Mayor Bill de Blasio, proclaims the New York Times, is “the best Democratic choice for New York” in Tuesday's primary election. This is hard to dispute, for de Blasio is effectively the only Democratic choice for New York—which reflects the cynicism that informs politics at every level in the city.
A stranger to New York might expect that de Blasio—who spent most of his first three-plus years in office underwater in the polls and under investigation in the federal and state criminal-justice systems—would have attracted a platoon of potential challengers. Not so. He assiduously feathered special-interest nests from the outset, and the beneficiaries—unions and real-estate interests, in particular—gratefully tamped down budding insurgencies. So the mayor goes into the primary facing what passes for a happy warrior these days, gadfly former city councilman Sal Albanese of Brooklyn—an energetic chronicler of de Blasio's shortcomings—and three largely unknown contenders.
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