Incompetent de Blasio earns yet another humiliating defeat

The horse-carriage deal is dead.

Its collapse came after the Teamsters withdrew their support to move the horses from their stables on the West Side to lands that would be given to them in Central Park.

This is just the latest instance of the de Blasio administration launching a wasteful crusade and losing — badly.

Last year, de Blasio sought to cap the growth of e-taxi services such as Uber, Lyft and Gett. Why? Because wealthy donors of his, city cab medallion owners, knew that the increasingly popular services were a significant threat to their bottom line. Instead of innovating and improving the service they offered to riders, these fat cats went to de Blasio, reminded him of their prior contributions and called in their chits with one goal: kill the competition.

De Blasio dutifully tried. And he failed, backing down in the face of industry opposition and public outcry.

The horse-carriage deal followed a similar trajectory. It was pushed by an organization, NYCLASS, that was established under the guise of animal welfare, but really was a way for its wealthy donors to seize the valuable land belonging to the horse-carriage industry and develop it for their own personal gain. Noble.

NYCLASS’s tactics — protesting private citizens outside their homes because they disagreed with them or comparing the plight of the horses to that of the Jews in the Holocaust — were so over-the-top they became a cautionary tale and a joke. “We don’t want to go full NYCLASS on this campaign,” one person told me in a meeting last summer.

On Thursday, as news spread that de Blasio had once again lost a big political fight, he sat in his SUV outside City Hall, surrounded by the very people whose jobs he wanted to eliminate: the carriage drivers. The men and women whose livelihood de Blasio had threatened surrounded his car and the mayor sat there . . . for 16 full minutes — he probably wished he was back in Iowa where nobody knew who he was.

Hizzoner finally emerged from the car, blamed the unions for his failure to do his donors’ bidding and retreated to his office. It was a stunning example of another problem that exists within the de Blasio administration: a lack of accountability.

There were other instances of de Blasio proposing a big policy and losing. His push to build housing on Sunnyside Yards in Queens would have added 11,250 affordable-housing units to 200 acres of undeveloped land and ultimately rivaled Peter Cooper Village and Stuy-Town. Gov. Cuomo snuffed that idea out because the state, not the city, controls that parcel of land.

How about the promise to raise taxes on wealthy New Yorkers to pay for universal pre-K? Once again, Cuomo stopped that and delivered New Yorkers universal pre-K without raising their taxes.

Or de Blasio’s stance against Police Commissioner Bratton’s desire to put more police officers on the street? In that instance, the City Council overrode the mayor and went even further than what Bratton was calling for.

When things go wrong, de Blasio and his team pass the buck. Homelessness increasing? That’s just the press fear-mongering. A top aide violating the law and having a live-in boyfriend who was a convicted murderer and had a history of misogyny and anti-police statements? The press was misbehaving and not focusing on what he wanted them to focus on.

Carmen Fariña telling parents about cuts to school language programs that they should just buy their kids Rosetta Stone? (What if history were cut? Would Fariña advise parents to buy their children The Oregon Trail?) The press clearly took what Fariña said out of context.

This time, however, he has a new scapegoat: the unions. How dare they fight for their own jobs at the expense of a few donors making millions of dollars?

Remember, de Blasio ran for mayor as the champion of unions and the working man. He decried how our political system let donors, or as he called them “those people,” buy influence with elected officials.
How ironic.

Evan Siegfried, a Republican strategist and commentator, is president of Somm Consulting.

Filed under