Eric Adams gets deserved scrutiny: New Yorker writes that he "apparently reserves the right to mix incidents from his own life with material from his quantum lives"

The New Yorker on 8/7/23 published, online, Ian Parker's devastating profile, Eric Adams’s Administration of Bluster, with the subheading, "The Mayor of New York City tells a personal story that is compelling and often untruthful. With a thin list of accomplishments so far, can he address the city’s problems?"

The message, of course, is "unlikely," and it's interesting that Parker in some ways either ignores or downplays some low-hanging fruit regarding Adams. 

For example, he barely mentions the felonious Petrosyants twins and ignores their restaurant/club Woodland, which might--as I suggest below--be the Rosetta Stone for the Adams administration.

The article does not mention Adams's landlord-friendly Rent Guidelines Board. And it barely mentions the troubled situation at Rikers Island, though it's used for framing:

Food is a favored topic. It allows Adams to connect political action to personal anecdote, a rhetorical move that’s harder to pull off for most issues pressing on City Hall—say, the huge annual cost of police overtime (eight hundred million dollars) or inmate deaths in the dysfunctional jails on Rikers Island. An argument for eating more beans is where municipal politics looks most like the online inspirational videos that Adams enjoys. With food, he has a story about taking control and, against élite expectations, turning things around. He often sounds frustrated that people don’t characterize his mayoralty in exactly these terms.

Of course, Adams' team would point out that he has positive ratings from New Yorkers, while predecessors Mike Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio had negative ratings at comparable times. 

Then again, as Parker writes, "Adams’s stories of intervention tend to stop at the point where he’s thanked; they don’t lead into discussions of agency reform."

As columnist Ross Barkan, who was tough on Adams far earlier, put it, The Prestige Media Catches Up to Eric Adams:

De Blasio and Bloomberg didn’t agree on much, but they were mayors who cared about tangible accomplishments. The mayoralty wasn’t funny to them, or a way to preen in front of the camera
...Adams does not care about governing. Not, at least, in the way any mayor in modern times has cared. Even Rudy Giuliani could sweat policy. Adams’ municipal government has bled top talent and many large agencies are struggling to function.

A "bonkers" mayor?

The article was summed up by John Teufel, who tweeted, Every longform article about Eric Adams now is the reporter thinking up 50 different ways to write "this fuckin guy is BONKERS" without actually writing it."

Consider:

The wellness conversations prepared Adams for the storytelling campaign to come. But a self-approving account of a personal transformation doesn’t exactly signal “I am you.” Adams’s clearer message was, as he once put it, “You could be the you you’ve always wanted to be.” When on the campaign trail Adams began describing himself as “perfectly imperfect,” it was with the implication that his imperfections were obstacles, such as dyslexia, that he’d already overcome. Later, in 2022, he had to deploy “perfectly imperfect” to stave off criticism, after Politico reported that Adams wasn’t a strict vegan: he ate fish. He initially denied this; he denied to me, untruthfully, that he’d ever claimed to be a vegan.

Or:

The Mayor apparently reserves the right to mix incidents from his own life with material from his quantum lives: things that could have happened, or almost happened, or happened to someone he once met... He is unusually ready to repeat things that are confirmably untrue, or that—in their internal contradictions, or avoidance of specifics, or mutability from one telling to the next—seem very likely to be untrue....

It’s a rare day when Adams doesn’t reference Desmond Tutu talking about the importance of fixing problems “upstream,” rather than “pulling people out of the river,” half-drowned. Tutu never said this. (The Mayor’s office noted that a Google search yields many attributions to Tutu.) 

Or:

Adams has sometimes talked of the death of Clifford Glover, a ten-year-old shot by a police officer in South Jamaica, in 1973. Adams once said that, after the killing, he “was marching and leading the protests.”...When Glover was killed, Adams was twelve; there’s no evidence that he led protests.

Or:

[Adams' brother] Bernie’s details are helpful, given that Eric’s childhood memories sometimes have the shadings of amateur devotional art. 

There's a darker side to it:

Adams’s “perfectly imperfect” mantra sometimes sounds like insurance paid against future embarrassment.
....Adams now used “faith” as an instrument of political dominance—a way to make haters waiters.

About the BP race

The article helps explain why Adams, who was positioned well to win the 2013 Brooklyn Borough President race, managed to win unopposed:

Adams retired from the N.Y.P.D. as a captain, in 2006. He went on to secure four two-year terms in the New York State Senate, representing a district in central Brooklyn. He was elected borough president in 2013 and 2017. But in six elections Adams had never faced a serious challenger, not even in a primary. Frank Carone, a lawyer and a Brooklyn Democratic power broker who became Mayor Adams’s first chief of staff, in 2022, recently explained how Adams had come to run unopposed in the 2013 primary. “We knocked some folks off the ballot,” he told me, in a businesslike way. “Some other folks, we spoke to.”

In Politico, a bad year

A shorter profile, 8/7/23 in Politico, is headlined The New York City mayor is having his Aaron Judge year after all. And it’s not good. Jeff Coltin focuses more on policy:

But Adams — not unlike the Yankees captain, who was sidelined by a toe injury in June and July — has struggled all summer. There is a law enforcement investigation into a former member of his administration. There’s a looming federal takeover of city jails. The City Council overrode his veto of affordable housing bills. And now migrants are sleeping on sidewalks in Manhattan as a crisis over their arrivals grows worse.

City Hall spokesperson Fabien Levy pushed back:

“You’re focusing on the stories that blow up, as opposed to what New Yorkers actually care about,” Levy said. He highlighted that many indicators in the city are trending the right way. More affordable housing is being built and preserved than the year before. Major crimes are down and shootings have declined significantly. Subway ridership is up, the city has fully recovered the amount of private sector jobs lost in the COVID-19 pandemic and complaints about rats are down.

Undeniable, but Adams does not have a signature achievement, the way Bloomberg (post-9/11 recovery) or de Blasio (universal pre-K) had.

In Politico, the Lander counter

Politico 7/6/23 published NYC’s mayor has found his archrival. His name is Brad Lander. Joe Anuta pointed to Adams's scorn for the progressive Comptroller, who's criticized and audited the mayor--and may someday run for mayor but likely won't challenge Adams directly.

Indeed, after that article, others have appeared describing the organized left's inability to find a candidate to challenge Adams.

Politico describes how the two were at odds:

In 2018, Lander lambasted Adams’ move to funnel $1 million in participatory budgeting money to Jesse Hamilton, a close ally to the mayor who was running against a Brooklyn progressive. (Hamilton lost, and now has a job at City Hall.)

A year later, Lander and Adams found themselves on opposite sides of a heated neighborhood spat over a popular Brooklyn brunch spot. The restaurant was run by close friends of Adams’ and catered to a largely Black clientele.

Several Brooklyn electeds signed a letter calling for the restaurant’s liquor license to be suspended, citing numerous complaints from neighbors about the antics of drunken patrons. Adams defended his friends — who’d hired Carone as their attorney — and called the opposition to Woodland racist. Lander, who was one of the signatories, said the restaurant owner (who is white and is also involved in the mayor’s favorite Midtown haunt) was manufacturing a race issue to distract from his failure to comply with the law.

Close friends? Well, felons too. Lander was right, as the evidence suggested, confirmed by the State Liquor Authority's decision to pull Woodland's liquor license.

In fact, I wonder if Woodland--source of Adams's unseemly friendship with the felonious twins and his hangs with "Bling Bishop" Lamor Whitehead--had generated half tne news coverage it deserved, whether Adams would've made it to the mayoralty.

After all, as some guy wrote in a City & State essay in August 2018, Eric Adams has faced less scrutiny than he deserves:

But we should remember that, beyond the easy headlines and the bully pulpit, there’s a skilled and too infrequently challenged politician curating his image.

He's getting it now, but way too late.