Eric, Curtis and New York: Notes on the first mayoral debate

The first general election debate underscored our conviction that Eric Adams is the best choice to be New York’s next mayor. Demonstrating solid judgment, he was sober and specific about the challenges the city faces, while Curtis Sliwa was colorful but, more often than not, wrong.

Adams backed Mayor de Blasio’s bold COVID vaccine mandate for city workers, which will save lives; Sliwa called it “a horror.” Adams reiterated the obvious need, after FDA approval, to mandate vaccines for schoolchildren, adding protection against a terrible present-day scourge to immunizations already required for polio, tetanus, measles, Hepatitis B and more; Sliwa incoherently naysayed.

Adams was clear and direct in answering how, as mayor, he would move government to protect people from future catastrophic floods. And he was right about the need to close Rikers — contra Sliwa, who panders by calling for hiring thousands of additional correction officers despite the fact that city jails already have the nation’s richest staff-to-inmate ratios.

Adams reiterated his support for congestion pricing, the best hope to tame choked streets and provide a reliable stream of funding for mass transit. Sliwa, playing to the cheap seats, ridiculously railed against it as an idea of, by and for of the elites.

That said, we have, as they say in the theater, a couple of notes for Eric. His answer on rescuing underwater taxi medallion owner-drivers made no sense. Dodging an answer on whether the city’s $65 million rescue plan is sufficient, he shifted gears to “allow(ing) them to go on the same platform as the Uber drivers are going on right now.”

He was wrong and Sliwa right about removing the Thomas Jefferson statue from City Hall because he owned slaves; while some renamings are justified, the last thing we need is a series of silly cultural skirmishes about new names for Washington Square Park, Madison Ave., Stuyvesant Town and so on. But those are nits. Adams had our confidence before, and Wednesday night, he reinforced it.