Recipes for disaster, in politics and with pandemics
For the Daily Beast, I had a long conversation with epidemiologist and legit Most Interesting Man in the World candidate Larry Brilliant, about why COVID is now a "Forever Virus" despite the vaccines and the Age of Pandemics we're now in, and got his throughts on SARS, Ebola, the “Spanish flu,” anti-maskers, biological warfare and Yogi Berra along the way.
On FAQ NYC, we asked two tough questions each of mayoral candidates Kathryn Garcia, Ray McGuire, Shuan Donovan and Dianne Morales—who says her campaign staff walking out on her is a model for how she'd handle the city's workforce as mayor, but didn't know when we asked her about the Taylor Law that bars public employees from striking in New York state—and also interviewed candidate Paperboy Love Prince.
And I wrote for the Daily News about how the city's new election rules could be a recipe for disaster:
Begin with a pandemic that reshaped the city and kept the mayoral candidates from, you know, campaigning in person much (except for Andrew Yang, who hit the ground running when others were still responsibly distancing and then predictably had to quarantine twice, after a staffer got the virus and then again after he did) until the closing weeks of the race. Add the fact that the policing and police reform issues the candidates have focused on may not match up with the public health and budget challenges our 110th mayor will face if office workers don’t all eventually return or when a virus does.
Let that sit, and mix in a new ranked choice voting system that means there are way too many candidates in the race with no reason for any of the sure losers to get out and help clarify the contest for voters. And a primary being held in June for the first time in 48 years, so that a lot of voters are just tuning in as early voting has already begun and the race is coming to a close. Then garnish with a campaign finance system that seems insufficient to a moment when seven of the eight candidates collecting matching funds also have at least one outside PAC spending on their behalf.
Pour a full cup of late mud on top, from the New York Post — whose “news” coverage has consisted largely of attacks on the other candidates since they endorsed Eric Adams — trying to recycle my reporting from six months earlier about the private security patrol in Maya Wiley’s corner of Brooklyn to the questions Politico raised about where Adams actually lives. Early voting is finally here, but you may want to wait to see what other shoes drop between now and June 22 before locking in your picks.
(And do be sure to make picks, plural, to avoid “spoiling” your ballot and throwing away your say if your first choice doesn’t win in this new system intended to let you vote your heart first without losing your head — though it remains to be seen how many voters actually use it that way, or at all.)
While that concoction bakes, try and sort through the hundreds of other candidates running for borough presidencies, the comptroller’s office, Manhattan district attorney (a state election, so the fundraising limits are vastly higher and there’s no ranked-choice or runoff, just a powerful position sure to belong to whichever of the eight Democrats gets the most votes), judges and, thanks to term limits, 35 open seats on the 51-seat City Council where members will get just a two-year term instead of the usual four, thanks to redistricting.
Let that congeal for a few weeks after Primary Day on June 22, enabling results to finally settle and get reported, and however it comes out, that’s what New York City is going to depend on for the rest of the decade.
Slice up the power, and be sure to serve it only to registered Democrats, since — with the exception of Staten Island borough president and a handful of local contests — these contests are all really decided in the party’s primary where only they get to vote.
All this talk about the most important election here in our lives and this is what we get? It’s a hell of a year to change up the rules and just sort of see how it goes.
I know that there’s more than one way to skin a cat (an expression that dates back to the 19th century, and may have been derived from the 18th-century proverb about how “There are more ways to kill a dog than hanging”) and that you never want to watch the sausage get made, but just the smell has my stomach turning somersaults.
Then again, there’s no perfect way to run an election, and I felt much the same way in 2013, when Anthony Weiner jumped in and shook up the mayor’s race just two years after resigning from Congress following his first texting-related meltdown. After melting down twice more in the course of that campaign, though only after his rise helped take down Christine Quinn and open up a late lane for Bill de Blasio to shoot through, he ended up writing occasionally for The News until it came out in 2016 that he was still compulsively texting women, not long before his old texts ended up playing a weird role in electing Donald Trump.
Finally, elections are just systems for deciding on people, and it’s fine to hate the players as well as the game. Talking with Ben Smith last week, Weiner said of his 2013 run that “I was famous for being famous, and I was a candidate because I had been a candidate, and I had all this money from past campaigns.”
That sounds awfully familiar, though no one playing the game or waiting on the bench to get back in ever says so out loud.
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