etc. The other major category that many black voters fall into is what Pew calls Establishment Liberals -- the second-largest Dem voting bloc -- generally a bit to the left of the mainstays, but not tremendously so.

Together, these two groups make up slightly more than half of all Dem voters: Mainstays are 28%, Establishment Liberals are 23%. And they tend to vote very reliably -- unlike, say, the Outsider Left, 10% of the Dem coalition, who are younger, more left-leaning, more pro-Sanders, and more negative toward the Democratic party.

Understanding all this is helpful in understanding the things that Democratic elected officials do and say. Most of them actually seem to be doing a fair job of representing the people who elected them. And the common leftist trope that the Democratic party is just a puppet of the same interests that control the GOP becomes a lot less convincing.

Personally, I find Adams to be an absolute clown. But his election is a testament to the fact that representation matters.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 1:50 PM on August 12, 2023 [23 favorites]

Flagged as fantastic, Artifice_Eternity.
posted by kristi at 4:18 PM on August 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

A valid point to raise generally, Artifice_Eternity; but at the same time this specific election was so close that you aren't getting him across the finish line without those racist (and p.s. misogynist) white voters. Adams only got about 30% of the first-round voting in the primary. Due to ranked-choice voting, the record is a little obscured on this, but the choice wasn't between Adams and Garcia, it was between Adams and Garcia and Maya Wiley. Wiley is also black, so if "representation matters..." Garcia and Wiley between them split ~40% of the first-round voting, with Wiley (the more progressive) actually having an edge over Garcia (more establishment; regardless of where you put her precisely on the left, not a DSA type at all!). In the final round, it was 50.4% to 49.6% (Garcia). One could argue here that a conservative joke of a candidate managed to draw off just enough votes because he was a black man to defeat a white mostly-centrist woman and a black progressive woman.

Most of them actually seem to be doing a fair job of representing the people who elected them.

There is a complicated story here. I would look at Locking Up Our Own, which is the history of how many black people found themselves supporting the "war on crime" that would end up devastating their communities only a few years later. There's something analogous going on in 2022. In the end, some of the media and cops (with their relentless 2020-and-after chaos-spawning misconduct and lies) colluded to make this an election between "law and order and state coercion" and "progressivism and imaginary chaos." Perfectly understandably, some black voters, living disproportionately in neighborhoods with worse reported crime, chose option A. The choice between overpolicing and threatened underpolicing is a hard one.
posted by praemunire at 5:16 PM on August 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

praemunire: The choice between overpolicing and threatened underpolicing is a hard one.

Absolutely, and when I talk with my Black neighbors, I hear a lot of sadness over the results of the cops not showing up when they're called.

The solution to bad police departments is not no police departments, it's accountable, uncorrupted police departments that are answerable to, and truly responsive to, all the people they serve.
posted by kristi at 5:53 PM on August 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

The Mayor and the Con Man
posted by blue shadows at 11:11 PM on August 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

In any election with a margin of victory of N votes, any voting bloc larger than N, or anyone who influences more than N voters, can be described as "to blame" for the outcome.

It's not usually as simple as "you're wrong, this is the actual culprit." If can be more useful to talk about the rationales of those different groups, and the relative magnitudes of their effects in that context.
posted by Riki tiki at 12:18 PM on August 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

The solution to bad police departments is not no police departments, it's accountable, uncorrupted police departments that are answerable to, and truly responsive to, all the people they serve.

Given the stunning depth of entrenched corruption and criminality of police departments in the US, that is honestly a less-realistic, more pie-in-the-sky fantasy than dissolving them all.
posted by Jon_Evil at 8:15 PM on August 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I know that the NYC mayor to POTUS pipeline is moribund, but non-New Yorkers can keep giggling at his antics until he runs for president in 2028, whereupon we will be guffawing even as material conditions are even worse off then.
posted by Apocryphon at 11:39 PM on August 13, 2023

The solution to bad police departments is not no police departments, it's accountable, uncorrupted police departments that are answerable to, and truly responsive to, all the people they serve.

Given the stunning depth of entrenched corruption and criminality of police departments in the US, that is honestly a less-realistic, more pie-in-the-sky fantasy than dissolving them all.

I’m always curious when I hear someone actually say they want to dissolve all police departments. I wonder “who do they think is going to help them when they’re the victim of a crime? Do they think they’ll just reason with the criminals?” Because even if 95 percent of people are good and rule-following, the other one in twenty will eat everyone’s lunch.

But if we do eliminate all police and society doesn’t collapse (and no roving vigilante bands), I’d like a unicorn that poops soft-serve ice cream too. Chocolate and vanilla twist, please.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 8:20 AM on August 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

It would be called something else that doesn't invoke and reify the troubled foundations of capital-p Policing. The US used to have constables (and some places still do, but different), so we know something new can be implemented with a different name. A key point as I see it is to remove guns from the vast majority of interactions, and today's police unions are going to cry "ambush murder epidemic!" in less than 8 minutes and 46 seconds, and they will come up with an infinite number of canned responses with a goal of self-preservation.
posted by rhizome at 2:11 PM on August 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

right - there's a distinction between "police" and "things that the police do, either nominally or in practice". Abolishing the police doesn't mean that everything the second bin goes with them. It just means that "police" is no longer the organizing structure by which those functions are performed, and we've given a good long think to how or whether we want those functions to be performed in the future
posted by vibratory manner of working at 1:46 AM on August 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's important to remember that "police" as we understand it today didn't exist until the 1800s. Nobody wants to go back to the levels of violence that society in the 1700s had (and whether it's the police that got us from there to here can be debated). But it's not exactly a "collapse of society" level difference.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 1:52 AM on August 19, 2023

I’m always curious when I hear someone actually say they want to dissolve all police departments. I wonder “who do they think is going to help them when they’re the victim of a crime? Do they think they’ll just reason with the criminals?”

For the overwhelming majority of crimes in the US, the answer already “not the police”. This includes the children of Uvalde, TX, the millions of sexual assault victims in the US whose rape kits have gone unprocessed because the cops didn’t feel like it, and almost anyone who’s had their bicycle stolen (or been injured by a reckless car while riding their bike).

Cops love to use the line “if you’re against police, next time you need help, call a crackhead”, but literally the most recent time I’ve been a victim crime was our band’s van was broken into and instruments were stolen, and we got them back by going to some junkies on the corner a few blocks away who kindly directed us to the pawn shop where our instruments were and we got them back very easily.
posted by Jon_Evil at 5:41 AM on August 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Also, less than half of all homicides in the US are solved.

Basically, cops don’t prevent crime, they don’t solve crimes, and through civil asset forfeiture, US cops steal more from Americans than burglars do.
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:27 AM on August 22, 2023 [1 favorite]