By Jim Geraghty
Wednesday, July 07, 2021
Way back on June 22, New York City’s Democrats went to
the polls to vote in a primary for mayor and other city offices. A mere 14
days later, the city’s Board of Elections counted the final 118,000 absentee
ballots, deployed a ranked-choice-elimination system, and then declared that
former police captain Eric Adams had won the Democratic primary — meaning that
in all likelihood, will be sworn in as mayor on New Year’s Day.
Adams won after New Yorkers ranked their top five
candidates out of 13 options in the city mayoral primary — or, if they
preferred, choosing fewer than five candidates. Then the bottom eight
candidates were eliminated in the first round, and the ballots that ranked
those losing candidates first were reallocated to their second choice. After
that, with no candidate winning a majority, the ballots of those who had chosen
the fifth-highest candidate were reallocated to their preference among the
other four. These elimination rounds continued until there were two candidates
left, and Adams finished ahead of Kathryn Garcia, the former city sanitation
commissioner. It sounds complicated, but it is much simpler when you recognize
that Mercury is completing its transit through the zodiac sign of Gemini.
Back on June 24, the great Peggy Noonan hailed Adams’s
primary win as a victory of reality over progressive theory. “Adams was a cop for 22 years, left the New York City Police
Department as a captain, and was the first and for a long time the only
candidate to campaign on crime and the public’s right to safety. He was the
first to admit we were in a crime wave.” Noonan observed, accurately, that
African-American voters were not necessarily the most progressive voters in the
electorate anymore, and that they represented a de facto force of, if not
conservatism, then a realist wariness of the fringes of modern progressive
thinking.
The notion of a centrist, tough-on-crime mayor replacing
the notorious groundhog murderer and early pandemic denier sounds
good, but we’ll see. Every elected official operates within a particular “Overton
Window”: the range of policies that a politician can recommend without
appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public
opinion at that time. Adams did not win this primary by a landslide. While he
received the most votes in the first round, he was the top choice of less than
a third of the city’s Democrats. He has 51.1 percent out of the final two.
New York City desperately needs a dramatic improvement in
its policing and prosecution of criminals, but Adams will have to take on a lot
of deeply entrenched opponents and a city media and cultural environment that
have evolved to reflexively demonize the NYPD. Way back in 2005, Fred Siegel described the New York City
of the David Dinkins years as an era of “hysteria that led upstanding liberals
to insist that they were more afraid of the NYPD than they were of criminals.”
Whatever you think of Rudy Giuliani now, the young(er) mayor of the early 1990s
was willing to be utterly hated as he enacted his reforms, convinced that the
broader public would look past the controversy and appreciate the effects of
lower crime rates. It remains to be seen whether Adams has that same courage to
exchange short-term unpopularity for long-term improvement in the city’s
streets — or whether he’ll bump up against the city’s Overton Window of what
policy changes are acceptable and settle for a series of half measures.
The irony is that we see the same phenomenon in the
opposite direction at the national level in Washington. Many progressives
interpreted Biden’s presidential win, the 50–50 Senate, and the slightly
shrunken House majority in the 2020 elections as a mandate to enact sweeping
changes in the country — and they’re largely hitting brick walls. The national
Overton Window isn’t wide enough to accommodate the wildest fantasies of
progressives.
The Democrats’ big election-reform bill is going nowhere.
Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico are no closer to statehood. Biden’s Supreme Court-reform commission doesn’t appear eager to embrace
the idea of expanding the size of the Court. Progressives were hoping Steven Breyer would step down after this recent term,
but that doesn’t appear likely, at least not yet. Greens are complaining
that Biden’s environmental proposals offer “little to nothing of substance.” You’re even starting to hear progressives complain that Bernie Sanders has
gone soft and isn’t really pushing Biden to the left anymore.
The Democratic Party’s conventional wisdom on “defunding
the police” has switched so intensely, so quickly, that Biden advisers are implausibly claiming Republicans are the ones trying to “defund
the police” because they voted against a past Democratic spending bill.
Even the proposal that has dominated the administration’s
attention for the past few months, a multi-trillion-dollar
infrastructure-spending package, isn’t a done deal yet. In the House, Oregon
Democrat Kurt Schrader says he would vote against a second infrastructure bill to be passed
through reconciliation. Meanwhile, Illinois Democrat Jesús García said this week he would only
support a budget-reconciliation package if it includes provisions to
grant a pathway to citizenship to a broad spectrum of the country’s
undocumented population. With the current four vacancies in the House — two
Republican-leaning districts, two Democratic-leaning districts — Nancy Pelosi
can afford to lose four votes if everyone is present, and Republicans are
unified in opposition to a reconciliation spending bill. For what it’s
worth, Representative Ilhan Omar says that 40 members of the
Progressive Caucus will vote against the bipartisan infrastructure deal if
they don’t get what they want in the subsequent reconciliation spending
package.
If you’re a conservative, you probably find the “What flavor ice cream are you eating today, Mr. President?”
coverage of this presidency irritating. But if you’re a progressive who
expected Biden to go to work to enact your priorities, you must find the fluff
coverage infuriating. Every day that Biden’s most-covered comment is about
chocolate-chip ice cream is another day that his most-covered comment is not
about building support for any particular legislative proposal.
You could argue we’re also seeing the same phenomenon on
the global stage.
The Biden team stepped back into power, ready to
reinvigorate the old alliances and return back to an Obama-style
foreign-policy-establishment view of international relations. But the Overton
Window has moved in the past five years. The Iranian regime does not seem all
that interested in getting back into a nuclear deal. Biden may well relieve the sanctions on Iran anyway.
Maintaining a unified alliance against Russia and China
is much more difficult now, with Germany much more eager to reach compromises with those powers.
With Trump out of power, European governments are falling back into old habits of
neglecting defense spending.
After Biden’s high-profile warning to Vladimir Putin, the
ransomware attacks are only getting more brazen. A Washington Post editorial warns the Biden administration that its tough talk about Putin
will look toothless if the accelerating pace of ransomware attacks
continue unabated.
And then there’s Afghanistan, where Biden appears set to
repeat the same mistakes that Obama made with his withdrawal from Iraq in 2011,
establishing the power vacuum that enabled the rise of ISIS.
The range of what is possible and workable on the world
stage changed while Biden was out of office. America’s allies, who were not
always agreeable to begin with, are less cooperative than they used to be.
Russia and China are even more shameless in their disregard of international
norms.
Biden and his team could blame Trump, but they explicitly
ran on the promise that they knew how to fix things. Everything looks easier on
the campaign trail, and most political candidates operate in a fantasy world,
where consensuses are quickly and easily formed, their proposals are quickly
adopted and enacted, and opposition at home and abroad quickly withers in the
face of their awe-inspiring leadership.
In other news, today, President Biden will visit McHenry
County College in Illinois to talk up his bipartisan infrastructure
proposal. He is expected to visit an ice-cream shop.
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