Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s early picks for his high workers supply a fairly clear image of what the ultimate product can be: A Metropolis Corridor run by a mixture of supposedly reasonable veterans of Mayor Invoice de Blasio’s crew plus an all-star staff of outright radicals drawn from the nationwide hard-left motion.
The Blas alums will not be truly moderates; they’re simply not as clearly radioactive; take into account two he tapped final week.
Jahmila Edwards, who’ll head the Mayor’s Workplace of Intergovernmental Relations, spent a decade at municipal-worker union DC 37: Which means his operation working with state and native officers will run by means of the prism of what’s finest for metropolis staff.
In the meantime, his decide for director of appointments, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, all of a sudden withdrew after her report of antisemitic and anti-police tweets surfaced: Service beneath de Blasio, in different phrases, isn’t any signal you’re not truly poisonous.
On Friday, he named Julie Su to the brand new place of deputy mayor for financial justice: She’s a pro-union progressive who allowed billions in fraud when overseeing California’s unemployment advantages, and couldn’t win Senate approval to function President Joe Biden’s Labor secretary as reasonable Democrats discovered her too radical.
Plus, Mamdani is reportedly eyeing lawyer Ramzi Kassem to be his high authorized adviser: His notable achievements embody defending an al Qaeda terrorist and a radical, anti-Israel Columbia agitator Mahmoud Khalid.
And Mamdani’s different possibility for that put up is reportedly Steven Banks, a self-described “social justice lawyer” who as de Blasio’s homeless czar doubled spending to “deal with” homelessness even because the ranks of metropolis homeless additionally soared.
In the meantime, rumors that the brand new mayor would possibly retain city-planning wonk Dan Garodnick from Eric Adams’ staff has light, whereas the likes of Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro (who was key to Adams’ main achievements of the final 12 months) have been instructed in no unsure phrases to pack their baggage.
The solely signal of hope for sanity to date is that Mamdani has satisfied Jessica Tisch to proceed as police commissioner — but he hasn’t remotely disavowed his longtime anti-cop and anti-policing agenda; most betting is that she’ll both get fired or really feel obliged to give up earlier than 2026 is out.
On the very least, it’s plain that the Metropolis Corridor braintrust can be far to the left of the crew that ran Gotham beneath de Blasio, till now New York’s most left-wing mayor ever.
With the entire remainder of the administration seeking to construct a socialist utopia (or break the town in attempting), it’s arduous to see how a sensible centrist like Tisch can final.
