The Unembarrassable Andrew Yang

N ew York City is a place where, if you shot Donald Trump in the middle of Fifth Avenue, a smirking successor to the O. J. Simpson jury would declare you not guilty, then you’d get a candy bar named after you, then the city would hold a parade in your honor down the very same street where the fateful incident occurred.

Yet Andrew Yang, the curious fellow who has until recently been winning the race to be the city’s next mayor (assuming there is anything left after Bill de Blasio departs this urban dumpster fire with a Frank Drebin–like cry of “Nothing to see here!”) is attempting to follow a Trumpian path to power. Yang is a TV creation. There is nothing on his résumé worth mentioning except his performances during the useless series of dull promotional videos known as the Democratic Party presidential debates of 2019–20. If Trump owed his outsized presence in the American mind to his hit show The Apprentice, and built a brand as a business success who brutally excised failure from the boardroom, Yang is a sort of NPR or C-SPAN version of Trump — he built his wonkish reputation around the trick of looking like a smart person.

To the small slice of New York City Democrats who will determine the next mayor in a place where the Republican Party is lying on a slab in the political mortuary — Bill de Blasio swept into office on the shoulders of the 3 percent of city residents who voted for him in the 2013 primary — their party’s staged events are watched with the same level of fervor as Indianans watching college basketball. New York Democrats thought in those presidential debates that Yang seemed personable, reasonable, and deeply versed in fresh ideas, which is relatively easy when you’re standing beside a line of superannuated oafs and bristling extremists. In a field of barely known candidates for mayor, Yang immediately shot to the top of the polls for the June 22 primary. “Who can beat Andrew Yang?” asked Politico on April 23.

Now he is fading quickly and has dropped to third place in some surveys. One poll showed his support tumbling from 32 percent in March to 15 percent in mid May. (Because of the city’s new ranked-choice ballot, there will be only one Democratic primary vote, with no runoff, but it’s possible the person with the most first-choice votes will not be the winner.)

So what happened? People started asking Yang questions about New York City. And he answered them. He has said so many embarrassing things that New Yorkers are starting to compare his leadership qualities to those of The Office’s Michael Scott. “Cringe, in many ways, has been what the Yang campaign runs on,” wrote New York Times critic James Poniewozik.

Like Trump, Yang has zero experience in government. And, like Trump, he hopes to be seen as a rich businessman who can break and/or fix things. Also like Trump, Yang lunges at every microphone and camera. He will talk to anybody, even comedians, and he is unembarrassable. Though Yang has lived in the city for 22 years, he gives off the impression that he either hasn’t been paying attention or has been out of town a lot. Poniewozik assembled against Yang the following damning indictment:

He tweeted his love of New York “bodegas” with a video of what looked like a capacious supermarket. He reminisced about waiting “in,” not “on,” line at a “NY restaurant,” Shake Shack.

To that can be added the following: Yang complained that the city is not enforcing rules against unlicensed street vendors (which felt like a dig against immigrants and the harmless yet colorful vibe they bring to the streets). He has said of fellow candidate Kathryn Garcia both that she has demonstrated incompetence by having served under Bill de Blasio and that he would hire her to manage his government for him. He has blanked out when asked basic questions about NYPD reforms, how he would pay for his fanciful idea to wrest control of the subway system from New York State, and what his favorite Jay-Z song is.

And here was the capper: Asked to name his favorite subway stop, Yang said, “Times Square.” This was evidence of some next-level cluelessness; one of the things that binds all New Yorkers together is that we all hate tourists and the wellspring from which they emerge, Times Square. The remark reinforced the perception that Yang, who grew up in the suburbs north of the city and went to boarding school at Phillips Exeter Academy, is not a true member of our strange New York City tribe. He has never even bothered to vote for mayor before. When a Daily News cartoonist made a joke that portrayed Yang as a clueless tourist in Times Square, surrounded by discount T-shirt shops and costumed characters, Yang made some pathetic whimpers about being the victim of racism; his strange reasoning was that he was being labeled an outsider for being Asian rather than for associating himself with the detested Times Square. His wife joined in the outrage party, even bursting into tears for the cameras.

So now Yang finds himself stamped not only with the label “tourist” but also the modifier “thin-skinned.” For a guy who is running a personality-centered campaign, Yang is piling up a list of traits that is as cringey as the unbroken series of bricks he heaved in the general direction of a hoop at the West Fourth Street basketball court.

Yang’s Tigger-ish optimism is welcome — he embodies the hope that the city will find its way out of its current triple crisis of crime, disorder, and lost jobs, not to mention its enduring sense of mourning and fear. But a successful mayor has to be as comfortable in the arena of conflict as Mad Max in Thunderdome, and Yang (unlike Trump) does not seem remotely tough enough for the job he seeks. He expressed support for Israel while it was being attacked by Palestinians, which is a properly New York thing to do. But then he caved in to far-left demands to reframe the situation as very complex and nuanced as rockets rained down on Israel. Even in New York, a city that is home to more Jews than any other, Yang could be forgiven for expressing sympathy for Palestinians. But for backing down? Never. “Combative” is practically one of the titles that comes with being a mayor, the way “Defender of the Faith” or “Commander in Chief” gets attached to lesser jobs.

Longtime public servants such as Eric Adams, the former NYPD captain and current Brooklyn borough president (a ceremonial post, but it sounds impressive), and Garcia (who ran the de Blasio sanitation department and hence is the woman to thank for New York City’s famously spotless streets), have surpassed Yang in some polls because they, unlike Yang, have demonstrated some degree of familiarity with the city’s immense $88 billion government. Garcia earned the endorsement of the New York Times.

Yang, though, emits an aura of unseriousness that is becoming far too familiar in our politics. When he was waging his breezy campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, he used to wear a ballcap emblazoned with the word “MATH” — MAGA for progs. Tell a left-wing audience that our social problems can be solved by some sort of as-yet-undiscovered scientific formula, and they’ll nod along with amazingly naïve vigor.

Yet, unlike Trump, Yang cannot point to any entity or edifice and brag that he built it; his signature accomplishment was a flashy nonprofit career-training outfit that promised to incubate 100,000 jobs but fell 99,850 short and burned through tens of millions in donations in the process. Yang’s other achievement is climbing confidently up the rungs of private industry all the way to the position of chief of a small test-prep company you’ve never heard of. His net worth is about $1 million, according to Forbes, which for a 46-year-old lawyer in Manhattan who got his J.D. from Columbia University is slightly embarrassing. (At major city law firms, starting salaries approach $200,000.) Yang seems to think that his self-styled “entrepreneur” label makes him sound like a rich guy who doesn’t like to brag, but in fact he’s just another schmuck on the No. 2 train.

Yang has proven such a lightweight on the campaign trail that even the notoriously buffoonish mayor Bill de Blasio has been teasing him for his lack of preparation, although de Blasio is so unpopular that 40 percent of city Democrats say they’d be less likely to vote for a candidate he endorsed (as against only 28 percent who say they’d be more likely to vote for a de Blasio endorsee). At this point, Yang’s best hope for reviving his flagging campaign might be to gin up a public fight with de Blasio and position himself as the scourge of all things de Blasian. Either that, or Yang could spend the next three weeks taking a crash course in New York City 101 and try to convince people he’s more than a MATH slogan on a hat.