The David Dinkins legacy has always been complex, ripe for revision and misunderstanding. New York City’s first and only black mayor, who died yesterday at the age of ninety-three, served for just a single term, from 1990 through 1993. It was a period of economic and racial tumult for the city, when just about anyone left of center was forced into a defensive crouch.
Several days after Democrats failed, despite everlasting hype, to win Texas in a presidential election, a top Democrat in the state had a stark message for liberals otherwise triumphant about Joe Biden’s overall victory: a lack of in-person canvassing cost Democrats dearly.
One of the darker outcomes of 21st-century work life has been the predatory gig economy. Divorced from healthcare benefits and regular pay, millions of workers are told they are supposed to be lucky to drive passengers around in a car for ever-diminishing returns.
Chuck Schumer knows how to raise money from rich people. It’s why, in part, he was able to claim a Senate seat in New York, outhustling a generation of rivals who may have possessed more talent, vision, and charisma.
When Donald Trump first ran for president in 2016, he uttered a line that, to most journalists and liberal pundits, seemed bizarre and condescending. “We won the evangelicals. We won with young. We won with old,” Trump boasted during a victory speech in Nevada. “We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”
Six months after Governor Andrew Cuomo and state lawmakers approved a budget for the City University of New York, the country’s largest urban public university system is reeling from ongoing, indefinite cuts. Nearly 3,000 adjuncts have been laid off. Course offerings have been slashed, ballooning class sizes. Contingent staff that remain are having their hours cut mid-semester.
There was a strange moment last month when Donald Trump, briefly departing from his usual conspiracy-mongering and idiocy, stumbled on an argument grounded in actual reality. The leaders of the Pentagon, Trump fumed, “want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”
Every few years, Bob Woodward offers up a best seller and a news cycle. By now, the ritual is as reliable as a deadlocked Congress. Woodward, every J-School’s chief deity, upchucks a book with a bevy of interviews with powerful men and women, sometimes named, usually not. News outlets dutifully report on revelations from these interviews, often deemed “explosive” or “bombshells,” since analogies of death and destruction tend to be the best we have.
As Joe Biden and Donald Trump slog to the finish line, it is accurate to say that, in this deeply polarized time, there are profound political differences between them. On the economy, on taxes, on climate change, on health care — it does the Left no good to blur the lines between even mainstream Democrats and their Republican opponents.
In the middle of September, with State Senate Democrats heavily outspending Republicans in their quest to expand their majority, a billionaire entered the fray to help the beleaguered GOP. Ronald Lauder, the 76-year-old heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune, dropped $1.7 million into the operations of the new independent expenditure group called Safe Together New York, taking specific aim at six Senate Democratic candidates—four incumbents and two challengers.