In last week’s mayoral debate between Zohran Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, the big loser was the voting public, with too many interruptions by the moderators and too little time for answers and insufficient time for follow up or development of ideas.
There will be another chance on Wednesday evening, we hope it will be better.
One problem was that Sliwa was there at all. While the moderators correctly tried to overlook him, so much so that he complained, that was the right approach, as he should not have been on the NBC TV stage. The reason is simple: Sliwa is not going to win. He’s polling at less than half of what he won four years ago, when he was blown out by a margin of more than 2-1. He is aiming to be the Harold Stassen of New York City?
Yes, Sliwa’s on the ballot, but so are a bunch of fringe candidates who also aren’t going to win. Either Mamdani or Cuomo will be elected the next mayor two weeks from tomorrow. The debates should be limited to those two contenders and exclude the distractions, like Sliwa.
Another problem was that at times it seemed that the four questionnaires on the panel were more interested in their own schedule than what the candidates had to say, which produced a two-hour run of sound bites and attack lines. Every time a conversation threatened to get interesting, one of the moderators would interject, “we’ve got to move on.”
Again and again, one potential mayor or another was cut short or told to hurry up or only allotted a ridiculously short amount of time to speak on something. It didn’t get quite as bad as “discuss your plans for the city’s economy: You have 15 seconds,” but that was the sense.
In fact, we don’t have to move on. Let the candidates speak and engage with each other. It is called a debate. Every topic doesn’t have to be covered. And silly queries like breakfast orders at a bodega or whether to attend the Mets World Series Game 7 or Knicks NBA Finals Game 7 impossibly occurring at the same time are a waste of the precious moments that the moderators are trying to force the candidates to adhere to.
Presidential debates with a single moderator worked best, allowing the candidates to expound on their ideas and plan and defend those positions from the rival, with the moderator only being as a gentle guide. If a candidate pretends to be a senator conducting a filibuster, maybe then interrupt, but otherwise let them debate. Mamdani and Cuomo have a great many differences, let’s hear them out.
While it was treated as a throwaway, this question near the end could have been illuminating: “You have all said that you want to be mayor for all New Yorkers, so will you march in all the parades that mayors have traditionally marched in, or are there any that you would boycott?”
Cuomo and Sliwa both said that they would march in all the big parades as all mayors have, but Mamdani said: “There are many parades that I would not be attending because I’d focusing on the work of leading this city.” Yes, but would a Mayor Mamdani march in or boycott the Israel Day Parade on Fifth Ave., held every May, the city’s main Jewish parade?
