De Blasio's Only Successful Because He Pays off the Unions

Mayor de Blasio, persistently beset by legal problems and entering his re-election year, just did what any New Yorker in trouble might do. He called the cops.

That is, he laid a bundle of cash on the NYPD’s principal labor union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, settling the city’s last major outstanding labor contract.

This doubtless was in the expectation that the pact will grease the skids for a second de Blasio term — that’s also the New York way.

So now the labor ducks are all in a row.

Pretty smart, huh?

Well, the mayor ’s legendarily high self-regard has gotten him into more than one pickle over the past four years, and it seems the fellow just doesn’t learn.

Why else would he have agreed to sit down with US Attorney Preet Bharara, if not in an effort to talk his way out of the federal criminal investigations that dogged his administration early on?

Look at it this way: If de Blasio is bright enough to outsmart Preet’s piranhas, which appears to be his strategy, how did he get into so much trouble in the first place?

And how much trouble is that? Consider that New York City taxpayers are already on the hook for some $11.7 million (and counting) in legal fees run up by the mayor and his minions as they...

Read the entire piece here at the New York Post

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Bob McManus is a contributing editor of City Journal. He retired as editorial page editor of the New York Post in 2013 and has since worked as a freelance editor, columnist, and writer.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post