Be prepared. The potential soon-to-be election (so say the political pundits) of New York City mayoral candidate and devout socialist Zohran Mamdani is going to launch an avalanche of loving media coverage.
The anti-Trump is born! Isn’t socialism fabulous? And so on and on. Count on it.
Come January the new guy will be taking office and officially become Mayor Mamdani. But a look back in history would be instructive.
In 1965 it was also time to elect a Mayor of New York. And bursting onto the political/media scene was one John Lindsay. The media went crazy.
Recall that 1965 was a mere two years after the assassination of America’s revered, handsome President John F. Kennedy. The country was, understandably, still somewhat shell shocked.
JFK, smiling and waving happily as his motorcade made its way through the the streets of Dallas, Texas, sat in the back seat of the open (no roof) presidential Lincoln Continental. At his side was his smiling and beautiful wife Jackie, attired in a fashionable pink suit with matching hat.
By November of 1965 and the time for the New York mayoral election, the film taken that day in 1963 by a Texas citizen named Abraham Zapruder had finally been released by the government. In vivid color the nation could see, in detail, the brutal assassination as it unfolded that day.
Why was this relevant two years later in a race for Mayor of New York? The Republican -yes indeed Republican - candidate for Mayor was a tall, very handsome Republican Congressman John Lindsay. And like clockwork the media was filled with comparisons of Congressman Lindsay to the late and revered President Kennedy.
Lindsay’s handsome, smiling, JFK-resembling image was everywhere in both the New York and national media of the day, as here on the cover of LIFE magazine following his victory. The considerable media coverage of Lindsay was a decidedly unusual event for a mere New York mayoral candidate. He won, but of course. Going away.
And then.
And then John Lindsay became the actual Mayor Lindsay. There were storms ahead. And one urban woe after another fell on his handsome head. On his very first day in office, New York’s transit workers union went on strike, completely shutting down the city’s subway and bus service. And from that moment on, or so it seemed in the day, Lindsay was plagued with one urban crisis after another. Teacher strikes, garbage worker strikes, strikes by the operators of drawbridges and sewage treatment workers. And memorably, a blizzard, immobilizing the city in snow.
Things were so bad that the Republican Mayor eventually felt forced to switch parties, and though re-elected in a controversial 1969 election, Lindsay’s 1972 presidential bid for the Democratic nomination tanked. In short, Mayor Lindsay’s political career was over, the media’s one-time New York mayoral golden boy finished politically for good. With considerable help from the media that had once celebrated him.
The mayoralty run of one Rudy Giuliani turned out quite differently. Starting out as a popular, crime-busting US Attorney, Giuliani swept into the mayor’s office. And then out of the blue, which no one saw coming, New York City was suddenly and literally subjected to an aerial attack from Islamic terrorists on 9/11. Giuliani, also taken by surprise, was instantly on national and global television screens walking the pollution swept streets, taking charge of the resulting chaos and dealing with mass murder as the twin towers crashed, killing some 26 thousand New Yorkers.
Giuliani, quickly dubbed “America’s Mayor” turned out to be a seriously good and popular mayor, although not enough to make it to the White House. But even he could not finish his career unscathed, as his performance in various aspects of the Trump presidential campaign and in the Trump-Ukraine episode brought him tons of both legal problems and negative media coverage.
This trip down memory lane surfaced in watching the media of today swooning over New York’s apparent about-to-be elected Democrat/Socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani. Interestingly, in Mamdani’s case his candidacy has both excited some New Yorkers while antagonizing others - with the media taking note.
Politico, for example, headlines:
Zohran Mamdani’s meteoric candidacy is deeply polarizing New York
The New York City Democratic mayoral nominee has been hit from all sides over his Israel criticism and past stances on policing.
The story reports:
NEW YORK — Front-running mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has energized the Big Apple — and polarized the nation’s largest city just as quickly.
Much like his nemesis President Donald Trump, the young democratic socialist has inspired durable support and repelled his opponents, a dynamic that’s symbolic of the national divide. His foes, including those in the business community, Jewish voters and moderate Democrats, have framed Mamdani’s potential mayoralty as an existential threat to this deep blue city.
Meanwhile, the left-wing New Yorker waxes enthusiastically about the socialist candidate. A recent headline:
What Zohran Mamdani Knows About Power
The thirty-three-year-old socialist is rewriting the rules of New York politics. Can he transform the city as mayor?
One suspects this election of 2025 and its enthusiastic, loving media coverage of Mamdani has been despairing to another candidate in the race - former New York Governor (and Democrat!) Andrew Cuomo. While there are a handful of days left to run in this election, Cuomo, once touted as a sure-thing presidential candidate, is regularly lagging in the polls, with the GOP candidate, Curtis Sliwa, behind Cuomo.
Yet the Mamdani-loving media coverage is not taking into account one serious problem for the current Golden Boy. Which is to say, as one socialist office-holder after another has discovered, socialism as an actual governing force doesn’t work well, usually ending up with a mess on the hands of the socialist political practitioner of the moment.
But if John Lindsay’s media experience of going from mayoral Golden Boy to a media untouchable, an experience also lived by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani by the time he ran for president and later became a serious Trump supporter, says anything it is that when a potential New York Mayor swims in media adulation, as Mamdani is now doing, the media tide can - and will - turn and decidedly turn in the opposite direction.
And one suspects that once in practice, Mamdani’s socialism will not help him. Even in the New York media.
