Will the Next David Dinkins Please Stand Up?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/nyregion/will-the-next-david-dinkins-please-stand-up.html

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Among New Yorkers in the brownstone-occupying territories, which is to say in many of the places that elected him in the first place, it is common to encounter a sense of bewildered frustration at the notion that Mayor Bill de Blasio faces almost no opposition in his race for a second term. How is this possible when rates of homelessness have risen, when towers are going up in communities that don’t want them, when so many seem to have so little enthusiasm for him on a personal level?

In the quarters where the mayor is disliked, he is disliked fiercely, for an imperiousness and a preachiness that seems yoked to hypocrisy. The latter, in particular, has animated the recent reaction to his insistence on traveling by S.U.V., several times a week, to a gym 11 miles from Gracie Mansion, while asking his constituents to make greater sacrifices for the betterment of the planet. One candidate who is opposing the mayor in the Democratic primary, Sal Albanese, a former city councilman, showed up outside the mayor’s gym with a MetroCard on Wednesday, but evidently missed Mr. de Blasio.

Beating an incumbent is rarely a simple matter, especially in municipal races where labor allegiances are unlikely to shift. Beyond the support Mr. de Blasio has received from the unions, he has maintained the loyalty of black voters, ever since his campaign four years ago introduced his family, which is biracial, to the world. There has, in fact, been a longstanding disparity in the mayor’s approval ratings; a Quinnipiac University poll conducted last month indicated just how wide the gulf is, with only 39 percent of white voters saying they had a favorable opinion of the mayor, but 80 percent of black voters suggesting they did.

Ask political hands in the city why no significant challenger has emerged in this mayoral race, and they will tell you that in the absence of a strong African-American contender, Mr. de Blasio’s victory is inevitable. Some Democrats who would like to see a changing of the order have hoped Hakeem Jeffries, who represents the Eighth Congressional District in Brooklyn and Queens, would enter the contest. A former corporate lawyer with degrees from Georgetown and New York University, who grew up in Crown Heights, he is regarded as a singular individual who could successfully build a coalition between the affluent white business class, on whose money any bid would quite likely be dependent, and minorities. Those close to the congressman have long said he has no interest in running, and at any rate he is now becoming a leader of the Democratic Party nationally.

But the fact that his name keeps surfacing in these conversations is indicative of a much broader problem: the failure of the political culture to produce and groom a wider network of black talent, male or female. David N. Dinkins will be celebrating his 90th birthday in a few weeks; there has not been a black mayor in New York City before or since he held the office in the 1990s. For the past six years, black mayors have presided over Denver and Kansas City, Mo. Since 1974, there has been only one white mayor in Atlanta, which, like other Southern cities, has continued to nourish generations of leaders who came of age in the wake of the power base established by the civil rights movement.

In some sense New York has regressed. For decades since the 1960s, the Harlem Clubhouse reigned as the city’s incubator of black political leadership, producing Percy Sutton and Representative Charles B. Rangel, who served in Congress from 1971 until last year, as well as Mayor Dinkins. The power of that club was broken by Mayors Rudolph W. Giuliani and Michael R. Bloomberg, and fell apart several years ago amid ethics charges levied against Mr. Rangel, and scandals surrounding former Gov. David A. Paterson. The Rev. Floyd H. Flake, who might have become mayor, left Congress in 1997 to work at his church, then to run a university.

The former generation did not adequately tend to the subsequent one, the argument goes, and did not groom a new generation. There was no heir apparent for Mr. Rangel’s seat, for example. In Queens and Harlem and Brooklyn you’ll hear this strain of complaint from both activists and people who are running. “There is a limited bench of African-American potential candidates who could win citywide right now,” Juanita Scarlett, a political consultant who has worked on many campaigns, told me. “We are always looking to recruit new talent.”

Others see the loss of Ken Thompson, the visionary Brooklyn district attorney who died last year at age 50, as a setback in the evolution of a new black political leadership. This does not mean that the next four years couldn’t see an active flourishing and regrouping. “Someone like Bill Lynch,” the black political strategist credited with Mr. Dinkins’s political ascent, “was great at building coalitions across the city,” Dennis M. Walcott, the former schools chancellor and deputy mayor, said. The city needs another.