The city isn’t in crisis, however much the centrists hoping to step into the race if Eric Adams’ figurative and literal trials stop him from finishing his term want New Yorkers to think that, but it’s out of joint and in shaky shape.
The center is being held, precariously, by the city’s embattled 110th mayor, who seems to think he’s only historically unpopular because of the press or the Biden Justice Department as if New Yorkers don’t have the sense to judge their city and his actions for themselves.
(Soon, Adams may add the city’s Campaign Finance Board to his list of scapegoats if it decides to remove him from the matching funds program he’s been criminally charged with pillaging.)
Adams didn’t do himself any favors this week by whining about how he wasn’t going to answer many questions from reporters about his private meeting at Gracie Mansion with Donald Trump’s border czar:
“it’s not going to matter what I respond to anyway. You have your preconceived thoughts already.”
What a waste of a bully pulpit.
If the mayor doesn’t want people speculating about how he’s cozying up to Trump because he’s hoping to get cut a break on his own legal problems, he could preemptively reject any such help.
And if the mayor doesn’t want people speculating about how his cooperation with the incoming administration could result in family separations and New Yorkers afraid to turn to the police for protection, he could spell out the lines the city won’t cross on his watch.
Instead, the “get stuff done” mayor, trying to sail into the political winds blowing to the right, is once again saying a lot without holding himself to anything specific with weasel words like “my focus is the American people and the people of New York City. And those who don’t like it, they will cancel me. And I say, cancel me. I’m for America.”
He said that a week ago on CNN, in one of his many brief monologues gussied up as press appearances he prefers to actually answering questions.
For a Democrat who kept an awful lot of distance from Kamala Harris before the election, Adams keeps repeating her mistake of seeking out safe spaces to simulate conversations that won’t push past his talking points rather than actually trusting his own ideas.
It’s hard to convince people you’re an open book while only taking “off-topic” questions from reporters once a week.
It’s hard to get people to buy your “crime is down” claim when the brass no longer regularly delivers briefings and answers questions about the CompStat numbers, whether those are up or down.
And it’s hard to convince New Yorkers you share their values when you leave so much strategic ambiguity about what your values are and how they’re going to be applied.
Adams has cited Teddy Roosevelt’s line about how “it is not the critic who counts… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.”
Roosevelt warned in that same speech, titled “Citizenship in a Republic,” that “Courage, intellect, all the masterful qualities, serve but to make a man more evil if they are merely used for that man’s own advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights of others.”
The 26th president also came up with the phrase “muckraker,” which he used to demean investigative reporters as people so obsessed with the mud on the ground that they failed to notice an angel above.
But Roosevelt — along with Trump, the only NYC native to be president — also coined the “bully pulpit,” with “bully” there meaning “terrific” or “superb,” at one of the sessions he held at the White House with journalists to share his thoughts with them.
“Half a dozen of us were with the president in his library,” one of them later recalled, as the president read material from an address to Congress he was preparing.
”He had just finished reading a paragraph of a distinctly ethical character when he suddenly stopped, swung round in his swivel chair and said ‘I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit!’ “
This mayor does, too, if only he’d use it.
Instead, Adams has seemed to pick up on what Roosevelt called the distinctly American “tendency to use what have been called ‘weasel words.’ When a weasel sucks eggs, the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a ‘weasel word’ after another, there is nothing left of the other.”
Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.
