ERIC ... WHACK THE WOKE!

Is Mayor-elect Eric Adams ready to whack the woke? NYC’s future depends on it 

 

By Bob McManus

 

New Yurk Post

November 2, 2021

 

 

Congratulations to Mayor-elect Eric Adams, who seems to have a sense of humor. This is a good thing, for surely he will need one.

Also a keen sense of perspective, thick skin, the guts to say no when it matters — and a hypersensitive nose for nonsense.

It was New York’s finest mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, who so famously noted that there is no partisan way to pick up the trash — that is, to deliver basic municipal services. More recently, Ed Koch was a Democrat, Rudy Giuliani was a Republican, and Mike Bloomberg was a shape-shifting political chameleon — but each man, in his own way, got the job done.

Alas, La Guardia notwithstanding, there is a woke way to run a city — though if New York has learned anything over the past eight years, it’s that woke won’t work.

In that unhappy sense, Bill de Blasio’s mayoralty has been transformative. The man who would now be governor (and what a laugh that is) promoted every ill-considered left-wing nostrum rattling around in his otherwise empty head — and all but brought New York to its knees.

This is Eric Adams’ inheritance: Crime is soaring; the demented and addicted roam increasingly dangerous streets; politics have reduced public education to a shipwreck; and fiscal intemperance has placed the city at the mercy of even a modest national economic downturn.

 

As mayor, Eric Adams will need to face down the progressive ideologues 

 

Yes, COVID hurt. But New York’s trajectory had been set long before the pandemic arrived. And, of course, none of this is a secret.

But what seems not to be appreciated fully is that Bill de Blasio is not the only hard-core ideologue in town — indeed, far from it — and this underscores the questions raised by Eric Adams’ Tuesday victory:

Does the new mayor have the stomach to buck the woke tide, with all the turbulence this would generate? Or will he go with the flow — and make matters worse?

Perhaps more fundamental is this: Do New Yorkers even want a return to the relatively hard-edged governance of the Giuliani-Bloomberg days?

 

Mayor-elect Eric Adams greets voters during the election at the Jackie Robinson School in Brooklyn, November 2, 2021 

 

They did elect de Blasio, after all. Twice. And they seemed poised to put full-fledged wokesters into key municipal offices going into Tuesday’s elections. Both the City Council and the Albany Legislature are dominated by hard-left ideologues. And next year’s gubernatorial election already is generating pro-woke pandering.

All politicians pander, of course. (Or, depending on one’s point of view, they respond positively to constituent, um, concerns.)

The current problem — and what will severely complicate any effort to resuscitate New York — is that past pandering has hamstrung common-sense policy possibilities.

Not to oversimplify, but there’s little point in corralling violent criminals if they can’t be kept off the streets because of wrongheaded bail and related “reform” laws.

And it’s a little silly to expect competent law enforcement when street cops know that a legitimate arrest gone awry can end a career or worse. Better to avoid involvement.

Taking a knee to criminals and their apologists — there’s no other honest way to put it — endangers everybody, and Eric Adams knows this. He’s said as much — but now comes the test.

A similar failure has reduced public education to a multibillion-dollar sick joke. Racial hucksterism on one hand and union coercion on the other all but eliminated classroom accountability during the de Blasio years.

And why does accountability matter? Because you can’t make progress if you can’t measure it. But if you do measure it, you expose failure — in the classroom, at the Department of Education, with the state Board of Regents and in the governor’s office. This leaves Adams as the odd man out come January, and it’s fair to wonder whether anyone — let alone a machine politician from Brooklyn — has the strength, the character and the smarts needed to cope.

And, of course, the challenge extends far beyond criminal justice and public education.

De Blasio is leaving a shambles — the mountains of trash around the city both proving La Guardia’s timeless point and marking a path to a successful Adams mayoralty.

Never mind the ideology. Adams needs to set smart goals — safe streets, sound schools, fiscal sustainability — and embrace common-sense policies to achieve them.

The wokesters will howl, but that’s OK. If the mayor-elect does what he has said he’s going to do, they won’t be his friends anyway. So it’s to hell with them — or to hell with New York City.

That’s Adams’ choice.