How can Dems govern America when they can’t properly govern cities?

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As Vice President Kamala Harris fumbles her way through the final weeks of the 2024 presidential election campaign, Democratic mayors in big cities are offering the nation a snapshot of the party’s ability to govern, and it isn’t pretty.

From New York City to Chicago, Illinois, and Oakland, California, blatant corruption has taken hold of administrations charged with governing America’s largest cities. Chaotic and disastrous governance has made the people of these cities less prosperous and less safe.

The highest-profile disaster of a mayoral administration belongs to New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who is facing federal charges that he took bribes and other inappropriate gifts from the government of Turkey. The scandal has embroiled his entire inner circle, prompting several resignations, indictments, and retirements. While not every current or former New York public official who is in hot water is facing legal troubles for the same reasons, the overall picture is one of widespread corruption.

A New York City of corruption The list of those tied up in the bribery investigation is extensive: In addition to Adams, there is also his chief adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, who was served a subpoena; his former campaign fundraiser, Brianna Suggs, whose house was searched by the FBI and had her cellphones seized; Mohamed Bahi, a former Adams aide who has been charged with witness tampering; and Rana Abbasova, an aide fired from her job in City Hall but allegedly cooperating with investigators.

Nor is that the whole picture. The scandalous and corrupt governance of the city of New York goes deeper than Adams. In September, New York City Police Department Commissioner Edward Caban, leader of the largest police department in the nation, resigned, and his chief of staff, Raul Pintos, abruptly retired. This came amid a federal investigation that Caban and his brother James may have accepted bribes for favors to nightclubs. No charges have been filed.

Other investigations have entangled former NYPD Inspector Dwayne Montgomery, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges; former NYC Buildings Commissioner Eric Ulrich, who is charged with taking bribes; and several others whose homes have been searched and whose phones have been seized. One of those implicated is interim NYPD Commissioner Thomas Donlon.

True to stubborn form, Adams has doubled and tripled down on his innocence. He pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, refused to resign his post, and urged New Yorkers to withhold judgment. “I ask New Yorkers to wait to hear our defense,” he said.

The evidence against Adams is compelling, and his legal troubles have touched off a guessing game about who could challenge him in the Democratic primary next year. Several politicians are expressing interest in the job, including former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and current New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Amid the sea of corruption that has plagued him, arguably the only point in Adams’s favor is that he was the first and most vocal critic of the Biden administration’s open border policies, which flooded New York City with thousands of illegal immigrants and pushed the city’s infrastructure to the limit. Whether there is a connection between that criticism and his legal troubles will perhaps be revealed.

Bay Area bribery While Adams has already been in court on public corruption charges, Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao has avoided such a fate for the time being. But an FBI investigation into campaign corruption could soon find her in the same boat as her New York City counterpart.

The corruption story in Oakland reads like the plot of a West Coast edition of The Sopranos. The FBI raided Thao’s home in June, subpoenaed the city police department in July, and raided the homes of the Duong family, which has close ties to Thao and owns an Oakland waste management company. The investigation purportedly centers on laundering campaign contributions.

In the immediate term, Thao has other problems to deal with. On Nov. 5, voters in Oakland will decide whether to recall her from office along with District Attorney Pamela Price, who is facing a backlash from voters for her embrace of a soft-on-crime approach to her job. If Price is recalled, she will be the second Bay Area district attorney recalled in the past three years. In 2022, San Francisco ousted District Attorney Chesa Boudin for refusing to prosecute a large number of crimes.

Regardless of whether Thao and Price lose their jobs next month, the tale of Oakland is one of chaos and corruption all too familiar in Democratic-run cities.

Teaching Chicago a lesson But one mayor has, for now, managed to sow chaos and corruption without drawing the interest of the FBI. Brandon Johnson is mayor of Chicago because his predecessor, Lori Lightfoot, refused to shy away from a fight with the Chicago Teachers Union and played hardball when it refused to go back to work in January 2022.

Infuriated at Lightfoot’s refusal to back them, the union backed one of its own, Johnson, in the 2023 mayoral election. Lightfoot was soundly defeated in the first round of voting, and Johnson was elected mayor in a runoff election against centrist Paul Vallas, who ran a campaign focused on public safety.

The full picture of Johnson’s backroom dealings with his former union came into view as the school board, with which he had publicly feuded, resigned en masse. The resulting vacancies allowed Johnson to appoint a board of allies, who will likely back his efforts to fire Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez. Martinez refused to sign off on Johnson’s efforts to take out a loan to meet a budget shortfall.

The chaos on the school board has unfolded while the CTU is negotiating a new employment agreement with the city. Previous members of the board and Martinez refuse to bow to the union’s demands.

Johnson has turned the office into a conduit for union rewards. He is not serving the people of Chicago. By all accounts, the new school board will support the ouster of Martinez and will accede to the union’s contract demands. It may be legal, but it is corrupt nonetheless.

Big-city chaos on a national scale Criminal corruption plaguing Oakland and New York City may not be the type of government that Vice President Kamala Harris would bring if she is elected president of the United States next month, but chaotic governance and “legal” corruption in both those cities and in Chicago are probably a harbinger of what a Harris administration will look like.

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The Democratic Party is begging voters to deliver it control of the White House and Congress, yet in the cities that are the nation’s centers of culture and commerce, the party has accomplished nothing but chaos and corruption. At the state level, Democratic governors from New York to California are mired in low approval ratings, maintaining their grip on power only because the leftward lean of their respective states is so extreme that to the voters, the only thing worse than the status quo is a Republican.

If the Democratic Party wants to convince the people that it should be trusted with control of the federal government, it should model good governance in the big cities that it governs rather than turning them into case studies of corrupt misfeasance.

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