Skip the patty-cake, poke ’em in the snoot

It’s good to see Zohran Mamdani meeting with New Yorkers who opposed him in his run for mayor, including a closed-door meeting with a bunch of rank-and-file cops. Earlier in his career Mr. Mamdani uttered the words “defund” and “police” close together in one sentence, which is dumb, and he’s not saying it anymore. It’s what you’re supposed to do after you win a primary and become the Democratic candidate, meet with people who disagree and say fewer dumb things.

There are dedicated cops and some not so much but when you need the police you need the police, you don’t need a pollster, a nail polisher, or a politician. My lasting memory of New York cops goes back to when I landed at JFK and headed for the cabstand, heard shouting, saw people waving their hands and a young woman lying on the sidewalk apparently unconscious. A guy in an orange jacket got on his walkie-talkie, and two cops came running, one of them got on the phone and the other one lay down beside the woman and talked to her and put an arm around her.

It’s fine that Mr. Mamdani has gotten East Asians and Africans excited and first-generation Americans and young lefties, this is Diversity City and Complexityville, and millions of people need to move around town every day and live their lives and scrape together a living free from fear, and the mayor’s job is to secure that freedom and be reasonably honest. Palestine is not his assignment. I know young people who took a big chance to come live here and did so because they had a dream. I married one. So Mr. Mamdani is carrying the high hopes of a great many people and I hope he knows that he — being an outsider and a Muslim — will be held to a high standard. The city has known some corrupt mayors who invited pals to partake of the pork but when you call yourself a socialist, it signals that you’re not in it to do favors for your backers. A socialist is in it for the common good.

I’d be okay living in Kansas City but I love New York because my wife does. She comes back from her long walks exhilarated and that makes me happy. She takes me to the Met for Puccini and Strauss and Verdi and I enjoy her pleasure. She is utterly alive here. She reads the Times sitting across the breakfast table, doesn’t spend too much time on the front page, skips the opinion stuff, which is mostly dismay, and jumps to the odd and unique and human stories deep inside and the riveting facts. There is a love of facts in old-fashioned journalism, an odd pleasure in being proved wrong, that is missing in the propaganda press, and a mature grown-up appreciates one and avoids the other.

This is why the guy with the red tie — who is fortunate his father was born before he was — moved to Florida. New Yorkers saw through him a long time ago. He bought Marjorie Merriwether Post’s palace in Palm Beach where people respect narcissism more than Manhattan does and there he made contact with Martian children who elected him leader of the free world for their own amusement and have been loving his wackiness ever since. In New York, he is simply a traffic hazard. Red lights flash, avenues close, people ride the subway and curse him as they pass below. Someday he’ll be honored by the city naming a storm sewer after him, meanwhile he doesn’t really exist except as a warning to children: when you promise to make America great and instead you make it a joke, history will not be kind.

The Democrats’ problem is simple: they loved high school debate, making your point, rebutting the opponent’s, but were flummoxed by Trump, a stream-of-consciousness orator uninhibited by factuality or relevance, uninterested in actual government policy. They were playing tennis and he was a pro wrestler. Biden prepared to debate him by memorizing statistics, then got confused when Trump said that Biden’s administration was the worst in American history. Biden should’ve said, “You are a werewolf and you drink the blood of aborted infants.” Big mistake. Democrats running for Congress next year shouldn’t waste time on economics. Declare that the Prez is a woman in transition and promise to depants him and confiscate the six billion he’s earned since January. End of the story. Election’s over.

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