Former cop Eric Adams wins the Democratic primary for mayor of New York, and President Biden celebrates. Because the fight against rising crime is a hot topic of US national politics, which the Republicans will exploit to win next year’s midterm elections, and perhaps even the presidential elections of 2024. So the head of Casa Banca needed the message launched by the most large American city, where its progressive rivals within the party such as Alexandia Ocasio Cortez, who after the murder of George Floyd had launched the campaign to cut funds to the police, were defeated.
Adams’ victory became official yesterday, when the count of the last votes computed with the complex mechanism of ranked choice made his advantage over the two closest opponents, Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley, unsurpassed. Eric prevailed by a whisker, that is 1% compared to the former commissioner for garbage collection, and a little more than the liberal candidate supported by Ocasio. However, both have recognized the defeat and therefore he will face the Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa in November, who is well known as the founder of the Guardian Angeles, but has no serious statistical chance of winning, because in New York the Democrats have a starting advantage of 7. to 1 with respect to the Gop. Barring any sensational surprises, Adams will become the second black mayor in the history of the city. But to determine its success will be precisely the ability to distinguish itself from the first black mayor, David Dinkins, who, leaving the Big Apple in the grip of crime, opened the door of City Hall to Rudy Giuliani.
Eric was born sixty years ago in Brownsville, a complicated neighborhood in Brooklyn, to a butcher father and a cleaning woman mother, who had not made it past third grade at school. When he was 15 he had been stopped by the police for violating private property, and they had beaten him up in the police station. He claims that at that moment he had decided to become a cop, to change the system from the inside. And so he had, graduating in 1984 from the Police Academy as second in his class. Having become a police captain, he had driven his superiors crazy by founding a group of black agents, committed to the brutality directed at minorities. In 1997, at the time of Giuliani, he had also joined the Republican Party, but he had begun his political career in 2006, by being elected Democratic Senator of the state of New York. He then became president of the Brooklyn Borough, and from there he launched the run to City Hall.
Moderate compared to rivals, he set the campaign on the need to relaunch New York after Covid, healing social inequalities. And above all on security, which he wants to bring back by reforming the police, but without cutting funding. The same position of Biden, who according to informed sources would have supported Adamas under the radar, because he knows that if the Democrats present themselves in the next elections as the party that wants “defund the police”, they will commit suicide. Eric is no saint, but his former colleagues who had turned their backs on de Blasio should recognize him as one of their own, and get back to work. Fundamental goal for Democrats nationwide, as a basis for not losing Congress next year.