Who’s stopping him anyway?

BILL DE BLASIO has been mayor of New York City for just two weeks, and some folks are already getting impatient.

I'm not referring to de Blasio supporters, most of whom are employing the time-honored--but not necessarily time-proven--strategy of "let's give him a chance."

For example, consider the mild response to de Blasio naming Bill Bratton as his police chief. Bratton held the same job in the racist administration of Rudolph Giuliani, where he popularized the "broken windows" theory that called for aggressive policing in poor Black and Brown neighborhoods. "Broken windows" eventually led to the "stop-and-frisk," the policy of racially biased warrantless interrogation that became a lighting rod for discontent with outgoing Mayor Michael Bloomberg and helped de Blasio win last year's election.

Bratton's appointment would seem to be a slap in the face to all those who voted for de Blasio based on his opposition to stop-and-frisk. Certainly that's the feeling of the activists--many of them relatives of people who have been killed or beaten by the NYPD--who formed New Yorkers Against Bratton to organize protests across the city.

But the larger organizations in the movement have had a more muted response, issuing a set of recommendations to de Blasio and Bratton, and then adopting a wait-and-see approach.

NO, THE true stirrings of impatience with de Blasio are coming from the city's ruling class, which is not accustomed to waiting and seeing about anything. These folks are annoyed that the new mayor isn't moving fast enough to disappoint his base.

For them, de Blasio's first offense was his New Year's Day inauguration, where some speakers denounced the inequality of the Bloomberg era. Ramya Ramana, the city's Youth Poet Laureate, wrote a poem for the occasion that called for "no more brownstones versus brown skins playing tug of war."

Republicans were predictably upset. Giuliani called the speeches "vicious" and "mean-spirited," which those of us who remember Rudy as mayor will be surprised to learn was not meant as a compliment. But well-heeled liberals were also put out. The New York Times editorial board declared the inauguration speakers' anger against racism and poverty to be "graceless" and "tacky."

Tsk tsk, Mr. de Blasio. An inauguration is hardly the proper setting for your constituents to express themselves. Rather, it's a day for members of the political class to demonstrate that they have more in common with each other than with those who elected them.

This venerable tradition dates back to 1800, when Thomas Jefferson called for unity between the two parties of the day by declaring, "We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists." Of course, at that time, the vast majority of people--women, slaves, anyone without property--were barred from voting. In fact, only about 1 percent of the population voted in the 1800 election, which really ought to take away some of that Founding Fathers' mystique. But even as the electorate has greatly expanded in the past two centuries, the national tradition of the 1 Percent calling for unity after a bitter election lives on.

A week after his inauguration, de Blasio further alarmed elites by helping his ally Melissa Mark-Viverito to win the race to become Speaker of the City Council. In addition to being the first Latina to hold the position, Mark-Viverito is a former organizer with the health care union 1199SEIU. The prospect of her working alongside de Blasio reportedly has bankers and real estate developers worried about "an unchecked liberal alliance leading City Hall."

Technically speaking, sweeping liberal victories in mayoral and city council elections are supposed to result in liberals leading both of those branches of government. Nevertheless, after 20 years of contentment under autocratic Republican mayors, Manhattan power brokers are suddenly dusting off their copies of The Federalist Papers to extoll the virtues of checks and balances.

THE IRONY of all this hand-wringing is that it doesn't seem like the elites have much to fear in a de Blasio administration. It's true that the mayor is talking about taxing the rich and reducing inequality, and that his power might be unchecked by the City Council. But in true Democrat fashion, de Blasio seems determined to find a way to check himself, even if he has to travel a couple of hours north to Albany to do it.

De Blasio's main policy proposal is to make pre-Kindergarten available to every child in the city, and to pay for it by raising incomes taxes on those making over half a million dollars a year. It's a nice idea--except that, according to the rules of the medieval fiefdom known as New York state, cities cannot change their own income tax rates without approval from Albany, where there is little enthusiasm for de Blasio's idea.

In fact, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants to slash corporate and estate taxes and create zones across the state where businesses don't have to pay any type of taxes for 10 years.

This seems insane given that cities have no money and corporations have lots of it. Howie Hawkins of the Green Party says the plan "will push dozens of local governments toward insolvency and anti-democratic state takeovers by Financial and Educational Control Boards, like Detroit and Philly."

Then again, what do Howie and I know? We're not businessmen. Cuomo, on the other hand, must know what he's doing because he's being advised by John Mack, the CEO of Morgan Stanley until the company went bankrupt and had to be bailed...Yup, we're screwed.

But let's get back to de Blasio. I hope he somehow convinces Cuomo to raises taxes on the rich, but am I the only one who finds it a little silly that his main campaign pledge is something he has no power to implement? He's acting like the kids who used to declare that if we voted for them for class president, they would get all the teachers to stop giving out homework.

It's not as if de Blasio doesn't have the power to tax the rich himself. He can levy small taxes on Wall Street and real estate transactions that economist Dean Baker estimates could raises billions of dollars annually without impacting any non-speculative business activities.

Instead, the mayor is travelling to Albany to butt heads with the governor, who has offered to find money to fund pre-K (probably by cutting other programs) without raising taxes. De Blasio has rightly rejected this compromise because it would not ensure permanent funding for pre-K. But he and his supporters are mute on the ways he can find the funding himself. Before he was mayor, de Blasio held a position called Public Advocate, which is essentially a media platform with little actual power. Does someone need to explain to him that in his new job, he can actually do stuff?

De Blasio knows what he's doing, of course. He's just trying to negotiate the dilemma that Democrats face when have no conservative opposition to blame for their lack of action.

De Blasio was elected mayor of New York City on a promise to reduce inequality, but you can't reduce inequality without taking on the 1 Percent, which he is loathe to do. If de Blasio can't blame two-party gridlock, maybe he and Cuomo can create one-party gridlock. Similarly, when Obama became president in 2008 and his party had control of both sides of Congress, they had to invent an intraparty war with the conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats to justify why they couldn't pass a better health care bill (or anything else).

As I've written elsewhere, the Democratic Party is like the guy who looks for someone to hold him back from a fight he wants absolutely no part of.

Activists in the movements for racial and economic justice need to push de Blasio to meet our demands now. If the 1 Percent isn't going to give him a chance, then neither should we. Patience isn't always a virtue.