When Zohran Mamdani was in high school, he tried to seize the reins of (student) government power the usual way: By promising the voters free stuff. At the Bronx HS of Science he ran for student veep on a fruit-juice giveaway platform. Yep, we’re looking at a career founded on tempting kids with sweets. He lost anyway.
So he amped up his proposals by a few billion dollars, and now he looks like he’s going to promise his way right into City Hall.
A mere decade and a half later — yes, we’re about to have a mayor who was in high school until 2010 — Mamdani is wowing the party that never stops saying “What an intriguing idea!” when told it can help itself to things paid for by somebody else.
Step up to the Golden Corral buffet of social services, folks! Don’t worry about the costs.
Zo is somehow going to make the buses both free (meaning lots more passengers, many of them homeless) and faster (sure, bud). Buses are already pay-optional, of course: 48% of riders are fare beaters. But making the buses free is going to blow an $800 million hole in the budget. Never mind, New York: Zo has got this.
Harsh reality
Mamdani is too young to remember the dot-com boom — hell, he’s barely old enough to remember 9/11 — but he’s the Kozmo.com of pols, the company whose business model was “build brand loyalty by giving customers enormously expensive yet free one-hour delivery.” After bleeding a quarter of a billion dollars of red ink, it died. Its last recorded remark was, “Oops!”
When Andrew Cuomo’s dad, Mario, was running for mayor in 1977 against closeted Ed Koch, some of his supporters muttered, “Vote Cuomo not the homo.” Today Andrew’s reality-acquainted backers are essentially saying “Vote Cuomey not the Commie.”
But Mamdani isn’t really a communist, nor even a socialist (despite compelling evidence to the contrary, such as him constantly saying “I’m a socialist”). Socialists want government to take over all of the major industries, but if Mamdani’s army of Bowdoinians had to wait in line at the iDMV the next time they wanted to upgrade their phones, Zohran would be as popular in this town as botulism or JD Vance.
Mamdani is not Vladimir Lenin. He’s something much more recognizable: our own Bowdoin Beto of the Boroughs. He’s a bluff, a hope, a whimsy, a rumor of a man who has no knowledge of anything, no experience running so much as a halal hot-dog stand and nothing to offer except vibes.
His stock answer to everything, when he even pretends to answer, is to smile charmingly and leave the details to the future.
We’re living through a multicultural real-life reenactment of “Being There,” in which a total moron is mistaken for a Solon because people want to believe things that can’t be.
Mamdani shouts, “Affordability!” and people go, “Dang, the kid’s got some good ideas!”
Andrew Cuomo may be a grabby jerk, but having been governor for 10 years, and a close-up observer of executive power when his dad was governor for another 12, at least he has some understanding of real-world governance.
Like the rest of us, he couldn’t believe that Mamdani wouldn’t say whether he backed the three ballot proposals meant to speed up home building, largely by taking the human roadblocks known as the City Council out of the process. At the debates, the imbalance of knowledge was such that Cuomo came across like a physics professor who had to explain to a pesky 6-year-old why he can’t have a fountain of Snapple and a pet dragon.
Old ideas
It won’t matter at all. Thanks in part to Curtis “I love this city so much I’m gonna help Mamdani” Sliwa, a part-time assemblyman who has never held a real job is going to win easily. He successfully debated Cuomo to a draw by dismissing everything Handsy Andy said as downer vibes. Who wants to vote for frownsy old Cuo-no? Who wants to tell the kids there’s no municipal Santa, and if there were, he’d cite union work rules to explain why he needs every third Christmas off?
Mamdani may be young, but his ideas are not just old, they’re ancient, moldering, dead. A long time ago they were buried.
But now they’re undead, and Zohran’s zombie notions are stalking the landscape to the tune of sinister music. A crucial detail of his appeal: His supporters are so young they don’t remember when there used to be items on the news about oxymoronic Soviet supermarkets, where you’d wait in line all morning to obtain enough provisions to get you through the day: a sad sack of gray taters and a quart of vodka. At least everything was affordable.
“Tax the rich even more than they’re already being taxed, which is a hell of a lot” is a bizarre policy for a city and state that are already heavily dependent on not pissing off the rich too much.
The wealthy are our most precious resource — they’re to our fiscal picture what the sun is to agriculture — and without them, our ways are not sustainable. Moreover, their wealth is closely linked to the fortunes of Wall Street, which could tank at any time and which a smart mayor would try to nurture instead of disparage.
Millionaires are mobile. They know where all the exit routes are.
Running from gov’t
Yes, OK, I admit if this burg actually turned into “Escape from New York,” it’d be kind of interesting, but short of creating Alcatraz-on-Hudson, the rich do have options other than paying for Mamdani’s $6 billion free child-care program — almost as expensive as the entire NYPD.
Most cities have zero income taxes, but New York has a sizeable one already. At any given moment, any given corporate shark or hedge-fund bro is thinking about how much easier life would be if he could just spend 180 days in some sunnier state. Say, one with zero income tax and sane governance.
Florida has begun to push to zero out property taxes. It gets more relatively attractive every day. Miami isn’t exactly St. Louis. It has a lot of attractions even if it weren’t much, much more affordable than New York.
Yet Mamdani would raise corporate taxes a dizzying 59% and charge each millionaire another $20,000 per million in income tax. Many of them will respond with the classic Michael Corleone counter-proposal: “My offer is this. Nothing.”
Finance, law and tech are, for the most part, industries you can participate in from anywhere. And the funniest part of Mamdani’s wish-for-more platform is this: He can’t raise income taxes anyway. The whole thing is just Beto bluster. Taxes are a state thing, and Gov. Hochul has already said she’s against additional punishment for the rich.
Bill of goods
What about the housing vibes? Fewer than half of New York rental apartments are rent regulated; when Mamdani promises a rent freeze, he’s only talking about those. And what were the hikes last year? Three percent (amid a 6.5% hike in costs). The year before that it was 2.75%.
Needless to say, landlords will have to raise rents even faster on their other, non-regulated apartments to cover the increasing money drain of the regulated ones. Congrats, L-train hipsters, if you’re not lucky enough to have a rent-regulated place, you’re voting to raise your own rent! At least you enjoyed the vibes along the way.
As for Mamdani’s much-vaunted city grocery stores, which can only be called Trader Zo’s, the plan is so feeble it’s as laughable as the way he pretends to eat a burrito on the subway (occupying two seats, then spreading his meal out on a third, so it’s guaranteed to splatter all over the floor the first time the car jolts). He merely suggests launching one store in each borough, so even if these things are so clean, efficient and cheap that they make Costco’s CEO weep into his pillow every night while muttering “My whole life has been a lie!” they won’t do you much good unless you happen to live nearby.
The best possible result is one depressing store in each borough, each of them bound to be a dingy Post Office of Produce. When have you ever been in a store and thought, “I wish the government were running this”?
This is a New York Jets-level failure in the making. You know what would really help New Yorkers afford groceries? Ending the unspoken ban on the company that has mastered the art of selling cheap: Walmart. Even the dumocrats in DC have given up that silly fight against low prices and broad selection: There are now four of them in the nation’s capital. Adjusted for population, that’d be 44 Walmarts in New York — and we’d still be able to boast that we’re aligned with the most Democratic city there is.
Globalize the infantile
Mamdani still won’t renounce his favorite catchphrase, “Globalize the intifada.” This is meant to be a fancy college way to say, “Attack the Jews wherever you may find them,” but it isn’t particularly fancy. If it’s global, it has nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with hating the Jews: There’s no nuance or nicety here.
Mamdani once rapped in praise of a Hamas funding group. Just this month he was pictured smiling and hanging out with an actual unindicted coconspirator behind the first World Trade Center attack while continuing to swear he’ll arrest Benjamin Netanyahu the next time he comes to New York.
Sept. 11 happened when Mamdani was in fourth grade. If something like it happened again, a few things would follow in the weeks and months afterwards: the economy would crash (eliminating tax revenue to pay for Mamdani’s dumb ideas), tourism would crash (eliminating tax revenue to pay for Mamdani’s dumb ideas) and we’d have to wonder whether our mayor was privately thinking, “This is our fault for supporting Israel.”
Seventy-two law-enforcement officers died on 9/11, and we’re about to have a mayor who said, just five years ago, “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.”
And “queer liberation means defund the police.”
And “There is no negotiating with an institution this wicked & corrupt.”
In the second debate, he was still proposing insane ideas like having 911 dispatchers steer callers to social workers instead of sending police. That’s worse than unworkable; it’s going to get people killed.
Even Mamdani’s supporter and fellow Democrat Kathy Hochul said, “Everybody’s concerned what will happen to the policing of the city.”
Running this city is a serious job, not an internship for a silly rich kid who wants to inflict his dopey college-seminar thinking on 8 million people.
Kyle Smith is film critic for The Wall Street Journal.