What Eric Adams understands — and Biden doesn’t

What Eric Adams understands — and Biden doesn’t
New York mayor Eric Adams has described himself as the “Biden of Brooklyn.” But when Biden travels to the Big Apple today to meet Adams, it is the president who needs the mayor, not the mayor who needs the president.

With violent crime surging in New York and other American cities, Adams secured the mayoralty with a tough-on-crime message. Since coming into office, he has doubled down on that approach. To the chagrin of the city’s progressive activists, he has vowed to reintroduce a plain-clothes anti-gun crime unit disbanded…

What Eric Adams understands — and Biden doesn’t

New York mayor Eric Adams has described himself as the “Biden of Brooklyn.” But when Biden travels to the Big Apple today to meet Adams, it is the president who needs the mayor, not the mayor who needs the president.

With violent crime surging in New York and other American cities, Adams secured the mayoralty with a tough-on-crime message. Since coming into office, he has doubled down on that approach. To the chagrin of the city’s progressive activists, he has vowed to reintroduce a plain-clothes anti-gun crime unit disbanded by Bill de Blasio in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. A former cop himself, Adams recently delivered the eulogy at the funeral for Jason Rivera, one of two NYPD officers shot and killed last month. “The tragic death of your brother in blue uniform is a stark reminder of what is on the line every day,” an emotional Adams told mourners at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Outside, thousands of uniformed officers gave Rivera a hero’s farewell.

Those striking scenes felt a long way from the milieu in which Biden operates today. Voters see in Biden a president beholden to the left and unable or unwilling to take anything like as tough a line on crime as Adams. They see a president who, as a candidate, leant into 2020 as a moment for a reckoning on criminal justice, recanted his role in the passage of a crime bill in the 1990s and hugged the BLM movement as closely as he plausibly could. His defenders will doubtless point to a speech Biden last summer on gun crime prevention. But Biden focused much of that speech on the case for stricter gun control laws, rather than addressing the murders committed with weapons illegally acquired and owned under existing laws. The president’s spokespeople might also point to Biden’s recent calls for greater police funding, and note that there are limits to the role of the federal government in these matters.

If these sorts of claims feel defensive and hesitant, that’s because they are. They reveal a political culture in which to profess concern about crime is to do something vaguely indecent, or “problematic.” Hearing the White House talk about public safety, or watching Jen Psaki snicker at Fox News for worrying about the issue, you might be left feeling that this administration sees rising crime rates as a political inconvenience, not a burning injustice that requires urgent attention.

Sometimes politics is about the nitty-gritty of policy, making sure that you have a well-worked plan to address voters’ concerns. But gestures matters too. This is something that, in other contexts — Covid, for instance — an old hand like Biden clearly understands. But a president often talked up as uniquely well-suited to the role of Consoler-in-Chief hasn’t exactly be forthcoming with public displays of emotion when it comes to the victims of spiraling violent crime. Here, the contrast with Adams is striking. New York’s mayor talks about violent crime in his city with the passion, urgency and anger that the issue deserves. That, if nothing else, is what the Biden of Brooklyn can teach the man himself.

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US takes out ISIS leader

Joe Biden this morning announced the leader of ISIS has died in a US Special Operations raid in northwest Syria.

“Thanks to the skill and bravery of our armed forces, we have taken off the battlefield Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi — the leader of ISIS,” Mr. Biden said in a statement. “All Americans have returned safely from the operation.”

According to Syrian first responders, thirteen people died during the raid.

Meet the Washington Commanders

My sports-allergic colleague Cockburn has some fun with the new name for the football team formally known as the Washington Redskins. “At first blush, the Commanders isn’t such a bad choice,” he writes. “The franchise, after all, is based in the very seat of our military-industrial complex.” But, as he points out, the name games are the least of the team’s problems: there’s the odious owner, the crumbling stadium, oh, and the decidedly patchy on-field performance.

Graham’s dubious dump run

As I noted earlier this week, Lindsey Graham has been a vocal cheerleader for Supreme Court contender and South Carolina judge Michelle Childs.

The latest effort in Graham’s pro-Childs push is an interview with Politico’s Burgess Everett, in which the South Carolina Republican senator deployed an anecdote about a trip to the dump to make his case. “Three guys in pick-up trucks came up to me and said she ‘seems like a nice lady. I’m tired of this Harvard-Yale stuff.’ The great equalizer is the garbage dump because everybody’s got to throw out garbage,” said Graham. “I was just struck by what they thought.”

Count me skeptical about the veracity of this tale. The educational background of a Supreme Court contender hasn’t been on the lips of everyone around me on my dump runs. And it feels like a suspiciously neat little anecdote, but I’m happy to be proven wrong. Are you one of the guys in a pick-up truck? Are you Lindsey Graham? If so, get in touch.

Murky goings on at the South Carolina dump aside, Everett writes that Graham’s cooperative Supreme Court mood has “raised the specter that Graham, who once lavished praise on Biden ‘as good a man as God ever created,’ may be making a political shift back to the deal-cutter who worked on immigration reform and defused a brutal Bush-era battle over judges. At a minimum, Graham still seems to believe in deference to presidents on nominations, despite his fury at how Democrats handled the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh and his swing from vociferous Trump critic to ardent defender.