Mayoral Candidates Fight Over Who has More NYC Spirit

Previous New York City mayoral races have tended to focus on law and order. This time around, it’s about who will make the city economically viable for those who aren’t real estate developers, major corporations or Mike Bloomberg.

John Liu: New York City comptroller. Mayoral candidate. Moroccan flatbread lover. Photo credit: Thomas Good via Wikimedia Commons | Illustration credit: Matt Bevilacqua

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John Liu, the New York City comptroller who, if you read and believe the New York Times, is caught up in some fairly shady campaign fundraising business or, if you believe John Liu, is the victim of a “witch hunt” perpetrated by federal authorities and the New York Times, is forging ahead with his mayoral bid.

In New York City, perhaps even more than elsewhere, running for high office involves proving that you never actually stop moving and that you can put inhuman quantities of food into your face. Other coverage aside, Liu, a Democrat, has gotten a Times profile that validates he’s restless enough and hungry enough to be the next mayor of New York City. In the course of the 950-word, day-and-a-half-in-the-life piece, Liu eats — and works off — fried whiting, shrimp, roast chicken and potato kugel. Along the way, perhaps because he has consumed so much, Liu has this to say about the city he hopes to lead:

A Sylvester Stallone fan, he draws parallels between [current Mayor Michael] Bloomberg’s New York and “Demolition Man,” in which the beautiful citizens of the future only ate salad, never cursed and had virtual sex to avoid dealing with body fluids.

“That’s what everything reminds me of,” he said, after munching on Moroccan flatbreads from Hot Bread Kitchen, an East Harlem business incubator.

Oh yeah, Liu eats Moroccan flatbreads, too.

We don’t get more details on the complaint, which is a shame. But one imagines that Liu is referring to things like the city’s smoking ban, its calorie posting requirements, and its (now stalled) “big sugary drink” limitation. Almost if as on cue, Bloomberg on Monday floated the idea that stores selling cigarettes and other tobacco products be forced to hide them away from public view.

In the modern era, previous New York City mayoral races have tended to focus on law and order: Ed Koch’s tough-on-crime campaign, the dig that David Dinkins wasn’t tough enough, Rudy Giuliani, Bloomberg’s own election in the wake of September 11. But as we head into November, the city’s in an interesting place. Crime is down. The population is up. The emerging theme of the race is who will figure out how to make New York City economically viable for those who aren’t real estate developers, major corporations or Mike Bloomberg.

Democrat Christine Quinn, speaker of the City Council, talks about preserving the city as “a home for the middle class, and for all of those people working hard every day to get there.” Then there’s the pitch of Republican Joe Lhota, the former MTA chair: “New York City is at its very best when it is the center of opportunity celebrating its diversity.”

But Lhota hints at the idea that there’s more to New York City than economic accessibility, and city sage Alec Baldwin takes us all the way there when he talks about looking for a mayor who can “genuinely stoke the ineffable spirit that defines New York.”

Even if economic issues do dominate the campaign, there’s already a subtext that involves making this discussion about New York City’s spirit more concrete. If New York swung a little too fast and loose in the decades leading up to the turn of the last century, perhaps the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction during the Bloomberg era. Has this city become too much the expression of one man? And if so, what does that mean, really? Is the affront too much deference to developers? The crackdown on dirty water dogs? Both? At this stage in the race, the answers are, indeed, ineffable, but the questions don’t seem to be going anywhere.

This weekend, in search of a St. Patrick’s Day Guinness, I hit up Park Slope’s Pork Slope, a Brooklyn bar opened in part by Dale Talde of Top Chef fame. (He’s the one from Season 5 who cooked a lot of Asian foods and had a lot of outbursts.) On the cash register was a bumper sticker that read, “I Miss the Old New York.” The bar’s been open seven months.

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Nancy Scola is a Washington, DC-based journalist whose work tends to focus on the intersections of technology, politics, and public policy. Shortly after returning from Havana she started as a tech reporter at POLITICO.

Tags: new york citymayorshealthmichael bloomberg2013 mayoral races

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