Old Media Meets New on Primary Day in New York

Yesterday, the nine major Democratic candidates for mayor of New York City agreed to appear on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show, a local-media institution, to make their closing arguments ahead of the primary, which takes place today. The program felt like something of a throwback: a respected mainstream forum had convened a disparate group of politicians in the same place; Lehrer proceeded, with minimal fuss, to invite them to talk one by one, in alphabetical order, and was unfailingly fair and polite as he did so. I’m not quite sure what it was—perhaps something in his scratchy audio; perhaps something in his intonation or turn of phrase—but listening to one of the candidates in particular, the former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, felt like a full-on time warp, like listening to archival radio from the New Deal era. “It’s ‘Who can make government work to clean up the city?’ And I fit that bill,” Cuomo said, before dismissing his principal rival, the Democratic Socialist state lawmaker Zohran Mamdani, as being “about public relations.” When it was his turn, Mamdani criticized Cuomo for demonizing him using language “that is more befitting of a beast than a person.”