Zohran Mamdani seeks to avoid Democrats' past mistakes

As the youngest man in more than a century to become New York City mayor prepares to take office, his aides, advisers, supporters and would-be staffers are looking at the lessons of the past.

Among them are the triumphs and mistakes of another Democratic legislator swept into high office by an insurgent, youth-driven movement clamoring for a new political dawn: Barack Obama.

Senior advisers and aides who worked in Obama's orbit before he was president and during his eight years in the White House are among those counseling Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, 34, who takes office in 46 days. 

Obama himself and Mamdani have repeatedly spoken in recent months, with Obama offering to be a "sounding board," as Mamdani translates his platform into policy for universal child care, municipal grocery stores, free public buses and taxes on those making over $1 million a year.

Looking for lessons

Mamdani's team is also looking at the mayoralties of New York City's left-leaning leaders to hold the office — Bill de Blasio, David Dinkins, John Lindsay — and what worked and what didn't.

Patrick Gaspard — under Obama, an assistant to the president, director of the office of political affairs and later an ambassador to South Africa — noted that the administration notched historic and long-fought victories, particularly Obamacare.

But there were also mistakes along the way.

"We made an error in the Obama moment, and we just hugged the institution, and didn't stay tethered to the movement," said Gaspard, who earlier was chief of staff, in the late 1990s, for the New York City Council.

Obama was criticized for sidelining grassroots supporters — 2 million strong who signed up to fight for his promise of hope and change — who had helped him win office. "Obama's Lost Army" is how The New Republic termed the squandered potential. 

Mamdani and his team hope to harness that sort of army, with a roster of volunteers that exceeded 100,000 during his mayoral campaign, and the start of a nonprofit advocacy group, Our Time for an Affordable NYC, to unleash that energy, with an identical color scheme and font to his campaign.

The 'Obama trap'

In September, Obama 2008 campaign adviser Marshall L. Ganz, who now teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School, met first with Mamdani's field director, Tascha Van Auken, who worked for Obama too, and then with Mamdani himself. Ganz advised them to avoid what he called the "Obama trap," by maintaining a grassroots movement once in office.

Folks were ready to go to work for Obama's agenda, but then he chose to really neutralize the whole operation," Ganz said.

By deciding to fold the volunteer organization that helped Obama get elected into what Ganz considers to be the ossified Democratic National Committee, the organization's capacity was allowed to wither, he said.  

Gaspard also sees lessons in the tenure of Bill de Blasio, mayor from 2014 to 2021, who notched policy victories, including universal pre-K, but also had stumbles. De Blasio and Gaspard met as young aides to David Dinkins, mayor from 1990 to 1993.

"My good friend, Mayor de Blasio, should have developed an outreach muscle to people who were not fellow travelers, people who perhaps weren't progressive, people who did not agree with him in the first instance on how he wanted to approach policing or public education or taxation," Gaspard said.

Mamdani, heeding that lesson, has appeared on right-leaning media, including Fox News during the campaign, at one point making an appeal to Trump supporters.

"Too often, we win, and we go into a kind of cave with like-minded people," he said.

Memories of another maverick

De Blasio did not comment when texted by Newsday seeking comment, nor did Obama's office when emailed. Lindsay died in 2000 and Dinkins in 2020.

For Anthony Shorris, de Blasio's first deputy mayor and a former director of the Port Authority, Mamdani's victory reminded him of another maverick, charismatic young man who became mayor: John Lindsay, who won in 1965 at a time of upheaval, and with a young staff. Lindsay went on to serve two terms.

"It was filled with the energy of repudiating an old, tired regime," Shorris said of Mamdani's victory: "This is a repudiation of an old, tired machine."

Like Mamdani, Lindsay took office and presided over a city in a deeply divided nation.

"Zohran, I think, has the potential to help New York, but we're also gonna be caught in a very difficult national moment," said Shorris, who also worked in the Koch and Bloomberg administrations.

Amit Singh Bagga — a former staff member for de Blasio and Gov. Kathy Hochul and an adviser to Mamdani during the primary — sees similarities between Obama and the mayor-elect: youngish legislators, with comparatively little executive experience, promising bold changes, but challenged by right-wing forces with a measure of racist attacks.

Bagga, a Congressional aide when Obama was trying to enact what would become Obamacare, said that Mamdani should heed the lessons of that fight by not conceding ground upfront.

Big dreams dashed

What had started out as Obama's signature campaign pledge — universal health care with options for both public and private insurance coverage — became a purely private plan with exchanges, a concession that dismayed some on the left. In the aftermath of his presidency Obama has been criticized by some Democrats for compromising too much and not adhering to his principles.  

"There was a thing he could have done that maybe seemed to some to be too left or too extreme or going too far," Bagga said. "But in not pursuing whatever sort of further edge of whatever the issue was, he actually didn't land anywhere."

Obama has defended the concessions that led to Obamacare — the Affordable Care Act — as critical to making sure millions of Americans could be covered by health insurance.

"The ACA wasn’t perfect. To get the bill passed, we had to make compromises," Obama said in 2022.

Bagga said, "My impression is that Zohran is going to take a different approach, at least with respect to the pursuit of whatever policy agenda he's laid out."

In June, during the final debate of the primary campaign, Mamdani, confronted by claims of his lack of experience, cited the advice of seasoned officials such as Gaspard and Bagga "who have delivered that public service and that public excellence in this city."

Mamdani himself had once been critical of Obama's centrism and, in Mamdani's view, inadequate progressivism, tweeting, as a 21-year-old, in 2013: "Hasnt Obama shown that the lesser evil is still pretty damn evil?" Earlier this year, Mamdani's campaign dismissed the posts as the musing of youth.

In preparing to be mayor, Mamdani has hired as his first deputy, Dean Fuleihan, 74, a veteran budget official who used to oversee negotiations for the State Assembly and has promised bold, tangible improvements to New Yorkers' lives from the get-go. Fuleihan was first deputy to de Blasio after Shorris left.

Keep the heat on

The city's public advocate, Jumaane Williams, said that New Yorkers who voted for Mamdani and want to see his agenda enacted can't merely vote and leave it to the candidate and his team. In contrast what happened with Obama, Williams said, Mamdani's supporters need to stay involved, attend rallies and meetings and hearings to back him, and make sure he keeps his campaign promises, Williams said.

"Just being involved civically and politically to give him the strength and the nudge when it's needed," Williams said.

At Mamdani's election night party, in newly renovated 1928 venue the Brooklyn Paramount, veterans of the recent Democratic presidencies and mayoralties mingled with celebrities and first-time voters. Cheers erupted, hugs were exchanged and tears flowed when news broke about Mamdani's victory over his nemesis, ex-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

 The DJ blasted Panjabi MC and Jay-Z's "Beware of the Boys."