Last month, about 240,000 registered Democrats in New York City—myself included—voted in a runoff election for public advocate and comptroller, two of New York's three directly elected citywide offices. Facing only nominal Republican opposition in November, the winners of the runoff—John Liu in the comptroller race, and Bill de Blasio in the public advocate race—are essentially guaranteed victory in the general election. In other words, two of the top three municipal offices in the nation's largest city were chosen by 6% of the city's electorate. That isn't democracy. It's oligarchy. And it's not working.

It wasn't so long ago that we Democrats were celebrating our dominance. Last November, I joined hundreds of my fellow Democrats at an election night event hosted by the New York state Democratic Party. We celebrated the election of a Democratic president, a Democratic landslide in Congress, and with equal excitement the news that the New York state Senate, that last bastion of Republican control in our home state, had fallen into Democratic hands. For the first time since 1935, Democrats would control the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature. 2009 was going to be a great year.

In June, the state Senate was thrown into disorder when two Democratic members—Pedro Espada Jr. and Hiram Monserrate—staged a parliamentary coup and attempted to reinstall the Republican leadership. Last month, New York's Democratic Gov. David Paterson lost the public support of our party's national-standard bearer, the president of the United States. Meanwhile, New Yorkers continue to pay among the highest taxes in the nation, footing the bill for the backdoor borrowing of the state's hundreds of barely regulated authorities, a bloated public workforce rife with redundancies, and of course, the salaries of indicted state legislators (including Sen. Monserrate, recently convicted of misdemeanor assault—and still collecting a paycheck).