Well, Joe Lhota seems to have weathered Kittಌygaffe.
Quinnipiac University’s pollsters yesterday reported that Lhota, a former deputy mayor and a man who꧒ speaks his mind, maintains🐲 an impressive lead in next Tuesday’s Republican mayoral primary.
So much for the “dis kittens and die” meme that o𝄹vertook holiday-weekend news cycles, after Lhota averred that he wouldn’t stop subway service because of stray kittens on the tracks.
Sensible. Incomprehensible 🐲politics, but sensible.
The New York Republican Party, of course, would be hard-pressed to cough u༺p a quorum for a fantasy-football league —🀅 and this complicates polling.
But the numbers seem substantial: Lhota leads the subtly thuggish billionaireꦫ grocer John Catsimatidi🔥s, 48 percent to 24 percent, with a 9.8 percent margin of error.
He’s consistently led by such margins all along, so it seems that the only real questio🃏n is this: Apart from the sheer joy of the c♚hase, when you’ve won the GOP nomination for mayor of New York City, what have you won besides another chase?
That is, what next besides the Democratic 🐠tsunami?
But this is, in fact, slightly ahistorical.
It may be that Mike Bloomberg’s singular contribution to the health and welfare of New York City came on Election Day, 2001 — when he denied the mayoralty to the Naderite nood🍰ge Mark Green, who’d spent much of that campaign as the popularly preordained winner.
Green had big plans for ﷽Gotham — most of them involving unaffordable sums of money not his own. Whereas Bloomberg appeared content merely to ru🔯n the town.
Just wee﷽ks after 9/11, that seemed reasonable enough.
ꦓTwelve years on, the age of Bloomberg is drawing to an end — and with it, likely, a two-decade Democratic drought at💧 City Hall.
By and large, the Democrats seeking City Hall lack Green’s practiced arrogance, which is a blessing, but like him they are a drearily doctrinaire bunch — displaying spendthrift impulses, instinctive pandering and a distressing lack 🦩of personal depth.
Liste🧔n to them, and you’d never suspect why a Giuliani administration was necessary 20 years ago. Some 2,200 murders a year, maybe? They say they care about that, but there’s no evidence.
Nor do t𒉰hey display much appreciation of just how good for the city Mike Bloomberg’s🥂 own brand of invincible arrogance has been — on balance, of course, and never mind the annoying bike lanes.
But times change, and urgencies ebb — a🦩nd this expla💦ins what looks like an impending Democratic restoration.
Still, there’s an election to be run and — on the merits — Lhota really needs to be a part of it; he seems to be the sole contender of either party who understanꦓds the efficacy of saying no.
“For every dollar in the [city] budget,” he said last week, “there are at leaᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚst two advocates fighting to keep it in the budget, and they all have allies s🐎omewhere in the process.
“So a zero-based budget” — nothing new goes in unless something old comes out — “becomes a💯n epic battle,” the only easy way out being a൩ppeasement. That is, economy-crushing tax increases.
But it’s a fact that, apart from a stiff tax hike immediately post-9/11, Bloombe💞rg has largely kept the city living within its means — which are ꦚnot inconsiderable, of course.
Lhota notes that city tax𝔍 receipts today, adjusted for inf🔜lation, are 56 percent higher than they were a decade ago — and he thinks that should be enough.
But too much is never enough for liberal Democrats. While Lhota says he won’t abide tax hikes, the Democratic field is at best ambivalent about them — and, indeed, party front-runner Bill de Blasio is explicitly promising hundreds of millioꦰns in new taxes, to be extracted from “the rich.”
That would be the wealth-producing segment of the economy — and those who aspire to join it. And these generally are folks who have their own vie൲ws on such matters.
For example, urban analyst Aaron Renn — in a startling new report on domestic migration in The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal — says that 2.5 million more people have left the New York m꧃etro area for elsewher🥀e in America over the past 12 years than have moved into it.
A🀅nd they’v🍒e taken more than $50 billionin personal wealth with them.
This i🥃sn’t new, and it has as much to do with Albany as it does with City Hall. But it’s not a trend to be encouraged, which is precisely what the Democratic candidates for mayor are doing.
Lhota seems to understand, even if he does need to get a whole l♚ot louder abou𝓰t it. And if he does — well, there are reasons why his party has held City Hall for 20 years, and public safety is only one of them.
As unlikely ♏as it seems now, lightning coul🌼d strike.