Mamdani

 

My photo, not the shop I've been going to since COVID inflation made haircuts equally unaffordable everywhere, but mine is also called "Excellence". My shop has Arab barbers, but I go there not just because they're Arabs but also because they straight-razor shave the back of my neck and give me a great hot towel.

Happy New Year! The New York City news, of the inauguration of my borough president Mark Levine as city comptroller, Jumaane Williams as public advocate (a New York institution in which he has served since 2019, preceded by Attorney General Letitia James and former mayor Bill de Blasio), and our new mayor Zohran Mamdani, really feels like a beginning of something in a way New Year festivities rarely do (I don't know but I think January 1 is a pretty unusual date for holding inaugurations; Spanberger's gubernatorial, in Virginia, is going to be January 17 and Sherrill's in New Jersey on January 20).

The ceremonial itself, and the speeches, were pretty inspiring, as far as I'm concerned. I really liked Levine pointing out that each of the three of them swore on a different holy book, and Williams getting emotional, and then asking all of us to take an oath together:

— that no one let go of anyone’s hands, because if we’re all connected, we can’t lose anyone. So we hold on to the hand of our neighbor, and we reach out with our other hand to grasp someone who may fall through cracks, and we bring them along. I want everyone, if they’re comfortable, take a hand of the person next to you, or the arm, and just repeat after me. We can all be the voice of the people.

CROWD: We can all be the voice of the people....

Echoing Mamdani's tribute to the collectivity of democracy in his November victory speech:

More Spaghetti on the Wall

This, discovered by @plankysmith.bsky.social, took me aback. What? Who makes fun of weeping police officers? Why would he do something like that? We all have our issues with NYPD, but that just sounds gratuitously mean. Leave the poor guy alone, you know. Who knows what he might have been through, what violence he might have witnessed, what pain he might have been forced to inflict, what sufferings he might have endured in his private life? A policeman's lot is not a happy one! (Happy one!) As a general rule.

And it's not like the Zohran we've come to know and love! Funny, but never cruel, and more likely to laugh at himself than some defenseless third party. What's up with this?

And then the other thing was that nobody seemed to know,  or even to be interested. Planky, and Roy Edroso, mocked the story from a literary standpoint, as it well deserved, but the Bluesky commentators mostly seemed to be most interested in denouncing Politico's morals and those of its right-wing German owner, which was understandable, but not very informative, while at the ci-devant Twitter, they just denounced Zohran, and nobody was wondering what had happened:

And finally, long story short, Mamdani's original tweet, to which Politico helpfully linked, didn't seem very informative either:

Umm what pic.twitter.com/DhIcZxOQRb

— Timbo (@TimboNotes) July 29, 2025

At least until you looked at the timestamp, which was pretty clarifying. Mikey had observed the troubled officer shortly before noon on November 7, 2020; Zohran offered his gnomic comment just an hour later. What was November 7, 2020? Four days after the 2020 election, and the day enough of the absentee ballots had been counted that the media outlets were able to call it for Joe Biden, which they did around 11:30 AM.

In other words, that cop wasn't upset because he'd seen somebody getting shot, or had to make a difficult arrest, or gotten a breakup text from a girlfriend, he was overcome with grief because he had just learned that Trump had lost. Or that's how Mikey evidently saw it. And how is that not funny? And how is Zohran's remark "mocking a crying cop"? (Whoever the cop was, it's totally unlikely he ever saw the tweets, let alone had his feelings hurt.) If you were scrolling a lot that afternoon you'd get what it was about, but by the next morning its meaningfulness had to be reconstructed out of the metadata, as I just did. I still don't really know myself what Zohran exactly meant, either, I may as well admit.

There's a lesson there, I think, on the current media climate: that it's not just vicious, but also profoundly stupid. Axel Springer Politico's purpose, no doubt, is to make trouble for Mamdani, not even necessarily to get Andrew Cuomo or whomever elected, just to make things difficult for the Democratic nominee, maybe focusing on trouble with the NYPD, which is kind of a given for a New York mayor of the progressive or left variety, given how right-wing the cops are especially in the upper echelons—remember how fraught the relationship was with de Blasio. I wouldn't be surprised if Politico was explicitly dredging the data for examples: feeding Mamdani's Twitter feed into the chatbot and asking it to find instances of him disrespecting the police, and this is what it came up with.

But they didn't have any clear idea what it might actually mean,  and weren't curious enough to try to find out. They didn't quote it in the article, or describe it to any degree, just linked it and hoped for the best, that the right people would accept that it was a real scandal without looking into it too closely, and that's pretty much what they got—though it's less a proper scandal than more spaghetti on the wall. But you can't learn anything from it if you don't look at it a little more closely, and that wall is getting really fithy. It's just more moral denunciation, all the damn time.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

 

Election Eve

 

It's finally starting to look really possible that Zohran Mamdani will win the Democratic primary in the New York mayoral race: in its final poll before Election Day tomorrow, Emerson College's simulation of the rank choice outcome has him winning, for the first time, in the eighth round, 52-48. It's a nice illustration of how the system works, with the lowest-performing candidates dropped out and the votes distributed to voters' second and third and so on choices, until one of the candidates crosses the 50% mark:

I had a sense of how something like this could happen; Cuomo, running especially on name recognition, is mostly a first choice, more often of voters who didn't rank anybody else—he has fewer votes to pick up in the subsequent rounds. Mamdani, attractive but seen as a bit of a gamble, gets a lot of third and especially second choices behind candidates seen as safer, Adrienne Adams and Brad Lander, the best qualified by conventional measures. I can see my own vote (in the end I decided to rank Lander first) moving into Mamdani's column in the last two rounds. In that big jump putting Mamdani over the top, you can see how the cross-endorsement strategy was supposed to work.

New York Note

@zohran_k_mamdani

Los neoyorquinos latinos son el corazón de esta ciudad y merecen un alcalde que les hable directamente. Este vídeo es un esfuerzo a presentar nuestra visión a la comunidad latina, para que podamos trabajar juntos para construir la ciudad que todos merecemos. Latino New Yorkers are the heart of this city — and they deserve a mayor who will speak to them directly. This video is an effort to introduce our vision to the Latino community, so we can work together to build the city we all deserve.

♬ original sound - Zohran Mamdani

This is pretty irritating, from the New York Times Editorial Board keeping its promise not to endorse any candidates in local elections any more:

Given those polls [showing Cuomo and Mamdani dominating over the other nine candidates] the crucial choice may end up being where, if at all, voters decide to rank Mr. Cuomo or Mr. Mamdani. We do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots. His experience is too thin, and his agenda reads like a turbocharged version of Mr. de Blasio’s dismaying mayoralty. As for Mr. Cuomo, we have serious objections to his ethics and conduct, even if he would be better for New York’s future than Mr. Mamdani.

For any voters tempted to leave both off their ballots, it is important to understand that this decision would be tantamount to expressing no preference between the two. It is similar to voting for neither major-party candidate in a traditional election. 

"We refuse to choose, because it's beneath our awesome dignity, but if you follow our example you're a moral coward. Also, you should choose the ethically challenged Cuomo." As they make clear by devoting three paragraphs to Zohran Mamdani's shortcomings, condemning his ideology, policy ideas, and inexperience, and the way he reminds them of de Blasio, and just one to Andrew Cuomo's—the issue of his weird though probably not criminal mistreatment of women, over which he resigned from the state governorship four years ago, on the advice of this same editorial board, which now seems to think that was less serious a fault than advocating a minimum wage hike or free buses, as Mamdani does.

In the first place, the argument is bullshit. It's a rank-choice vote among 11 candidates, and it is not similar to voting for neither major-party candidate in a traditional election. With the much smaller (and better informed) turnout you expect in a primary, and only Democrats voting in New York's closed-primary system, it's easy to imagine one or two of the other candidates emerging if enough people decided not to rank the two frontrunners, and if the frontrunners are as bad as the board seems to think they are, that's what the board ought to call for, instead of using this backhanded technique of pushing us in one direction.

Then, Cuomo's ethical failings aren't limited to the #MeToo moments that helped to drive him out of office. In the middle of his first term as governor, in 2013, he named what's called a "Moreland Commission" in New York to fight corruption in state government, then abruptly shut it down halfway through its 18-month appointed lifetime. It later became apparent that Cuomo and his aides had never really allowed it to function, as The Times reported: