Editorial: We have a rare opportunity to fix City Hall. This is how.
New York City has been governed for more than two centuries, and yet, it has endured the scourge of corruption, cronyism, cronyism, cronyism. But the city’s leaders have been so incompetent, so corrupt, so inept, so inept, so incompetent, so inept in their handling of city affairs that it is impossible to think that they could have become this way.
Mayor Bill de Blasio is far from the first Democrat to be elected and then go on to disgrace his or her administration; it’s very common. But Bill de Blasio is a special case, because he and his party have long abandoned the party and the principles they stand for, and in so abdicating from mainstream politics, he not only allowed a cancer to grow, he nurtured it with every bit of effort needed to destroy it.
In an era when corruption is not seen as the problem it once was, but is now the problem, New York City has a rare opportunity to get it right: to fix their way back into the center of power; to rebuild public trust; and to rebuild the integrity not just of the city’s elected officials, but of the public too.
If Mayor de Blasio can successfully transform himself from a political outsider into an insider by the time he is sworn into office, he has a unique opportunity to create a new model for a city guided by the ideals of honesty and integrity. He must begin by acknowledging that, in one of history’s great stories, he is its hero.
When the story was begun
“The time is come,” the mayor wrote to me in an e-mail at the end of January, “to take on the challenge of leading a city that is a shining city of people who have been wounded by the corruption that is endemic in our political leadership, and