The Rise and Fall of New York

◼ Twenty years ago, New York’s long nightmare ended with a Giuliani victory over Mayor Dinkins. Now the nightmare returns as former Dinkins staffer and terrorist supporter Bill de Blasio will begin wrecking the city where Dinkins and his Democratic predecessors left off. - Daniel Greenfield/Front Page

The middle class voters in Queens pleading with Joe Lhota to protect them from Bill de Blasio’s red plague are part of the older New York; that city of gruff accents but kind hearts, loquacious taxi drivers and busybody tenement grandmothers that appears so often on television and in movies that even most New Yorkers still confuse it with reality… even though it hardly exists now.

Bill de Blasio, with his Park Slope digs, represents the city’s new Yuckie overlords, yuppie hippies with Subarus, six- figure salaries, leftist politics and Whole Foods reusable bags full of tofu for the kids. It was only a matter of time until the college kids who moved to the city to slum and protest before finding profitable work formed alliances with minority community groups that would allow them to take over.

...Bill de Blasio’s victory isn’t an endorsement of his program, but of the manipulation of the political system by the powerful special interests bringing the city to the brink of bankruptcy and of the short memories of city residents voting in more of the same two decades after the Dinkins nightmare ended.

New York City’s meteoric rise from the slums was a national story. Its descent back to the slums will be local crime coverage.