Eric Adams, the new Democratic mayor of New York City who, from one minute to the next, is either suggesting everything has changed since he succeeded Bill de Blasio or nothing has changed, has had a fairly easy ride with the press so far and notably has enjoyed a lot of support from the New York Post. Nevertheless, yesterday at City Hall found him playing the race card on a room full of reporters. Adams lashed out bitterly for no apparent reason except a thinness of skin that would make an onion blush:
I’m a Black man that’s the mayor. But my story is being interpreted by people that don’t look like me. Diversify your newsroom, so I can look out and see people that look like me and say we’re going to write stories based on the prisms that we have. . . . That’s not what we’re getting. And that’s why I’m covered the way I’m covered. And I’m not comfortable with it.
Bad, bad move. Almost all political journalists in New York City are liberals, and if anything is going to turn them against Adams it’s being called racists. Moreover, just six weeks into a mayoralty that could very well continue for eight years, Adams is already threatening to refuse to answer questions in the future:
I’m going to stop doing off topics, because if you already have your perception of me and you’re already going to stick to what you think I am, then why am I doing this? If you want to acknowledge or not, I have been doing a darn good job. If this is how this is going to be, then I’m just going to come in, do my announcements and bounce. Why am I even answering these questions? And it happens over and over and over again.
Crime is surging in New York City for the third straight year, presumably thanks in part to permissive attitudes toward crime adopted by the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg that are so radical even Al Sharpton is complaining about them, and yet Adams’s attitude toward Bragg appears to be supportive rather than damning. Adams already appears to be in over his head. This is not the mayoralty we hoped for when Adams campaigned on law and order.