While Zohran Mamdani has vile views and worse politics, his campaign has been a logistical triumph and his Democratic debate performance in May was startlingly impressive. There was every reason to expect his debate showdown last night with Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa would be another feather in his cap.
It wasn’t. Mamdani flopped. His answers were defensive. He seemed angry at being questioned at all. It seemed offensive to him that he would have to offer an explanation for having called for defunding the police and refusing to accept the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
He claimed he never said things he said or that he shouldn’t be accountable for words he wrote only five years ago. He did not seem like a young and happy warrior, more like a petulant graduate student.
But if Mamdani did badly, Andrew Cuomo did worse. And an enjoyable Curtis Sliwa buried Cuomo even deeper.
On May 15, 2022, the Pittsburgh Pirates were no-hit by the Cincinnati Reds and still won the game because of three straight walks and a fielder’s choice. That’s kind of what happened in the debate. Mamdani got no hits. But Cuomo gave up three walks, Sliwa made a fielder’s choice, and Mamdani’s march to the mayoralty was not halted.
For a man who’s run in multiple elections over the past 25 years, Cuomo was shockingly inarticulate and unable to sustain a single argument or a single answer. There were moments when Cuomo sounded more like Luca Brasi stumbling through his thanks to Don Corleone for that wedding invitation than he did his own famously silver-tongued father.
He wanted us to understand the legal claims against him for sexual harassment — the very cause of his resignation from his job as governor in 2022 — have gone away, but even to get that point you needed to get past innumerable “ums” and “ahs” that didn’t exactly inspire confidence in the merit of his narrative.
Here are some key moments from the first NYC Mayoral Debate
The only real life in the debate came from Curtis Sliwa, the populist New York crime-fighting hero of the 1980s, who was so spirited and lively it was like he was bringing CBGBs back. He was also easily the most substantive of the three candidates. He aimed his fire at both his rivals — on the ludicrous financial fantasies of Mamdani’s expensive and unworkable proposals and Cuomo’s policy failings in signing soft-on-crime legislation into law as governor.
Sliwa was the only one of the three to talk coherently about the crisis in the city’s schools and how they are being run not for the benefit of kids but bureaucrats. And he kept bringing up public safety, which Mamdani kept deliberately seeking to confuse with his “affordability” mantra — as though making buses free would make up for a city in which cops will be retiring in droves rather than serving under someone who has been a professional denigrator of and agitator against policing.
That said, Sliwa maybe should have had one fewer cups of coffee, so hepped-up was he and so intent on making sure he was not, like Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction,” ignored. He may have done himself a little bit of good with voters, but he’s still going to come in third, and it’s still the case that every vote he gets will be a vote Cuomo doesn’t get — thereby effectively serving as a firewall for Mamdani’s chances.
Bottom line: Mamdani didn’t do himself any favors last night. But Cuomo did him a favor by being so lousy, and Sliwa did him a favor by making Cuomo look even more lame.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
