MIRROR-IMAGE MAYORS: “Like John Lindsay, Bill de Blasio conjured up crises to win the mayor’s office—and, like Lindsay, he may soon face the real thing,” Fred Siegel writes at City Journal:

Both Lindsay and de Blasio promised to carry on the work of presidents who massively overreached. Fifty years after Lindsay, de Blasio still proposes social programs as an alternative to work—but with an important difference. In 1965, Great Society liberals held out the hope of racial inclusion. Today’s liberals offer make-work jobs designed to produce Democratic Party majorities. The underlying problem with both mayors is that they proposed, as [William F. Buckley, who ran against Lindsay in 1965] warned, to do the impossible when they promised to straighten the “crooked timber of humanity.” But government, let alone local government, can do no such thing. As New Yorkers who are angered by de Blasio’s ideological tours in Iowa understand, mayors must stick to the prosaic problems—union contracts, road repairs, and taxation. When a mayor neglects these responsibilities, he ends up as Lindsay did— an exile in his own city.

Read the whole thing.