Governing Is Hard Work

Mayors who aren't very interested in their jobs make me angry, especially mayors of big cities. Especially mayors of New York City! I've heard all of the arguments, which basically boil down to them not having as much authority as they would like due to various constraints (city council, budgetary authority, state meddling, etc.) but boohoo you aren't a dictator of your city and mayoring is hard work. Maybe you can't control everything, but you can get up every day and go to work to do the things you are capable of doing.

Shortly thereafter, he declined to cancel St. Patrick’s Day parade and then did. He resisted calls to cancel regular street sweeping and then did. He had a photo op at a 311 call center, where he told a caller who had just returned from Italy that she did not need to self-quarantine, advice that forced 311 to actually call the woman back and tell her to stay inside for 14 days. The mayor touted the city’s new, wide-scale testing capacity, only to have his Health Department announce that only hospitalized patients should be tested. He tweeted at Elon Musk to supply the city with ventilators. When a New York Times reporter wrote of his own gut-wrenching story about contracting COVID-19 and being unable to get help, a top mayoral aide chastised him online for seeking help at all rather than just getting better at home. And the mayor himself told a radio host that people who don’t display symptoms can’t transmit the disease, an assertion that contradicts information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Well he tweeted Elon, so everything is fixed now.