NYC: Vote for the Creep. It's Important.

Eric Adams, the embattled current mayor of New York City, has ended his reelection bid in an effort to make it easier to defeat anti-Semitic socialist Zohran Mamdani.

Not surprisingly, the conservative New York Post had little to offer other than opposition and a limp appeal to that city's apathetic electorate to get off their couches to vote.

This is no surprise, since, even before the conservative movement traded in what little sense it had for a leash held by Donald Trump, it was always a collection of disparate elements united by opposition to the left, rather than any positive agenda, let alone a pro-freedom one.

This problem is, of course, on top of the fact that New York City strikes me as a place where appeals to preserve capitalism or even to be tough on crime risk alienating a leftist electorate that will reflexively smear such appeals with ridiculous leftist caricatures.

And all that is on top of the fact that the strongest opponent, Andrew Cuomo, left office as governor of New York in disgrace due to allegations of sexual harassment.

What to do?

Image by Infrogmation of New Orleans, via Wikipedia, license.

Appeal to the tiny and vanishing bit of common ground still shared by voters just to either side of center: Basic human decency. Mamdani is well-known to be sympathetic to Hamas. For example, he just recently hemmed and hawed his way around condemning the genocidal butchers of October 7, 2023.

Cuomo, while nevertheless a terrible choice in any other election, deserves to win in this context in light of his past support for Israel. He -- or at least Mamdani's opponents -- should lean into this. Hard.

And Mamdani's opponents can simultaneously help him while also acknowledging their champion's flaws -- by borrowing from a similar campaign, the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial race, which pitted the corrupt and unpopular three-term Edwin Edwards against David Duke, who, among other things, had once been a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

The extremely negative runoff was notable for David Duke's own party repudiating him and a plethora of unofficial bumper stickers that humorously lamented the choice while offering the only decent solution:

Humorous unofficial bumper stickers were created in support of Edwards over Duke, despite Edwards' negative reputation. One bumper sticker read "Vote for the Lizard, not the Wizard", while another read "Vote For The Crook: It's Important."

Might I suggest one for New York: "Vote for the Creep. It's Important." I'm sure others more clever than I can outdo this.

-- CAV