Deals with the devil happen all the time in politics, but now you can hear the details straight from the Prince of Darkness himself, as the dark lord lays out the roadmap for Bill de Blasio's big move from Gracie to the governor's mansion.
NY Post photo composite
From: Belial, Beelzebub, & Dinkins, Campaign Consultants
To: Bill de Blasio
Re: New York’s next governor!
First of all — and you don’t hear this nearly enough, Bill — nice work!
As campaign consultants and, more important, as dedicated servants of the Prince of Darkness, we have been trying to destroy New York City since our side lost control of the place back in the ’90s, and, for years, we had approximately squat to show for it. Until you. Rudy Giuliani, Mike Bloomberg — you’d think a guy with three diamond pinky rings for every ex-wife and a Salomon Brothers megalomaniac would be, in normal times, pretty much our guys. But, no. New York not only endured — it thrived! And then came you. Wonderful you. Infernal you. Doing to New York what that Other Guy did to Sodom and Gomorrah.
Plague, fire, blood in the streets, that weird blue paisley dinner jacket at the Met Gala? That was some messed-up stuff — and, coming from us, that is high praise. The Ninth Circle has taken notice, and the Son of Perdition himself took time away from those ongoing Netflix negotiations and asked our team to reach out to you.
Now that you’ve finally left the office of mayor, we know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: “My soul is a hideous empty black void and I have no real marketable skills, so I guess I’ll just run for governor!” That is not a bad plan. Versions of that have worked before. But, let’s face it — when it comes to energy and charisma, you’re no Dannel Malloy.
You gotta work with what you have, Bill.
Do your political prospects look pretty grim at the moment? Sure, they do. When choosing their next governor, New Yorkers currently prefer Andrew Cuomo three-to-one over you. To be perfectly blunt, they’d probably elect Chris Cuomo before they elected you, if the election were today.
You should borrow a play from the Cuomo book. Without some kind of trivial and salacious distraction, people are going to pay attention to your record in office. And that means you’re going to have a hard time doing to the state of New York what you did to the city. And we want that to happen. We need a win!
We represent the team that invented algebra, so we know when the numbers look bad. As of the middle of last week, New York City had 279 new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 daily. For comparison, the number in Lafayette County, Fla., way down there in Trump-DeSantis country, is 3. Even New Yorkers notice that kind of thing. And we have the most recent CompStat numbers here in front of us. This is a problem that literally has your name on it — yours and Dermot Shea’s. Here’s a tidbit: For the week of Christmas 2021, murders are up 37.5% year over year.
Now, normally, we’d say that’s our kind of Christmas gift, but we have been working for years to turn Christmas into a purely commercial exercise in crass consumerism. And all this chaos has been bad for business. Between the murder and mayhem and the plague, things are so bad out there that even the Apple Store is closed. Do you know what it takes to get Apple to say no to money? Because we have Steve Jobs right here if you want to ask him.
(Who do you think gave him the idea for the iPhone?)
It’s not that we don’t love mayhem and disease. That’s our core business. What we’re saying is, you may have overdone it. A third of the small businesses that were forcibly shut down during the pandemic are not coming back. And we rely on bodegas as much as the next guy. And, on top of that, the billionaires are fleeing your city as fast as they can. We need those guys. Most of them are clients.
The good news is: You’re an innovator, Bill. Fire and brimstone and locusts and all that stuff — that’s yesterday’s news. The hot new thing is extended social isolation, wanton crime, and a whole new generation of psychologically maladjusted adolescents — or, as we call them, our base. Nobody has done it like you. Catherine Pugh down in Baltimore? Amateur. Eric Garcetti in Los Angeles? Everybody still thinks he was a character on “The Wire.” There is no mayor in America with a record like yours.
And making a problem like that go away comes with a price.
This is the hard part of the pitch.
You know how we work. You may not like the idea of eternal torment very much, but, if you want to be governor, that’s how it gets done. We are your only shot. And it’s not really that bad — we took Bill Clinton’s soul back in 1999 and nobody even noticed. They damned sure won’t notice with you.
(And Hillary liked him a little better that way.)
And if an eternity of torment is good enough for New York City, it’s good enough for for Hizzoner. What goes around comes around, Bill. Give it some thought. We’ll be in touch.
— As told to Kevin D. Williamson
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