@AnitaSarsleezian You're a former New Yorker. What's your take on all this?
Lifelong born and bred New Yorker up until two years ago. And I'm old enough to remember the bad old days. I've been through Koch and Dinkins.
Honestly the whole thing is a clusterfuck. Curtis is what the city really needs to be honest. The city goes in cycles. Koch and especially Dinkins ran the city into the ground until Giuliani fixed it. And he wasn't nice about it - he was a hardass but that's what this city needs to keep it straight. Bloomberg was an utter disaster - all he really gave a shit about was making his friends rich and so the most construction happened under his watch - tons of skyscrapers went up. He really didn't do much for the city other than build tons of shit to make money off of.
Then of course we got DeBlasio which was an utter disaster.
We've had republican governors before like Pataki but he didn't do much, either. No politician ever does good for NYC - all they see NYC for is some bloated whore they can rape repeatedly through corruption and money laundering. They all wanna be mayor so they can raid the coffers. Has anyone bothered to find the $800 million DeBlasio's beastly looking wife stole yet?
Curtis actually does love the city and he's been around forever. His guardian angels were a godsend back when it was really bad here. I used to feel weight off my shoulders when you'd see a pair of the red berets and red jackets on the train. I mean, if you didn't live here during that period you wouldn't get it but NYC was every bit as bad as Detroit. You could park your car in downtown Manhattan, like the village, and actually get mugged between walking from your car to 200 feet to a storefront. Koch was a nightmare and had the city stretched to the limit. There weren't enough cops. Curtis wasn't an interloper or anything - his guardian angels were something that were sorely needed and in fact in some areas the cops would work with them.
Curtis as been associated with NYC every bit as long as Trump has. I remember in the 90s John Gotti Jr even tried to have him killed in a botched hit in a taxi cab where Curtis actually broke the window and jumped from the moving cab while they were trying to kill him. The man has been a thorn in the side of every corrupt motherfucker here for as long as I've been alive.
Curtis does have a point when he said that why should a republican step aside so that a democrat can win. Especially a democrat who couldn't even win his own primary? Curtis would be like another Giuliani. Yeah the guy can be cheesy sometimes but that's part of the weird NYC charm.
I think the whole situation is fucked badly. Curtis was right also when he said that if he pulls out his voters won't vote for Cuomo. Cuomo is as corrupt as they come and I have no hope that he'd do anything positive for the city. I mean, if you look at it, we're literally at the point that democrats were with hillary - "Vote for Hillary. Why? Because she's not Trump". I mean, the right is literally doing, "Vote for the corrupt democrat. Why? Because he's not Mandami". Cuomo has no redeeming qualities. Hell, back in the 80s when my mother was a big real estate agent, she's got tons of stories about how when Cuomo was AG in NY how no matter what real estate deal she was doing, he had his fucking hand out and if she didn't kick back to him, not a single permit would get approved. She told me she doesn't even wanna think about how many tens of thousands she had to kick back to him just get permits that she should have been approved for. He had a stranglehold on all the bureaucratic paperwork and no one got anything without giving him a piece. My mother was one person - you think it was just her? Hell, no. That guy had every person involved in construction or real estate in the city kicking back to him or nothing moved forward. He's got money that no one knows about.
The only ray of sunshine in all this is that this whole Mandami thing has been an utter disaster for Hochul and somehow Stefanik has managed to squeeze within 4 points of her and there's a good chance now that she can get in as governor. If Mandami wins and she gets in as Governor, that will seriously neuter a lot of the damage Mandami can do to NYC.
Seriously, Curtis is what the city needs - not Cuomo. But in the end it's kinda moot after Poso showed that the majority of foreign born are voting for Mandami and dems managed to import enough shitskins that you can't overcome it. We really might be fucked this time.
