The political tragedy of Eric Adams
Barring a zombie apocalypse in the next 24 hours, 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani will be elected the next mayor of New York City.
But before Mamdani becomes Gotham's 111th mayor, a few words are owed to the 110th: Mayor Eric Adams.
I have known Adams for more than two decades. People cheered him when we walked the streets of New York in the 1990s. At the time, he held no political office, but he was a big city folk hero. I was with him on assignment from Playboy magazine to write a piece about the tension between Blacks and mostly white police. Adams was a Black policeman who knew both sides of the problem.
Cops had beaten Eric Adams when he was a teen. But the boy went on to become an officer and to be one of the few Black policemen to rise in the ranks of that white police force. He did not just beat the odds to become a top policeman, but he also used his rank to speak out and create a group of activist Black cops.
He became a hero by taking the risk to improve race relations, both inside the police department and between Black and other non-white people on the one side, and on the other cops who felt crime data justified them arbitrarily grabbing racial minorities for stops and frisks.
To my surprise, the daring, some might say combative, young policeman successfully went into politics and became New York's second black mayor.
Unlike the first Black mayor, David Dinkins, who had lost his 1993 reelection bid, Adams looked to be on his way to a second term and even higher office. In a city known for corporate skyscrapers and displays of wealth, Adams promised to speak for socially conservative, churchgoing, working-class people far from midtown.
His “I am You,” campaign pledge to people who feel pushed aside in the big city created a powerful populist coalition across the city’s racial lines and stirred national attention. Polls showed close to half of New York Republicans had high hopes for the Black mayor.
“Look at me and you’re seeing the future of the Democratic Party,” he said after being elected mayor in 2021. “If the Democratic Party fails to recognize what we did here in New York, they’re going to have a problem in the midterm elections and they’re going to have a problem in the presidential election.”
Back then, conservatives and liberals predicted Adams was on his way to becoming the next big thing in Democratic politics. The Wall Street Journal even suggested he and Joe Manchin — the moderate Democratic former senator and governor from West Virginia — might form a formidable presidential ticket.
That was less than four years ago. But as Yankees great Yogi Berra is rumored to have said, “The future ain’t what it used to be.”
I now share what Rev. Al Sharpton recently described to The New York Times as a “feeling of sadness” at Adams’ failure and also the historic opportunity lost to Black American politics.
The potential for the rise of the next Barack Obama — a new generational Black star on the national political stage, was buried by Adams’s own hand.
His political opponents did not defeat him. Racial bias had nothing to do with his downfall. He did it to himself. First came his choice to surround himself with people who saw no wrong in corruption. One even offered a possible bribe to a reporter in a bag of potato chips.
And there were federal charges of rank corruption. It involved airplane seat upgrades and hotel rooms in exchange for giving the Turkish government fast approval for a new building. There were also charges of funneling illegal campaign donations — including some from Turkey — to unlock $10 million in public matching funds for his 2021 campaign.
It seemed small-time grubby to some of my New York friends. But as the old saying goes, with public corruption, there is rarely a case of “beginner’s bad luck.”
Then came Adams’ self-abasing pleas to President Trump to help get him out of trouble.
After Adams met with Trump, the case was soon dismissed. Career prosecutors resigned to protest political interference in the case. The dismissal was “without prejudice,” leaving the threat of reinstatement hanging over Adams’s head for the last year, ready to drop if he displeased Trump or stepped out of line on immigration enforcement actions.
That has led to Adams ending up as a political tragedy.
By late last year, polls found working-class voters, including Blacks, older New Yorkers, and the non-college educated had lost their connection with the mayor. As the Times wrote, most of the coalition that put him in office now “thought he had done something illegal, and those who thought he had not committed a crime overwhelming said he had done something unethical.”
The Adams scandal hits close to home for me. I grew up in Brooklyn and identified with the scrappy kid from Queens who tried to change the system from within rather than rage against it from the outside. But power is a corrosive force. Black politicians are not immune to its temptations any more than white politicians.
Sadly, the old adage still holds. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book “New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.”