What's Wrong With New York's Mayors?

Late Wednesday night, Eric Adams became the first New York City mayor to be indicted while in office.

When the 57-page indictment was unsealed Thursday, it detailed a litany of alleged wrongdoing largely related to Adams’ connections to Turkish officials. He accepted illegal donations to his mayoral campaign and lavish gifts, including regular free travel on Turkish Airways. Part of the indictment includes an explanation from the mayor that his “first stop is always instanbul [sic]” while traveling due to the favorable treatment he got from the country.

In a press conference Thursday that was held outdoors and routinely interrupted by hecklers, Adams brushed off the idea that he would resign, instead insisting that the charges against him are based on lies and are politically motivated — sounding eerily similar to other recently indicted politicians, including Donald Trump and Bob Menendez. “I always knew that If I stood my ground for New Yorkers, that I would be a target — and a target I became,” Adams said in a statement.

While Adams has the distinct dishonor of being New York’s first sitting mayor to be indicted, his recent predecessors in the office haven’t exactly covered the office in glory of late. Bill de Blasio launched two quixotic and doomed primary campaigns since he left office — for president and a seat in the House — and then posed for a glossy photoshoot in the New York Times with his wife to announce their separation. Michael Bloomberg did his best Brewster’s Millions impression , burning through hundreds of millions of dollars in record time in his own doomed bid for president. Rudy Giuliani, himself a former presidential candidate, was embarrassed in a Borat film, organized perhaps the most infamous press conference in American history at Four Seasons Total Landscaping and Thursday was officially disbarred in Washington, D.C.

So, what is it about the office that makes them crash and burn? And why do the mayors of the biggest and most important city in the country keep falling flat on their face — either in office or afterwards? To get a better understanding of the history of the office and what’s going on right now, Nightly spoke with Vincent Cannato, a professor of New York City history and the author of The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and his Struggle to Save New York.

This conversation has been edited.

What is it about this job that seems to invite corruption?

Part of it is just local politics in general, where the mayor is much closer to contracts inspections and the police, where all this corruption begins to happen. And most of Adams’ advisors were his very, very close friends — there was not a lot of daylight between him and his top aides. Then when you have a city as large as New York, those opportunities are going to be much larger than, let's say, in Schenectady or Utica.

When he was first elected, Adams was regularly discussed as a national Democratic star waiting in the wings, one who could potentially be a counterweight to some of the more progressive forces in the party.

I think there was a lot of stuff written about Adams around the last election that was wishful thinking. I think people wished that Adams was someone they wanted — they created an image (and he helped that along) of this moderate, former cop who’s not buying into the progressive wing of the Democratic party. There wasn’t a lot of evidence that that’s who Adams was. That’s not to say he was a huge left winger, but he’s just not hugely ideological. What we’re seeing now is the fruits of that — why become mayor? You’re becoming mayor for a different reason.

How much do local issues in New York matter nationally, and how much is New York’s mayor thinking about local issues vs. national issues?

New York mayors are not just people looking to pick up garbage. They have an eye on what's going on nationally and also internationally. But in the last 20 or 30 years, there has been a greater nationalization of politics in that sense. And both de Blasio and Adams, I think, had eyes much more on national affairs in different ways.

But yeah, the mayor of New York has rarely been a parochial figure. Most of their work was city based, but most of them had a larger national profile. The problem is, at the end of the day, a good New York mayor is going to probably focus on local stuff more.

When’s the last time New York had a truly parochial mayor?

[David] Dinkins (New York’s mayor from 1990 to 1993) in some ways was the most recent one. Vincent Impellitteri (1950-53) was kind of an accidental mayor, and then Abe Beame (1974-77) would be another one. And I don’t mean parochial in a negative light, by the way.

That’s a vanishingly small number. Can we talk a little more about why that is? What’s the size of the stage as mayor of New York, and why have all of New York’s recent mayors used it as a launching pad to attempt to have a national political career?

You’re mayor of eight million people — that’s bigger than a lot of states. So you represent more people than a lot of senators and governors, who are notorious themselves and looking in the mirror and seeing a president, so it’s not unusual for New York mayors to also see themselves as larger figures. But the history of New York mayors going on to higher office is pretty abysmal, but that doesn’t stop them from trying. Having said that, I could be wrong but I don’t think Adams had any national political ambitions.

Why can’t New Yorkers find a mayor that they like?

I think the mayor has largely been unpopular since Bloomberg’s last term — so the end of Bloomberg, de Blasio and now Adams.

The city’s changed tremendously in the last 30 or 40 years. There was generally a trend in New York City politics, where you had Tammany Hall and the Democratic Party, which controlled much of the city politics into the 60s. In the 70s and lingering into the 80s, there was still a Democratic machine. And then there was a counterforce, which was the reform forces, business forces that every generation or so would be able to capitalize on the mistakes and corruption of the Democrats and come in.

So, you had that sort of back and forth for much of the 20th century, and that’s completely broken down. There is no more Democratic machine. The city is still a very Democratic city, but there isn’t really a strong party structure in the city. And there's no reformers left; the business community isn’t really interested in city politics anymore.

There’s a lot of flux, a lot of change and a lot of uncertainty in city politics, so you get de Blasio and Adams, who are both kind of free agent Democratic types with a very narrow coalition; de Blasio’s was on the left and Adams’ is closer to the center. But both coalitions are pretty unstable, and both men have pretty serious personal and political flaws.

So what comes next for Adams? What does the political scramble look like if he resigns, or in next year’s mayoral election?

There aren't a whole bunch of wealthy contributors or party bosses who can get together and say, ‘Time is up. Eric, step aside.’ So that’s going to be a harder sell. The other thing is, Trump has also been indicted, and Bob Menendez in New Jersey, and I think the playbook has been to keep fighting. There’s less upside to resigning, and you fight as far as you can. I’m assuming Adams will do the same thing.

I don’t think he’ll be a viable candidate for reelection. He could try. And then it’s going to set up a fight between Andrew Cuomo and then [Brad] Lander or whoever’s going to represent the left.

You see Cuomo, the former governor, as the most likely representative of that center-left that we’ve talked about?

I don't personally see anybody else who has a high enough profile in the city. If you look at most of the high-profile politicians, they're mostly coming out of the progressive left. There's no other political candidate or businessperson who’s going to come in from the center who’s going to attract the same attention. Cuomo has many of his own flaws, so I’m not convinced that he would win, but he’s entering a pretty uncrowded lane.

So you’d have another person who resigned political office in New York amidst scandal, attempting to resurrect his career in the midst of a different New York politician’s scandal.

I’m guessing that if someone talked to Andrew, he would probably regret that he stepped down, that he didn’t hold on more and try to fight it out. I think if you’re Adams and you’re looking around, you’d say Cuomo shouldn’t have stepped down.

But Adams’ biggest problem, looking from afar, was that he was never particularly engaged in city government. He liked being mayor, and I think he kind of just pawned off the operations of the city to a small coterie of friends. That administration did not bring in the best and the brightest — de Blasio, I think, had much more talented people than Adams does.

This article first appeared in POLITICO Nightly.