When Al Sharpton faults you for your (lack of) work on diversity, you know you have a real problem running as a progressive. But mayoral candidate Maya Wiley is such a hypocrite, progressives are finding, she’s unlikely to care.
Even those sympathetic to her ideas should resist ranking her on their ballots, lest she take the race with second-choice votes; she’d be a disaster for a city already on the brink.
Sharpton is declining to endorse a candidate in the Democratic primary, but that’s not keeping him from criticizing Wiley, who is in a dead heat for second, according to a Post poll. When Wiley left Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration as Minority/Women-Owned Business Enterprise director, less than 5 percent of government spending went to such firms, though they represent 30 percent of city companies. Indeed, in her time at City Hall from 2014 to 2016, the city’s proportion of MWBE procurement dropped from 5.3 to 4.9 percent.
Sharpton told The Post that much of his National Action Network’s work “is around economic equity and fighting to get MWBE contracts up, not down.”
We’re the last ones to back such bean-counting as a matter of policy, but progressives who do may be disappointed by Wiley’s weak performance on that score.
Then again, Wiley never puts her money where her mouth is. She wants to slash the NYPD’s budget by a further $1 billion and is open to the idea of taking their guns away, even though the Brooklyn neighborhood in which she lives with her husband (in a $2.7 million home) is protected by private security — something almost no high-crime neighborhoods have the luxury of funding.
She also wants to reduce choice for New York schoolkids by getting rid of admissions screenings for city schools that she calls racist — while taking advantage of them for her own kids. One daughter went to Mark Twain Intermediate School for the Gifted and Talented in Brooklyn and Humanities Preparatory Academy in Manhattan, which require good grades for admission. Another spent grades six through 12 at Brooklyn Friends, a private school that charges $51,000 per year.
She’s raked in six-figure salaries for years — though she left off her time as a federal prosecutor from her LinkedIn profile.
Maya Wiley advocates for fewer cops patrolling unsafe streets and fewer opportunities for gifted minority students from the safety of her privately protected home. She has no business being on any New Yorker’s ballot.