Eric Adams is a lot of things.
The mayor of New York City is ambitious. He is confident. He is effective in his own way.
Here is what Adams is not: He’s not David Dinkins.
That is not to say he is better or worse than Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor, who died in 2020 at the age of 93.
It’s just to say that comparing the two is like saying Michael Jordan and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were a lot alike because they played basketball and because they were tall.
Yet some city leaders insist on putting Mayor Apples and Mayor Oranges in the same basket.
The latest offender? Mayor Adams himself.
“I’m your mayor, Eric Adams,” he said in a recent radio broadcast. “David Dinkins 2, I like to say.”
The comparison seems to be an effort by Adams to capture a coveted prize that eluded Dinkins in his stint at City Hall — a second term.
Adams, plagued by a low approval rating and a campaign financing scandal, is pulling out all the stops as he heads into an election year.
One of those strategies is cashing in on a legacy that is not his own.
“They’re very different mayors in very different situations,” said Bob Liff, a political consultant who covered the Dinkins administration as a political reporter. “I could argue that both have a more successful record of being mayor than they are given credit for in the media.
“But other than the fact they are the only two Black mayors, it’s an odd comparison.”
According to The New York Times, Adams is calling on voters to bequeath to him the second term that Dinkins never got.
More specifically, according to the Times, Adams, who is Black, is urging New Yorkers to re-elect him to make up for the racism that got Dinkins kicked out of City Hall.
If that is indeed the strategy, it is a dangerous game.
Not only are these different men, but these are different times.
The racism that Adams says keeps him from getting the credit he deserves is nothing compared to the prejudice that plagued Dinkins when his opponents, egged on by his chief rival Rudolph Giuliani, derided him as a “washroom attendant.”
The bigotry Dinkins faced crescendoed in September 1992, when thousands of demonstrators, many of them off-duty white cops, descended on City Hall to protest the mayor’s call for a Civilian Complaint Review Board and his creation of a commission to investigate police misconduct.
Dinkins lost his election rematch to Giuliani a couple of months later.
But Dinkins’ ultimate undoing was another racial conflagration — the Crown Heights riots and the deaths of a young Black boy and a Jewish rabbinical student. Dinkins was criticized for a slow response to the violence, and he paid for it at the polls.
Adams’ critics say his troubles are more of his own doing — his campaign’s fundraising, his handling of the city budget and his response to the migrant crisis.
Still, his defenders pair Adams and Dinkins together. They say Adams deserves as much credit for affordable housing gains as Dinkins eventually got for putting more cops on the street.
“You may disagree with Adams’ politics or his policies, but you can’t disagree with the record,” the Rev. Al Sharpton, an ardent Adams supporter, wrote in an op-ed article for the Daily News.
“You can’t disagree with the results. Mayor Dinkins would be proud of the job Mayor Adams has done for our city,” Sharpton wrote
He probably would be.
But Dinkins would want Adams to leave his own legacy — instead of resurrecting his.
