Why would a country boy from in a state far away have anything meaningful to say about a mayor of one of the largest, most important cities in the world, New York City? Of course, I could also ask: why not? I could point out that I’ll likely visit there within a couple months, and I have an interest in knowing if I’ll be safe. That city and presumably, Mayor Eric Adams, has a highly vested interest in ‘tourism’. That makes me and my interest representative of millions of others contemplating the same question. They’re fair game for my impressions, even from afar. Beyond that, New York City is representative of where the nation goes, certainly not from a position of most moderate, but rather unfortunately, as the most flagrantly progressive city on the east coast. There are a lot of lost souls in New York City. The city is under new reigns with Mayor Adams. Adams started out a scant month and a half ago with two huge major advantages. 1) He is not Bill de Blasio, the feckless ruinous prior mayor, a Nero that fiddled while his city burned at his own hand. 2.) He is better than numerous other office seekers others that promised to take NYC even lower than de Blasio if elected. An honorable mention goes to Curtis Sliwa, the Republican in this election cycle with all the charm of Pepe le Pew. With that, Adams could just show up each day, do nothing and it would have been better than the alternatives. But the reality isn’t that simple. If there’s real competition in performance, (there is), then he doesn’t just have to measure up to manifest failure. New York City was healed and prospered under Rudolf Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, both functioning as Republicans. I care not a wit for the blah blah blah of the equity, queer, and socialist crowd that would find delight in burning down the whole damn city than credit any Republican for any success. Real people measure life by the cost of their food, the safety of their commute to work, and whether they can take their children out to play in the tiny chain link gated parks all around the city. Mayor Adams could have taken the city up 10 notches on day-one simply by emulating the Giuliani and Bloomberg formulas. No one would fault him once the outcomes fell short due to the hyper-woke, corrupt, and Covid obsessed operatives in his city and in Albany. If the present short-term outcome fell somewhere in the middle, the city would be so much further than it is even now. Yes, things are a little better, but my early conclusion is that Adams is not the real deal that everyone hoped for. Not just for his missed opportunities which I just generalized, but for his efforts already wasted in head scratching errors. He made his brother his top deputy (nepotism anyone!?) and had to promptly demote him. He sat for tutelage from the thoroughly disgraced Andrew Cuomo (even if there were anything to gain from it, what a lapse of judgement for the bad optics!). We learned that he called whites ‘crackers’ in the past – (for which I could care less; however, I doubt my/our courtesy of forbearance here is reciprocated). Taking masks off of school children would have been an instant heroic gesture of a great leader, instead, he confirms that he’s a stooge of the teacher’s unions who themselves are following communistic marching orders from some higher ups. When pressed by critics on his stance with the wokesters in Albany, he lashed out and called his critics racist, stupidly uttering such a predictable cop-out with no context whatsoever. In a decisive move just this week, he declared that the subways should be cleared of the homeless and druggies and that the subway would henceforth be used only for commuting. Ra Ra! But why did it take him six weeks to do this, after multiple people have been killed by vagrants and tens of thousands of other harassed, just since he took office? He could have done that on day one – after all, he witnessed a beatdown right on a train platform on the first day of his mayorship. What the hell was he waiting for? This is just a sample list. Maybe someone will throw their drink in his face, and he’ll be forced to man up and stop he half measures. It’s not like he doesn’t have a blueprint to follow. He’s not a timid fellow. I’m just not sure if he’s smart. He gives the impression that he’s listening to some devil on his shoulder contradicting the rather obvious and therefore he hesitates. No one will judge him for the impediments that others put before him, but he deserves to be judged for what he doesn’t even attempt.