Bill de Blasio won the New York mayor's race on Tuesday night, and, on Wednesday, he started accepting job applications and citizens' ideas for his administration at a website for the transition. It is a nice gesture, striking the notes of diversity and openness that he hit throughout the campaign.
Now comes a compressed few weeks before the inauguration, where Mr. de Blasio has to confront the challenge of what it means to build a city where "we all rise together," a memorable phrase from his victory speech.
Mr. de Blasio is an astute campaigner, with thoughtful ideas and a good ear, and a habit of inclusivity. (How vastly different from the colossal self-regard of New Jersey's re-elected governor, Chris Christie, whose own speech was an epic song of himself.) Mr. de Blasio's soaring oratory about battling inequality and melding two cities into one has set expectations dauntingly high. He is a politician who has yet to prove himself as a manager, and it will be a steep learning curve.
The critics are ready for Mr. de Blasio to fail, to shrink in the shadow of a mostly successful three-term mayor, Michael Bloomberg. He will have to move quickly to bring in excellent advisers, commissioners and department managers to make sure his administration is effective and innovative — a high bar. We were encouraged by his postelection news conference, where he stressed the importance of building a diverse team that understands the "practicalities of government," and by his choice of two experienced hands to lead his transition: Jennifer Jones Austin and Carl Weisbrod, who have deep knowledge of state and city government in New York.
Mr. de Blasio has a delicate balance to strike: keeping the city's vast machinery running smoothly while changing its direction. He will be picking a schools chancellor to upend some of Mr. Bloomberg's education policies, a police commissioner to rewrite the rules on the aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics, and people to wrangle a budget with a $2 billion gap and not many easy ways to fill it.
It was Mr. de Blasio's opportunity to run at a time when no apparent full-blown crisis grabbed the headlines. Despite Joseph Lhota's unseemly attempts to foment last-minute voter panic about crime, this was not one of those elections where the Democratic city turns to a take-charge manager or technocrat to handle an emergency. Yet Mr. de Blasio argues that voters were turning to him at a dire time — not as dramatic as during 9/11 or a hurricane, but momentous all the same. He will soon hear the criticism of those who begin to wonder why — after so many heart-stirring promises — inequality isn't fixed yet. And, like all executives, he will face setbacks and disappointments and have to fight the impulse to get testy and exasperated when challenged by those who disagree.
In the zone where representative democracy meets executive leadership, Mr. Bloomberg stood in one particular spot, and by and large it worked. He gave the city many good things it didn't know it wanted, like smoking bans and pedestrian malls. But even in three terms, he left much undone, and he also gave many New Yorkers the impression that he didn't care to listen to them.
The mayor-elect promises a new approach in substance and style. Mr. Lhota said a de Blasio victory would mean we're doomed, but the voters wisely ignored him. Mr. de Blasio has always been clear about what he wants to do, including raising taxes in the unabashed pursuit of "progressive values." Voters validated his message by saying loudly: This is what — and who — we want.
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