National Review Online
Wednesday, April 30, 2020
In the middle of March, New York City mayor Bill de
Blasio was among those not entirely sold on social distancing as a prophylactic
measure against the coronavirus epidemic. “If you love your neighborhood bar,
go there now,” he famously said. A few days later, he was threatening to
padlock the city’s synagogues — permanently — if social-distancing protocols
went unheeded.
We sympathize with those New Yorkers driven to drink or
inspired to prayer by Mayor de Blasio’s incompetence, vanity, and stupidity,
which have been highlighted by but are by no means limited to his response to
COVID-19. For the time being, they must suffer in their households rather than
in congregation.
In all likelihood, the coronavirus has been spreading in
New York since February. The city’s jam-packed subway system, carrying five
million riders a day, should have counseled particular vigilance. But even with
the examples of California’s and Washington’s cities before him, the mayor was
slow to move. He dragged his staff along to a crowded YMCA for a workout even
as he was ordering gyms closed around the city. The city schools remained open
until March 15, and it was left to New York governor Andrew Cuomo to negotiate
their closure while teachers were threatening a wildcat strike. De Blasio
delayed against the advice of his own aides and health experts. A 36-year-old
principal subsequently died of COVID-19. The city’s refusal to disclose
infections in the schools “kept families in the dark and left more lives at
risk,” as one city councilman put it.
De Blasio was warned in early March that the city needed
to take more aggressive action against the epidemic, but he wrote off advice
from health commissioner Oxiris Barbot and others, worried that a lockdown
would hurt the city’s economy. Extended deliberations controlled by political
concerns rather than medical ones wasted precious time. “He has long distrusted
the top brass of the health department,” Politico reports, “feeling they
do not understand politics and public relations.” That may be the case, but
their job is not public relations — it is public health.
Ignoring the advice and recommendations of the relevant
experts in order to tend to his political concerns, Mayor de Blasio effectively
became a member of that class of villain most hated by his progressive allies:
a denier. His refusal to concede the facts and his desire to subordinate
good policy to political expediency were compounded by his general executive
incompetence, for instance in leaving city agencies without necessary guidance
for implementing work-from-home policies. He insisted that the city’s hospitals
were well prepared for the crisis; the actual situation in the city’s public
hospitals was shortly thereafter described as “apocalyptic” by one physician.
De Blasio did manage to name his wife as head of a
coronavirus-recovery panel. He always has time for that sort of thing. Mrs. de
Blasio is fresh off of watching $1 billion walk out the door while overseeing a
fruitless mental-health initiative. She has time on her hands and is rumored to
be considering a run for elected office herself.
De Blasio moved with much less dispatch than did
colleagues in California and Ohio, among other places. And then, after dawdling
for so long, de Blasio flipped. We always are happy to see a politician amend
his views to accommodate new facts, but Slowpoke de Blasio’s subsequent
overcompensation, and the sanctimony and viciousness he brings to the effort,
is something else.
De Blasio launched a broadside against “the Jewish
community” after a large crowd turned out for a rabbi’s funeral in Williamsburg
as though the event corporately implicated the more than 1 million Jews living
in New York City, drawing criticism from the city’s ADL and other local Jewish
leaders.
De Blasio has instructed police to follow a “zero
tolerance” rule on gatherings and has threatened to enforce his policy with
arrests. Perhaps he has not entirely thought through the social-distancing
implications of mass arrests.
The coronavirus epidemic was a test for Mayor de Blasio,
and he has been found wanting — which should be no surprise to anybody who has
witnessed the dramatic decline in the quality of city life under his watch. The
tricky question of balancing the consequences of an enforced economic stoppage
against the risks of an unknown and poorly understood viral epidemic in a free
society with democratic norms has gotten the better of better men and better
mayors than Bill de Blasio.
His incompetence has endangered the lives of his
constituents and made the coronavirus situation worse than it had to be. But it
is his tinpot-tyrant posturing and his ridiculous preening that really set him
apart from your run-of-the-mill municipal bungler.
Unhappily, there is no treatment for what ails Bill de
Blasio, and no cure in sight for New York.
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