Tomorrow New Yorkers go to the polls to choose a new mayor.
Before them will be a choice between two profoundly different visions for this city. It comes down to this: While Joe Lhota seeks to build upon the key reforms of the past two decades, Bill de Blasio campaigns on a platform that calls into question almost every stride forward the city has taken since the 1970s.
For this reason, The Post endorses Joe Lhota in this election.
For any mayor, the three most critical responsibilities are keeping the city safe, ensuring that every child has a shot at a decent education and insisting that the city government lives within its means. On all these issues the differences between the two candidates are stark. Consider:
Crime: Bill de Blasio has made his attacks on police practices — he claims cops are guilty of racial profiling — a centerpiece of his campaign.
Up to now he’s been able to point to Judge Shira Scheindlin to back him up. But last week’s stinging rebuke of Scheindlin by a federal appeals court undercuts the entire de Blasio premise. How can it be plausible for de Blasio to still insist he’s going to withdraw the city’s appeal of Scheindlin’s outrageous ruling that undercut the NYPD’s highly effective stop, question and frisk crime fighting program when the Second Circuit has made clear the judge was biased and the appeal may well prevail?
And let’s put this in proper context: Twenty years ago, New York had in excess of 2,000 murders a year; today, the figure is down to 417. Every time the experts said crime rates couldn’t get any lower, they did.
Lhota wants to keep these practices while de Blasio is for handcuffing the people that gave us the safest big city in America.
Education: Our public schools are doing a rotten job of meeting their responsibility to give our children the skills they need to succeed in this century. Mike Bloomberg came into office 12 years ago promising to fix this, and though in some areas he has fallen short, he has moved us in the right direction. In particular, he has nurtured the growth of a new kind of public school that is accountable to parents and actually teaches its students: charters.
De Blasio has put a bull’s-eye on charters, claiming in his divisive way that they are “wealthy” and represent only 5 percent of the school system. But make no mistake: Charters serve some of the least well off kids in this city, and they might well serve the majority of this city’s children if parents were free to choose.
De Blasio, backed by his pals in the teachers union, would kill charters. Lhota proposes to double the number. The stakes could not be higher.
Taxes: Few citizens pay more than New Yorkers. Every day this city’s hostility to business and achievement is leading more and more of our most successful people to take up residence elsewhere.
Bill de Blasio complains about income inequality. Let’s be clear: Nothing squeezes a middle class more sharply than the high-tax, high-regulation, high-spending city de Blasio advocates.
Lhota, the son of a New York City cop, rightly emphasizes policies that would make New York a ladder of opportunity for talented hard-working people who aspire to better themselves. These aren’t the only differences. For example, there’s de Blasio’s bid to force a successful charity such as the Central Park Conservancy to redirect its funds to places de Blasio deems more deserving. Or his dubious campaign to keep Long Island Hospital and other ailing and under-used facilities open rather than allow the growth of smaller and more focused facilities that are the future of good health care.
In addition, there are the pending contract negotiations with city unions. These government unions are demanding retroactive pay hikes, which the city simply can’t afford. Does anyone seriously expect a Mayor de Blasio to hold the line for taxpayers in these negotiations against the public unions that will have helped put him into office?
We recognize the Lhota campaign has done a poor job of presenting these differences in a way that resonates with voters. But in a Democratic city, any Republican has his work cut out for him. And de Blasio has other advantages, including a friendly press that allows a man who honeymooned in Cuba and still speaks warmly of the Sandinistas to paint Lhota, a moderate Republican, as an extremist for speaking to one Tea Party group on Staten Island.
Mike Bloomberg has often felt the sting of The Post’s criticism over the course of his mayoralty. That said, after eight years of Rudy Giuliani and 12 years of Bloomberg, New York is safer, cleaner and more vibrant than it was in the bad old days when it was following the kind of policies Bill de Blasio now advocates for our future.
True, New Yorkers won’t awaken to a crime-ridden dump if de Blasio wins Tuesday. But let’s not pretend, as de Blasio and his advocates do, that the hard-bought progress this city has made is irreversible. Or that his attacks on the police force, his attacks on successful schools and his fondness for higher taxes, more regulation and greater spending will be without consequences for this city.
Give Joe Lhota credit for bringing these differences out into the open. And if you don’t give him your vote, please do not complain when Mayor de Blasio does to this city exactly what Lhota and this paper have said he will do.