Lord knows we have our problems with Mayor Adams, but all New Yorkers can at least feel relieved they’re not suffering under Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson.
A pro-crime progressive and tool of the city’s monstrous teachers union, he hasn’t been in office a year, and the honeymoon is definitely over: Just 21% of registered Chicago voters, per one recent poll, approve of Johnson’s performance as mayor.
Then again, he’s already made countless moves any rational citizen would disapprove of.
Like saying absurdly that paying reparations for slavery would somehow help deal with his city’s endless crime epidemic.
No: What would help with that is Johnson taking on his fellow Dems and ending the policies around bail and policing that have sent crime skyward in the Windy City.
He went to bat with the press for a mob of vicious thugs that took over a big chunk of Chicago’s downtown.
During the campaign, he vowed not to end selective enrollment at Chicago’s high-achieving public schools, yet now the city school board seems poised to break his promise — no shock, given his fealty to the Chicago Teachers Union, which makes Gotham’s United Federation of Teachers look like the Munchkins’ Lollipop Guild in “The Wizard of Oz.”
His precursor, Lori Lightfoot, had poisonous relations with the press, but Johnson’s outdone her — leaving an editorial board meeting in a huff on getting resistance to his sudden demand it be off the record; conducting a totally insane presser where he badgered a reporter for daring to request a yes-or-no answer to two questions on crime and the city budget.
The man called for Soviet-style government-run grocery stores, for Pete’s sake!
So it’s no wonder this socialist-adjacent blatherer is struggling with his public.
Remember: The strident moralism of wokists like Johnson is routinely coupled with crass political self-seeking and so does zero good for the people it claims to want to help.
But the whole tragicomedy contains a potentially very grim lesson for New York City.
Johnson was elected after Lightfoot — a leftist, but not nearly as hardcore as Johnson — drove her city into the toilet with pro-crime, anti-family policies and a unique brand of narcissistic grandiloquence whenever she was confronted with their bad results.
Eric Adams is largely fighting the good fight on crime and schools, though with mixed success, but struggling in the face of the migrant crisis.
And he all too often responds to criticism with self-pitying plaints and/or absurd charges of racism.
But dumping him like Lightfoot just to make a change could well bring equally disastrous results.
All the Democrats visibly angling to take Adams on next year are flat-out awful — pandering to the hard left idiocy that drives the city’s worst problems.
We won’t stop pushing this mayor to do better, but Chicago’s Brandon Johnson debacle proves: When it comes to Democrats running major American cities, things can always get worse.
