Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter.
As a voter in the New York City mayoral race, I keep thinking about the rats and the garbage cans. The story of the election, as generally framed, is that Andrew Cuomo has come down to New York from the suburbs and back from political exile to offer his own hard-nosed, practical experience as an alternative to a field of candidates who are some combination of too idealistic, too leftist, or too unseasoned to handle the serious business of running a great and difficult metropolis. The city, he declared in Wednesday’s mayoral debate, is in a “management crisis”—as well as a “fiscal crisis” and a “societal crisis”—and he is the one person who is prepared and willing to take on “dysfunctional city management.”
And here was the option that Andrew Cuomo picked when The City surveyed the candidates for their positions on trash containerization:
- Following the test pilot, roll out standardized containerization for larger buildings but reverse the requirement for small properties.
Everyone else in the Democratic primary field picked “Promote containerization for all residential buildings.”
“Trash containerization,” for people who don’t live in America’s biggest, wealthiest, and most sophisticated city, is the novel policy proposal that garbage could be put out in closed garbage cans to wait for the garbage trucks to pick it up, rather than being dumped at the curb in mounds of loose, leaking plastic bags or left spilling out of open-topped cans. This is a challenging and difficult project for New York City to carry out.
I happen to live in a neighborhood that’s in the test area for the new initiative. When we moved here, the streets were crawling with rats. (The streets were crawling with rats in our old neighborhood too.) From dusk onward, and often enough in broad daylight, as I walked down the narrowed lane of sidewalk between the wall of trashbags and the buildings, the rats would dart right across my path.
Say what you may about Mayor Eric Adams—he’s a buffoon, he’s a stooge, he’s so corrupt he found an even more corrupt way to stay out of prison than the alleged corruption that could have sent him to prison—but one of the things he ran on was fighting rats, and deploying the trash cans was a victorious battle in that war. Since we got the cans there are nowhere near as many rats around. The rats aren’t gone; the city is still the city. But the constant scurrying to and from the curbside smorgasbord is a thing of the past.
Andrew Cuomo, the veteran leader and manager, wants to bring the rats back, because someone got his ear. Someone complained that it’s an unfair burden for owners of small properties to have to buy sealed trash cans to put the trash into. Cuomo is not against containerization—he supports containerization—but maybe the way it’s being done isn’t quite striking the right balance.
Here, likewise, is Cuomo’s exchange with the New York Times editorial board about his position on congestion pricing in Manhattan, after the board asked him if it was a subject he’d changed his mind on. The question linked to a New York Post story from December with the headline “Andrew Cuomo opposes Hochul’s $9 congestion toll while mulling comeback: ‘Could do more harm than good'”:
No, no, no. Congestion pricing I did not change my mind on. Congestion pricing was started many, many years ago. Nobody could get it done. I got it passed.
When they went to implement it, remember what congestion pricing was—this is what I promised the people of New York: “The subways will be safe and clean. There’s no reason to drive.”
The moment they go to introduce congestion pricing, the subways have never been worse. It’s post-COVID. People don’t want to go to work anyway, and now we’re going to put another burden to go to work.
All I said was, let’s study this before we do it in this moment, to make sure people aren’t going to say, “you know what, another reason for me to stay home.”
Now that it’s showing signs of success, you support it?
Yes.
Cuomo’s position on congestion pricing is that he supported it when he was governor, because he believed the time was right for it; he opposed it seven months ago, under Kathy Hochul as governor, because he believed the time was wrong for it; now that it turns out the time was right for it after all, he supports it again. Leadership!
There are plenty of powerful reasons to reject Andrew Cuomo as the next mayor of New York. He hasn’t lived here in decades, and his current residency looks suspiciously tenuous. He stands credibly and extensively accused of creepy, pervasive sexual harassment, and he has spent millions of dollars in public money trying to undermine those accusations. He schemed to keep Republicans in control of the state senate, to block his own party’s agenda. His mayoral candidacy is bought and paid for, to a completely unprecedented extent, by a consortium of the ultra-wealthy and some of the nastiest reactionaries in contemporary public life, including outright supporters of Donald Trump.
He has proven himself so unethical and vindictive and bullying—a person of all-around low character—that even his endorsers through the years have had to acknowledge his glaring defects. The supposed good-government group Citizen’s Union, including him in its slate of three recommended mayoral candidates, wrote that “his decade as governor left serious ethical stains and he too often misused the power whose deployment he so skillfully mastered.”
But set all that aside—the shady dealings, the affidavits about his roving hands, the chronic pettiness and meanness—and take the would-be mayor at his would-be face value, as a skillful and masterful leader. Cuomo has made himself into the frontrunner by portraying himself (and by getting himself portrayed) as both inevitable and necessary. The city can’t afford the uncertainty of some less established candidate.
Except: What is Andrew Cuomo certain about? What can he be counted on to accomplish? In an article about his taking $2.5 million from real estate interests, the Times noted that as governor he signed the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, despite the landlords’ objections, but that he is now “critical of the implementation of these measures, which he has framed as typical of New York’s out-of-touch leftist inclinations.” His idea for dealing with the city’s failure to meet the legal timetable for closing Rikers is to “develop an interim plan for the operation of Rikers while we do an overall assessment of what the right pathway forward should be.” His policy on bike lanes is to “expand bike lanes for ordinary New Yorkers where possible, balanced against concerns about congestion and dangerous use of e-bikes.” His housing policy brief was written by ChatGPT.
This is what the can-do, proven establishment candidate is selling: reversals, hedging, gestures at process, caveats, generalities. When the Times asked him about the Elizabeth Street Garden—an antique dealer’s leased storage lot reinvented as an ersatz public space in an effort by rich downtown figures to block a long-planned, long-approved apartment complex for elderly poor people from being built—he had this to say:
In general, I think it’s a mistake to close gardens and green spaces. You know, quality of life. Find a vacant site that is not a green space. A city-owned site that really is suitable for affordable housing.
But the city already figured out a suitable spot for affordable housing: the lot on Elizabeth Street. What Cuomo was proposing was to throw out an answered question, a piece of finished planning, in the name of asking the same questions all over again.
One of the most baffling features of living in New York City—which is also a feature of living in the United States in general—is how solvable, materially, so many of the problems are. Cities as different as Beijing and Madrid have been able to build out their subway systems while New York inches along the Second Avenue Line at inconceivable expense and with a timetable of decades. Hoboken has essentially eliminated traffic fatalities and has sharply mitigated flash flooding. Boston has driven down crime rates to startling lows.
Meanwhile, in the third decade of the 21st century, Andrew Cuomo, and the moneyed powers and political insiders rallying around him, can’t be sure that it’s worth the trouble to put the trash in trash cans so the rats can’t eat it. This is what the people who’ve assigned themselves the duty to run things believe that leadership should look like: a man with a famous name declaring that nothing can really be different.