Riding to Utopia…

Who would have anticipated the day when the most moderate elected official in city government would be Scott M. Stringer — the Upper West Side uber-liberal and protégé of left-wing gadfly Rep. Jerrold Nadler of Manhattan?
Well, yesterday that day arrived. Thank you, term limits.
For it was term limits that powered the sea change evident on the frosty steps of City Hall yesterday afternoon — perhaps the most wrenching shift in governing philosophies, attitudes and priorities New York has experienced in recent memory.
A new mayor. A new comptroller. A new public advocate. All of the left, and soon to be joined by a fundamentally new City Council — perhaps to be led by a hard-core activist from East Harlem who thinks Gov. Cuomo, a liberal icon in most quarters, is actually an Albany-based iteration of Republican Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.
And not one of them has ever had a private-sector job of any consequence — or a public-sector one, for that matter. And of them all, only one — Stringer — has been around long enough to have absorbed a sense of the limits of government.
So, folks: Can you spell “bumpy ride?”
A caveat: Inauguration Day is always about rhetoric; about refining and reinforcing campaign promises, about what Mario Cuomo used to call the “poetry of government.”
The heavy lifting — the “prose,” as the former governor put it — is to be found in the dense grey documents of governance: the budgets, the briefing papers, the testimony that agency heads and others will deliver at City Council hearings and in Albany.
And, of course, in City Hall whispers, over power-lunch place settings and in eyes-only memos prepared by lobbyists and other special-interest representatives as the new administration, and the new City Council, take shape.
But what of yesterday’s rhetoric? There was a lot of it — mundane for the most part, some of it a little silly and just about every word calculated to create an effect of one sort or another.
One speaker compared New York City to a “plantation,” about as ahistorical an allusion as can be imagined, but one that speaks to a sense of grievance so profound, and so bizarre, that no mayor could ever assuage it. But Mayor de Blasio is going to have to try, because it’s widely held.
Comptroller Stringer himself promised to harness the power of his office — by implication, the investment influence of the city’s massive pension funds — to solving social problems. This puts sets his agenda on a collision course with his fiduciary responsibilities; here comes big trouble, in other words.
And former President Bill Clinton spoke gravely on income inequality — and amusingly. After all, has there ever been a president so intimate with the top of the 1 Percent than the Man from Hope?
Which means that Clinton will soon find de Blasio’s hand in his pocket — if the new mayor has his way, of course.
“Now I know there are those who think that what I said during the campaign was just rhetoric, just ‘political talk’ in the interest of getting elected,” said de Blasio Wednesday.
Don’t you believe it, he declared — reiterating his pledge to seek higher taxes on the 1 Percent, as well as stiffer levies on the cost of doing business in New York through paid-sick-leave mandates and such.
And all of this is will happen in service to an over-arching goal, he declared:
“When I said we would take dead aim at the Tale of Two Cities, I meant it. . . We will give life to the hope of so many in our city. We will succeed as One City. We know this won’t be easy; it will require all that we can muster. And it . . . will be accomplished by all of us — millions of everyday New Yorkers in every corner of our city.”
Utopia on the Hudson? Really?
Source: http://nypost.com/2014/01/02/riding-to-utopia/


Get your bowl 'o popcorn folks- this is gonna be funny to watch! (I live in NJ) We know the crime numbers, the jobs numbers.....let's compare in four years. Woot Woot!