In fascinating profile of Tish James, Atlantic Yards is little more than an early episode

Rebecca Traister's 2/28/22 New York Magazine profile of Attorney General Letitia James, The Object of Their Ire, counterposes her and targets Andrew Cuomo and Donald Trump, noting:

Years of challenging a moneyed white male grip on political authority have meant a diversification of who can make their way up, and those who have risen more recently are often asked tough questions about how: Did they move from the outside in via the propulsive force of collective community action? Or did they take the hand of the system they were supposed to be challenging and in so doing risk becoming beholden to it?

Letitia James — or, as she likes to be called, Tish — is one of the few figures for whom the answer might plausibly be: Both.

The profile is fascinating, and James comes off  well. But it's notable how Atlantic Yards has almost become a footnote:

As soon as she got to the City Council, she began fighting the proposed development of the Atlantic Yards, a signal that her approach to political power was of the outsider-activist sort. In the 2011 documentary Battle for Brooklyn, you can hear a younger James, then three years into her fight against the state’s attempt to use eminent-domain laws to remove longtime tenants from the footprint of where the Barclays Center now sits, chiding “every elected official who has supported this project” — a list that ranged from Mayor Michael Bloomberg to Senator Chuck Schumer to her former boss Roger Green — for “having their head in the sand.”

Yes, it was politically brave, but it was also following most of her 35th District constituents at the time. And since then, as I've written, she's both diminished Atlantic Yards and overinflated it.

As Traister notes, she was always connected:

But James wasn’t just challenging the city’s political machers; she was enmeshing herself in their networks. Kimberly Peeler-Allen, the founder of Higher Heights Leadership Fund and now a senior adviser to James, said that back in the early aughts, “if you were doing a thing in central Brooklyn, you had to talk to Tish — ‘Tish’ll take care of you.’ ” James did favors; she made friends. Even on the occasion of her shocking WFP win, the New York Times referred to her as “a longtime Democratic Party insider” and “operative.”