Of all the democratic socialists who piled into a Manhattan church on Wednesday evening, none had the cachet of the man handed a microphone toward the meeting’s close.
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani offered some pleasantries — “Hello friends, Zohran, he/him, Queens D.S.A.” — before launching into his mission: torpedoing the candidacy of a left-leaning ally, Councilman Chi Ossé, who is attempting to unseat Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the top House Democrat.
The remarkable scene was both a reflection of the tricky political calculuses Mr. Mamdani confronts as he prepares to take office next year and the egalitarian nature of a group that served as the grass-roots organizing machine of his political success.
The problem with his logic here is he thinks he can secure mainstream Democratic support by going through Jeffries. That’s never going to work. You get mainstream support by going to the people. Because the mainstream already supports his ideas. Jeffries does not. He never will. He’s wasting his time. And he’s wasting his political momentum by trusting someone like Jeffries to be governed by anything but greed and graft.