Halfway through Eric Adams’s term as mayor of New York, many of the headlines he generates aren’t about the city; they’re about his personal problems. The F.B.I. raided the home of his chief campaign fund-raiser. Agents seized his cellphones and iPad. Government officials are looking into whether he received illegal campaign donations from foreigners.
These problems are his own making, the result of his well-documented penchant for transactionalism and insularity. But they are particularly damaging because he can’t balance them with evidence that he is improving life in New York.
Each one of Mr. Adams’s predecessors over the past four decades would have been able to fall back on his first-term accomplishments to compensate for a grave demerit, but Mr. Adams’s policy victories are scant. That’s a problem for him, but more important, it’s a problem for the nation’s biggest city. He hasn’t just disappointed his 750,000 voters; he has led the city into a costly stagnation.
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
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