Illustration by Tom Bachtell

New York is often described as a liberal city, but it is a long time since it has had an avowedly liberal Democrat as mayor. David Dinkins governed as a moderate, and so did Ed Koch. Abe Beame, who held office before Koch, was a Brooklyn clubhouse pol of the old school. (John Lindsay, Beame’s predecessor, was a liberal, but he was a Republican when he entered City Hall—as was the great Fiorello LaGuardia.) Now comes Bill de Blasio, who, on the eve of the election, was trouncing the Republican candidate, Joe Lhota, by almost forty per cent, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. From Pelham Bay to Staten Island, New Yorkers seemed to be ignoring Lhota’s warnings that a de Blasio victory would return their neighborhoods to the days of rampant crime and burned-out buildings. The voters are “not caught up in what the city was like twenty years ago,” de Blasio said last week, in the final mayoral debate. “They want to talk about solutions today.”

That, certainly, is true, and the six-foot-five resident of Park Slope has been commendably clear about his priorities throughout the campaign. During the debate, he reiterated that his primary aim was to “address the inequalities of this city.” Last year, the poorest twenty per cent of the city’s households earned, on average, $8,993, and the richest five per cent earned, on average, $436,931. De Blasio spoke again of “doing something very meaningful to increase wages and benefits”; expanding pre-K and after-school programs; repairing the relationship between the police and the residents of many communities; and making “substantial progress” toward his goal of constructing two hundred thousand affordable housing units.

Since the days of Bill Clinton and the New Democrats, it has been a totem of faith in some liberal-progressive circles that the key to lifting up the lower ranks lies in downplaying social and economic conflicts, cozying up to business interests, and tackling inequality covertly, through largely invisible subsidies such as the Earned Income Tax Credit. De Blasio, in pledging to raise taxes on the rich to finance his education programs, has challenged this formula, and turned himself into the standard-bearer for what some see as a new era of urban populism.

He has also created some expectations that will be tough to meet. His tax hike, which would apply to people earning more than five hundred thousand dollars a year, is a modest one, but it needs the approval of the increasingly tax-phobic State Legislature. His goal of raising wages may conflict with his plan to achieve “cost savings” in pay negotiations with city workers, many of whom have been without a contract for years. To build more affordable housing, he will need the coöperation of a real-estate industry that has often failed to follow through on such plans with City Hall, including some that de Blasio was in favor of, such as the Atlantic Yards development, in Brooklyn. And, even in the unlikely event that all his proposals are enacted, New York will remain a chronically unequal place. The forces responsible for rising inequality—technical progress, globalization, the decline of labor unions and a broader attack on workers’ rights, a culture of overcompensation on Wall Street and many corporate boards—are largely beyond the purview of any mayor, a fact that de Blasio has lately been acknowledging. Speaking about his agenda with New York, he said, “Is it going to end the problem of income inequality? Of course not.” He added, “Do I think people will feel movement on a lot of different fronts and a real commitment from City Hall to addressing these issues? Yeah.”

Such statements betoken a realism that some depictions of de Blasio, like the Post’s “Che de Blasio” tag, willfully ignore. A former liberal activist and supporter of the Sandinistas, de Blasio, at fifty-two, is also a wily political insider, a protégé of Harold Ickes and the late Bill Lynch—both pragmatic Democratic strategists. He worked under President Clinton and Governor Andrew Cuomo, two avowed centrists. He backed the rezoning of great swaths of the city, which made it easier for developers to override local opponents. (He enraged people in his own district by endorsing not just the Atlantic Yards development but a proposal to convert some of the area around the Gowanus Canal into luxury condominiums.)

In fashioning his populist campaign message, de Blasio was reacting to a changed political environment, one that was buoyed by the energy of the Occupy Wall Street movement. He was also pointedly contrasting his vision with what many New Yorkers had come to perceive as the imperial mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg. But his critique of Bloomberg was narrowly drawn. De Blasio differs with the Mayor on issues like taxation and policing, but he agrees with him on many others. In addition to supporting Bloomberg’s pro-development policies, he has embraced his smoking ban and other public-health measures, his climate-change initiatives, and his decision to seize direct control of the city’s schools. It is simply inaccurate to depict de Blasio as Bloomberg’s polar opposite—a left-wing bogeyman who will send the bankers fleeing to Greenwich. The bankers, like many highly paid New Yorkers, will stay in the city, because it provides them with proximity to others in the same industry, the ready availability of finance and labor, and the cultural benefits of living in one of the world’s great metropolises.

Perhaps a more legitimate criticism of de Blasio is that he lacks the experience to run a government that employs nearly three hundred thousand people, and to manage a budget of seventy billion dollars. Right now, New York is doing pretty well. In the past year, the private sector added about eighty-five thousand jobs. The city’s budget is balanced. But, as the Independent Budget Office points out, New York still faces significant challenges, particularly with regard to the rising costs of employee benefits and debt interest. The city now spends almost as much on providing pensions and health-care insurance for its own workers as it does on providing food stamps, medical care, and other social services. It spends almost as much on servicing its debt as it does on the Police and Sanitation Departments combined.

Will de Blasio be able to make the step up from critic and advocate to leader and administrator? Will he be able to reach agreements with the municipal unions and wring out of the budget more services for the city’s residents? Can he persuade Albany to raise taxes on the rich? Does he have the flexibility to deal with upsets, such as last week’s federal appeals-court decision to block a court order reforming the stop-and-frisk policy? Some people remain skeptical, especially the establishment types who would gladly have handed Bloomberg yet another four years. But, given the skillful campaign that de Blasio has run and the huge mandate that a record-breaking victory would confer, he could well prove to be a more formidable mayor than they suggest. In any case, a de Blasio mayoralty will be widely viewed as a test case for liberal reformers everywhere. ♦