Here in New York City, things are ever so slightly returning to normal. Governor Cuomo is adjusting the curfew from 11 p.m. to midnight. (when you’re allowed to stay out an extra hour because it’s summer #justgirlythings) The CDC declared that the risk of catching Covid from surfaces is low, suggesting that closing the subway every night for deep cleaning is unnecessary. Interim MTA President Sarah Feinberg then announced that all of the guck, gunk, and goo which was scrubbed from the trains during the past year will be gingerly reapplied to subway surfaces as the city reopens. And, most heartening of all, the Mayoral election is underway, with a parade of overpromisers and underdeliverers photo-opping and Zoom-stumping their way to the Second Worst Job in America.
There’s Citi executive Ray McGuire, who somehow turned his Times puff piece into a hit piece by focusing on his investment banking credentials, then giving a tour of his priceless artifact collection. When asked about his healthcare credentials, he says to go to New York-Presbyterian hospital and “look above that nurses’ station and see whose name is there.”
There’s Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams who, if elected, would be the city’s first vegan mayor, and by extension, the first mayor who authored a plant-based cookbook. Adams is also known for sleeping on a mattress on his office floor during much of Covid-19 (a practice known as “rent-hacking”). Adams is a retired cop who created a video guide to tactically searching your home for contraband because “there are no First Amendment rights in your home,” in which he says that couch cushions are a great place to “secrete drugs.”
But of all the payasos crammed in the clown car, the one with the floppiest feet, honkingest nose, and saddest smile is surely Andrew Yang, currently polling in first place. Yang has propelled himself to the top seed on a long string of strange antics and bemusing gaffes. When most candidates were still avoiding in-person events, Yang was happy to shake hands and kiss babies -- then caught Covid himself. He posted about consoling a 22-year-old through a break-up. He broke up a fight on the Staten Island Ferry. He caught flack from the city’s most annoying residents by calling a brightly lit supermarket a “bodega.” (A real New Yorker prefers a real bodega, where you can be bitten by a semi-feral cat and buy pills that turn your boner purple, all while a Yemeni man saves you from alcohol poisoning.) Yang has also said he wants to make James Dolan sell the Knicks, performed stand-up comedy with Dave Chapelle, and feuded with Eric Adams over whether he has “ever held a job in his entire life.” Yang’s campaign responded that he has had a real job because he ran a standardized test-prep business. As a current SAT tutor, I can safely say that that does not count.
Yang’s career path before becoming a serial electoral candidate reveals a lot about his perspective. He started out as a corporate lawyer, quit to launch several start-ups which did not pan out, then found himself running Manhattan Prep. There, he personally taught GMAT courses to the analyst classes at “McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley.” After that, he launched Venture For America, which places the nation’s top college graduates in two-year fellowships at promising startups. He also wrote his book, Smart People Should Build Things, which seems to lay out his fundamental view of the world: all our problems can be solved if we just give the right Ivy League graduates enough seed funding.
That’s probably why Yang’s policy proposals sound like ideas pitched in Dan Bilzerian’s comment section. He wants to make New York an international Bitcoin hub. He wants to attract TikTok hype houses. He wants to build a casino on Governors Island, despite that being explicitly illegal under a 2003 federal law. From crypto to influencing to gambling, Yang’s ideas for New York are just a lazy man’s brainstorm of how to make money without actually working.
And while those are amusing pipedreams, much of Yang’s campaign is actually quite insidious. Several of his policies are little more than increased policing and police funding. (One wonders what the NYPD could possibly do with extra money as they deploy literal robot dogs.) As one of the city’s most prominent Asian voices, he has a large megaphone within the Stop Asian Hate movement. He has used it to call for more funding for the NYPD Asian Hate Task Force. Activists were quick to point out that more policing hurts the most vulnerable Asian New Yorkers, citing the cases of Yang Song, who died during a police raid on a massage parlor in 2017, and Kang Wong, an 84-year-old who was beaten by officers for jaywalking. Yang has also argued for crackdowns on people who sell churros and spicy mango on the sidewalk. He recently tweeted: “You know what I hear over and over again - that NYC is not enforcing rules against unlicensed street vendors.” Beyond doing the Trumpian “Everyone’s saying it!” rhetorical device, there’s simply no room for that type of anti-tamale language in our city.
Earlier this week, it was reported that Yang’s two campaign managers, press secretary, policy director, and multiple senior advisors are not actually employed by the Yang campaign; they are paid by Tusk Strategies, a prominent New York lobbying firm. While many mayoral candidates hire lobbyists for help, none have made consultants as central to their campaign as Yang has. This is surprising, given that he wrote a book about how people shouldn’t become consultants. And when that lobbying firm has worked closely with the Police Benevolent Association, the horrid union which defends killer cops and endorsed Trump, it seems like more than just a coincidence that Yang holds other pro-police stances. Or, consider that the firm made hundreds of millions lobbying for Uber in New York, work which surely contributed to the suicide epidemic among the city’s medallion cab drivers. The Uber vs. taxi dynamic makes a fitting analogy for Yang’s entire techno-utopian vision: take a charming, iconic feature of New York City, replace it with a stupid, “disruptive” version that treats real people like shit, and make a few V-neck dudes really rich in the process.
When I’m driving in and out of the city, I’m struck every time by how truly massive it is. I especially feel it passing Co-op City at New York’s northernmost edge, where 43,000 people live in the largest housing cooperative in the world. Going about your daily business in your little pocket of the city, you forget that there are miles and miles of New York you’ll probably never even visit, each packed with people, businesses, communities and culture.
And that, beyond all of the awful policy and insider corruption and woeful inexperience, is why Andrew Yang can’t be the mayor of New York City. He does not know the city, and he doesn’t want to. He abandoned New York in its darkest hour, and does not think that’s a problem. He has a terminal case of Transplant Brain; to Yang and too many others, the city is a playground to swing through, use as fertile soil for whatever your dream is, then leave without a trace. They do not think of the city as a fantastically intricate, messy ecosystem of 8 million people, who were here before and will be here after him. Andrew Yang wants New York to be a place where you can live out a fantasy. But we need a mayor who will make New York a good place to live.
I’ve written before about politicians who use their power as a proof-of-concept, who are more focused on being an example for the world than on helping their constituents. At best, I think that’s what Andrew Yang wants to be. More realistically, I think he is an egomaniac who failed at a self-serving run for the moon and thinks he can land among the stars. He has found that tweeting goofy stuff and doing silly things keeps his name in the press, so he keeps doing it. He is attracted to novel and flashy ideas like an ostrich to shiny things. He could not manage the 300,000 city employees who would be under his leadership and he knows it. He represents the worst of our Disruption Economy, which moves fast and breaks things no matter what or who it breaks. He is an unserious man who wants to be mayor because he can. It’s hard to imagine anything worse for New York City.