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Mayor Zohran Mamdani is off to a terrible start, and it’s not just his friends and supporters who should be worried.
Mamdani’s core fans might not see it — but keeping his TikToks sharp won’t help him with the vast majority of New Yorkers who expect to see their mayor making the city work, nor with the political pros looking for signs of plans to execute policy rather than an unending event-of-the-day PR strategy.
Without question, he bungled his first crisis, Winter Storm Fern and her artic aftermath.
It’s not simply the 19 deaths in the bitter cold, the garbage that piled up in many neighborhoods or the troubles caused by huge, unmelting snowbanks: It’s how he handled the serial crises — or, rather, didn’t.
The city didn’t need to see a cute video of him shoveling (badly) the first day; it wanted to see him visibly on top of how the workforce responded day-in and day-out.
Instead, he mostly stuck to his preplanned set of events designed to promote his agenda — promoting nonprofit allies, reaffirming “asylum seeker” rights, opening rec centers and holding “rent ripoff” hearings.
Yes, he adjusted a little — visiting a warming center, announcing expanded homeless outreach — but his hard refusal to bend on making people get in out of the cold was no good look.
And City Hall’s evident resentment at facing questions got worse this week: “People die in their homes all the time,” Mamdani senior spokeswoman Dora Pekec intoned as she fended off Post requests for info on the seven people who died of hypothermia while indoors.
That strikingly resembles how Gov. Andrew Cuomo waved off questions about nursing-home deaths during COVID — not at all where Team Mamdani wants to be.
The mayor’s supporters might complain that all this is theater, not substance — but good theater was a lot of why he won the job, and is vital to success going forward.
Nor is he doing great on the substance front: His trip up to Albany for tin-cup day fell pretty flat, as Democrats from the rest of the state kept asking why the Legislature should send extra billions to the city when Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester and so on are hurting far worse.
“There simply isn’t enough money that we wish there could be,” he claimed — as if every other local urban area isn’t having to make do with a lot less.
Whining about the city not getting its “fair share”? Cue the world’s smallest violin!
Even his request to hike the city-only income tax is raising hackles: It might net City Hall more cash, but at the cost of sending big earners fleeing out of state — and so slashing what Albany collects from those “fat cats.”
Nor were many Dems amused by his admission that he’s suddenly only looking at a $7 billion budget shortfall, instead of the $12 billion hole he was citing (as Mayor Eric Adams’ fault, of course) bare weeks ago.
We have zero desire to see this mayor’s agenda succeed, but the city’s in huge trouble if he can’t start showing some baseline competence.
He’s in urgent need of wise counsel from an ally with serious executive experience: If former President Barack Obama won’t do a few tutoring sessions, maybe he needs to ask Bill de Blasio for governing tips.
Yes: The New York Post is telling him he can learn from Blas — that’s how badly Mamdani is flailing.