With the NY Times, the Daily News, and even the Chief Leader having endorsed Garcia, she probably looks good to a whole lot of New Yorkers who haven't read anything like this. They don't know she wants to lift the charter school cap over to Eva Moskowitz and the hedge funders who prop her up. They don't know she's wary of rent stabilization, standing for landlords over people who have to pay to live somewhere.
Every day, Eric Adams looks more ridiculous. He lives in a basement in Brooklyn, or maybe in his office, or maybe at some girlfriend's house in Jersey. Who knows? And Andrew Yang sounds okay, but if you know anything about the subjects on which he speaks, you realize he doesn't even know what he's talking about. But hey, let's not make a big deal over that. After all he's famous. What's he famous for? Well, he ran for President and he wears a MATH pin. That should be good enough for anyone.
And alas, the UFT endorsement does not seem to have done quite what we'd hoped. This seems to be our curse, I'd argue, at least this time, that's not our fault. At the time we made the endorsement, Stringer looked, to me at least, like the best candidate. I will never forget Patrick J. Sullivan on the PEP, speaking sense to Bloomberg, albeit while woefully outnumbered. Joel Klein sat playing with his Blackberry and clearly did not give a crap about his constituents. Were he a classroom teacher behaving like that, he'd have been up on 3020a charges, and justifiably so.
Stringer has not done a good job defending himself against his accusers, both of whom are represented by the same scummy anti-union lawyer. In a perfect world, he'd step down and endorse Maya Wiley, who from all I can tell, appears to be Not Insane. This notwithstanding, stepping down is not the sort of thing politicians do. What we need is a list of five candidates who are sympathetic to public schools, and we need to GOTV for them. If we can't manage that, it looks like Yang, Adams, or Garcia, any of whom would be terrible.
So now we find ourselves scrambling to put together a City Council that isn't awful, and that may be within our sights. However, with mayoral control being more like mayoral dictatorship, it will be a tough four years under any of these candidates. Though we've dumped a whole lot of money into the Stringer campaign, we haven't got the hedge fund bucks that float Yang and Adams, and we won't be able to just ship suitcases of cash in the direction of the new mayor.
Like the poor, unfortunate, hedge fund owning charter school lobby, who hasn't owned a mayor since Bloomberg. https://t.co/CvL7LuMh6U
— Arthur Goldstein (@TeacherArthurG) June 8, 2021
Alas, with this ranked voting, they don't have to hang their hats solely on Yang. They have Adams too, and from all I can see, they've also bought off Garcia. Get ready for a roller-coaster ride if any of them win. Me, I don't love roller coaster rides.
Don't forget to vote!
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