Campaigning is Over, Time to Govern

The electoral victories of Bill DeBlasio in New York and Martin Walsh in Boston have been seen as triumphs for the left. Yet political constraints and the fragile nature of urban economies tightly limit the ability of any mayor to achieve liberal goals.

The question ahead for both cities is whether these two triumphant progressives turn pragmatic and morph into the competent, managerial mayors that metropolises need.        

Jean Anouilh’s play “Becket” tells the tale of Thomas Becket’s transformation from ally to enemy of King Henry II. Although, the Plantagenet monarch hand-picket Becket for the Archbishopric of Canterbury, upon donning his Episcopal raiment, the erstwhile bon vivant becomes a champion of the Church. The office remade the individual.  While Anouilh’s telling is far from historically accurate, it captures an essential truth—no matter what is said by a leader before taking office, the requirements of the job will shape their behavior while in power.   

This challenge is particularly obvious in Boston, where Walsh was ardently backed by Boston’s unions. Walsh had served as President of Laborers Local 223 and as head of the Boston Metropolitan District Building Trades Council. As a legislator, he supported union issues.   

But as Mayor, he will inevitably end up in conflict with public sector unions. Big city labor negotiations are fundamentally zero sum games, and in Boston the mayor does not have the option of foisting compensation onto future generations by paying municipal workers off with higher pensions. More money for unions will inevitably mean less money for the Mayor’s other objectives.

If the new mayor is lucky enough to ride an economic boom, then there may be enough cash around to satisfy everyone, but if resources are limited there will be conflict, because the requirements of the job make conflict almost inevitable. We will have to see whether new Mayor’s supporters in the Public Sector Unions end up being just as disappointed with him, as Henry II was with Becket.   

Moreover, urban history reminds us that the Mayors who got the best deals out of unions were not always those who were elected to oppose them. John Lindsay, New York’s liberal Republican mayor, came into office planning on reining in labor costs through tough bargaining. The city’s transit workers went on strike his first day in office. Despite sending the union leader Mike Quill to jail, Lindsay eventually caved, giving the union a much better deal than they had ever gotten from his predecessor, Robert Wagner, a stalwart union ally.

In New York, Bill DeBlasio has promised a breath-taking array of progressive initiatives, including local control over minimum wages, reducing corporate tax breaks and “building or preserving nearly 200,000 units of affordable housing in the city over the next decade.” We can be sure that DeBlasio will be a much more progressive voice than Mayor Bloomberg, but it is less clear how much more progressive his administration will actually be.   

Both Bloomberg and Menino shared a workmanlike, managerial approach to mayoral leadership that recognized the need for economic development. Unlike Bloomberg, Menino always seemed to working for the neighborhoods, even when he was building a shiny innovation district on the waterfront. Menino’s tone, more than his substance, explains why there was far less hunger for political change in Boston than in New York.   

The other difference, of course, is that Bostonians never forget that they are cold city with a small physical footprint that always has to strive to survive. That knowledge keeps voters pragmatic.     

Many of DeBlasio’s goals require the approval of the state legislature, which faces budgetary pressures of their own. How willing they will actually be to “reverse state budget cuts” for the CUNY system, as DeBlasio wants, or to localize control over minimum wages? 

He can eliminate some of the tax breaks that the city occasionally grants to particularly desired employers—and that wouldn’t be bad economics. Typically, economists, including myself, are more likely to favor uniform, limited taxation that focuses on the area’s immobile assets, such as land, rather than targeted taxes or particular subsidies. But politicians grant such particular tax breaks because they stop a painful corporate exodus or attract a headline grabbing company. Will the mayor be able to say no when thousands of city jobs are on the line?  

Running New York City is probably the hardest feat of public administration in the country. Administering New York requires enormous energy focused on the basics of city government— policing, schools, sanitation. The city needs resources and that means not targeting or vilifying either taxpaying, job-creating companies that hire or the wealthy who can easily move elsewhere. Those realities will constrain DeBlasio just as they have constrained every one of his predecessor since Abe Beame.  

I suspect that on substance a DeBlasio administration will not look that different from the Bloomberg administration, just as the Walsh administration will not look that different from Menino administration. As Michael Katz emphasized in today’s New York Times, Bloomberg himself took plenty of progressive actions. He just never managed to sound like a champion of the poor. DeBlasio will.

But it is possible to speak for the downtrodden and still pursue many of Bloomberg’s best policies. The poor need public school reform far more than the rich. The poor need new buildings that will house prospective employers and reduce the costs of housing. The poor suffer most when streets aren’t safe.    

I suspect and hope that DeBlasio and Walsh will be inspiring pragmatists, who do everything they can to improve city services, but also recognize the limits that cities face. Their jobs cry out for competence, just as Becket’s Archbishopric asked for saintliness. I suspect that once again, the job will make the man.