Patrick Gaspard on Barack Obama, Zohran Mamdani, & Political Capital

The New York Editorial Board's interview with political strategist Patrick Gaspard, an advisor to Barack Obama, Bill de Blasio, and Zohran Mamdani.

Patrick Gaspard — a longtime political strategist; former U.S. Ambassador to South Africa and top Barack Obama advisor; nonprofit, philanthropic, and labor leader; former advisor to Bill de Blasio and current advisor to Zohran Mamdani — spoke with The New York Editorial Board on the morning of December 4, 2025. (photo by Juan Manuel Benítez)

Participating journalists: Juan Manuel Benítez, Nicole Gelinas, Josh Greenman, Alyssa Katz, Ben Max, Myles Miller, Harry Siegel, Ben Smith, Liena Zagare.

Full Transcript

Ben Smith
Thanks for coming. I always say this, but it’s true: We live in this moment when it’s optional to talk to journalists. So we always appreciate public figures who do, and it encourages the others. And thank you for—

Patrick Gaspard
I appreciate what all of you do, and I’m impressed that you would invite a hack like me because you’ve had some pretty serious people in these conversations, so...

Ben Smith
You know you’re a serious person. But in fact, actually that may be a good place to kick it off. Patrick, Ambassador, can you tell us, because I think it is useful to frame this conversation: what was your role with the Mamdani campaign? What is your role with the transition? And what do you expect your sort of relationship with Mamdani to be like when he’s in office?

Patrick Gaspard
I think I only have one talent, Ben, which is I’m a pretty good casting director, I’ve discovered over the course of my career…When I met Ben [Smith], he was a reporter for the Daily News and I knew that, you know, this is a guy who maybe someday could be running a breakfast meeting.

Let me just give you a little quick background on me and the mayor-elect. So I first met him when I was ambassador to South Africa. I was really close with somebody named Margo Lion, who was a legendary Broadway producer—Angels in America, Jelly’s Last Jam. I could go on and on. She was an extraordinary person who unfortunately passed away too early a few years ago.

Mira Nair had directed a movie that she shot in Uganda called the Queen of Katwe. They wanted to give it its release in Sub-Saharan Africa. They couldn’t do it in Uganda—some complications there. And Margo called and said they’re thinking about Johannesburg. “If they do it there, will you co-host something for them? Will you participate?” I love Mira Nair. I love her films. Absolutely. I agreed to do it.

She came with Lupita [Nyong’o] and everybody that’s in the film. It was really extraordinary. And she also came with the then 22-year-old music-content producer for the film, who turned out to be Zohran Mamdani. He’s just one of those people who, after five minutes of meeting him, you just think, “Hmm, there’s something about this person that I think is special, unique, different.”

Just that he was really special and he just left a mark. Fast-forward years later, he of course decides that he’s going to run for office in New York. I followed that closely. Then he decides he’s going to run for mayor of New York. And he asked me for a conversation early in the contest, sometime after Kamala Harris lost, and before anyone was paying attention to Zohran Mamdani.

I was impressed with just how serious he was about this. It was clear to me that it was not going to be a symbolic run, that he had a strategy, and that his strategy would take advantage of all the tools that are available to us to communicate broadly to the public on social media, et cetera. But that he would also rely on old shoe-leather organizing as well. He had this goal of hitting a million doors knocked in this city. He had a vision for how he could grow a volunteer base.

And most importantly for me, he had a clarity of narrative on what he thought really mattered and what impacted New Yorkers most now, and what he thought would animate the contest. As I listened to him, it occurred to me that there was this false security framework that many of the candidates had adopted about where we were in the city. If you listened to Andrew Cuomo even before he announced his candidacy, there was a kind of dystopian description of New York that didn’t jive with the New York that I experienced across the five boroughs. I thought it was not dissimilar to how Donald Trump described the city. That there’s something a little off about this.

I think that Zohran may be right that cost of living is the thing that will matter the most, despite what the polls are telling us. So I was just impressed with his tactile sense of where the city was at and his clarity.

I’ll also add, and then I’ll answer your question. I’ll also add that I thought that too many of my friends in the Democratic Party did not appreciate the way that a growing majority of Democratic primary base voters were not aligned with their description of the US responsibility in the Israel-Gaza conflict. Too many were feeling complicit in the imagery that they saw of dying civilians, starving kids. And that they had moved from where the Democratic Party leadership was.

It was interesting to hear in that early phase of the campaign that Eric Adams was flirting with the idea of starting a third party that would be called the Antisemitism Party, and that Andrew Cuomo was racing to volunteer his services to be Benjamin Netanyahu’s attorney in front of the ICC. And I thought, you know, there’s some misalignment here from where folks are at, and I think it’s going to catch up with them. And this young leader has a clarity around this issue that I think will be resonant even with people who don’t completely agree with his position.

So I just thought all of that was really important to understand about the environment. My role during the course of the primary and then general election was to give a lot of free advice to the candidate about what I thought the opportunities were for coalition-building. What it would mean to kind of expand the coalition beyond those who were obviously aligned and in agreement with his point of view about America in the world, et cetera.

I also tried my level best—and this was the hardest thing for me—I tried my level best to help him think through the tenor of public presentation in ways that could be more and more inviting and less strident. And here’s the difficult part for me: when you’re a baseball coach and you see somebody coming to the plate who’s just crushing it over the wall time and time again, you don’t really wanna tweak that person’s swing all that much. And I thought that, it was clear that this was somebody who had the ability to just land the thing across all three modes of communication that we have right now. He was somebody who was excellent at delivering punchy narrative in an affirmative way in a 90-second video. He could also carry a 20-minute speech with some real fervor. And he could sit and have a two-hour conversation on a podcast in a way that would come across as relaxed, authentic, intimate even. You just don’t see that that often, or at all. And I didn’t wanna mess with that, but I thought there was an opportunity to find the middle ground between that extraordinary moment that went viral when candidate Mamdani confronted Donald Trump’s border czar. There was a muscular way that he did that. There was a lot of anger there. Thought that there was a great middle ground between that and some of the video content that he produced that was all about personality and less about some of the policies that he was advancing. And I just tried to help as much as I could to help steer around that middle ground.

I also tried my best to be a credible validator for him with people who were perhaps discomforted by some of his positions or just didn’t know him well enough. I’ve been at this for more than a minute. The very first time I was involved in New York politics at all, I was a kid volunteering to hand out flyers for Frank Barbaro in his campaign against Ed Koch.

My first official foray into doing anything around the campaign was around the nascent stuff around Percy Sutton at some point. And then of course, I was involved with David Dinkins’s campaign in 1989. And I thought that the more elites in New York would have access to Zohran Mamdani, they would appreciate that he was somebody who was nimble enough and thoughtful enough to make up for what they saw as his lack of executive experience or what they saw as stridency on particular issues.

I also, much to the consternation of my friends in other campaigns, told him freely and openly that he could use my name as a validator, which he decided to do on the debate stage during the primary. That got me a lot of WhatsApp, Signal, and text messages from other candidates.

Since the primary through the general election, I felt responsible for helping to make a series of public, very public introductions and to prepare him for conversations with business leaders, faith leaders, older civil-rights community leaders, who again, were unfamiliar with him, who I thought needed to give him a fighting chance. And I’ve continued to give whatever thoughtful, or unthoughtful, advice and counsel I could in the construction of the transition team, those appointments, and thinking through the elements of delivery on an agenda that’s going to be overly dependent on outcomes in Albany.

Josh Greenman
And what are your plans for the actual administration?

Patrick Gaspard
What are my plans for the administration?

Josh Greenman
Yeah. I mean, what do you want your relationship with him to be? What does he want your relationship with him to be? Has that been worked out yet?

Ben Max
Are you going to be an “agent of the city“ again is the question.

[Laughter]

Patrick Gaspard
I’m happy to re-litigate the whole “agent of the city” thing—

Ben Max
No, no, no.

Patrick Gaspard
—and the bizarre designation from legal counsel at the time, who was my good friend, Maya Wiley, and the determinations that they made. That was an interesting moment. I’ll just take two seconds about it because what was at stake in the “agents of the city” framing—they were trying to make a decision about whether or not the mayor of the City of New York could have private emails or private communications with anybody, and how to classify those emails, whether or not they should be subject to Freedom of Information requests.

I will tell you that, as I told the mayor then and his counsel, I had no problem whatsoever with any of my emails to Bill [de Blasio] coming out in the world. Some of them eventually leaked out, including one where I wrote a detailed memo to my good friend, the mayor, telling him why I thought it was a god-awful insane decision to go to Iowa, to start flirting with running for president. And there was another email prior to that, about his decision to support Hillary [Clinton] or Bernie Sanders. And again, I just thought that the decisions that were being made were not the ones that I would have made. So I had no problem with those emails coming out. But apparently, there were people who were on the payroll of his PAC who were concerned about their emails. And I was serving as U.S. Ambassador to South Africa, not lobbying, not benefiting from any of his decisions. So I had no discomfort with that. So that was the agents of the city thing.

Look, when you are in that seat in City Hall, it is a very lonely place. There are very few people who understand the conditions under which you are making decisions. Very few people who understand that things only get to your desk when they are problems beyond easy solution. Sometimes you need voices that you can turn to who are not in your cabinet in City Hall, who are not proximate to how power is being leveraged in that building, who you hope might be able to give you fair and balanced assessments of a thing. Who maybe could push back with an aggressive “no” to you on a thing.

I suspect that the mayor-elect expects me to continue to play that kind of role. He’s made it very clear to me and a number of other people who are in his orbit that he’s worried about the bubble. He’s worried about the capture of all of it, and he wants to be able to maintain conversations that push him to interrogate his assumptions. So I’m happy to continue to play that kind of role.

Harry Siegel
So can you talk about what’s changed and the continuity between now and 1989 when DSA member David Dinkins set a record for mayoral primary votes I believe that Mamdani’s now shattered?

And just to throw in there, in 1989, the bad old days, the apocalypse was here. As you were saying, you met Mamdani right after Kamala’s loss. So that backdrop, I think, is also an interesting difference.

Patrick Gaspard
I spent a couple of hours being interviewed by Jonathan Mahler for the outstanding new book that he’s got out right now. So I feel like you’re making me kind of revisit all of that. And I had some PTSD in the conversations with Jonathan, remembering all that.

So interesting point on David Dinkins. And as you noted, an early DSA member, which some people were kind of surprised by. Some people didn’t believe it when Zohran Mamdani would say that I’ll be the second DSA-aligned mayor. I remember getting a message from another old Dinkins hand who was supporting Andrew Cuomo. And this person said to me, How dare he make this thing up about my mayor? David Dinkins was not a Democratic Socialist.

And I had to say, You know, I met Michael Harrington, who was a DSA co-founder. I had met Michael Harrington when I was a kid in the Manhattan Borough President’s office back in 1987, 1988. I was like 20 years old in the borough president’s office. And I met Michael Harrington for the first of three times in my life. And it was all in the company of David Norman Dinkins, right? There’s a different way that we used to think about these things some decades ago. You had people like Dinkins who had emerged from movements that a lot of folks were still proximate to.

People who were covering the mayoralty, right? There were a lot of journalists then who were familiar with and part of the student democracy movements, the anti-war movement. Who appreciated the relationship between the civil-rights movement and some of these other streams and threads. So it wasn’t shocking and strange at all back then, anything that would be politically problematic for David Dinkins to have welcomed the Socialist International to New York City when I was with him, when he gave a speech in 1990 doing that. It just was not seen as anything eyebrow-raising at the time.

But we have a different lens on it all now. It was extraordinary to see that in the primary and then in the general election, candidate Mamdani was able to break and bust our 1989 mark. The biggest difference is, while David Dinkins was a historic first, first Black mayor of New York City—there are ways that David Dinkins came out of a regular Democratic Party movement, right? Like there isn’t anybody in any Democratic club in New York or whether it was the Village Independent Democrats or the Ben Franklin Club in the Bronx that didn’t know David Dinkins when he was City Clerk, when he was Manhattan Borough President. He just worked every corner of the regular Democratic Party in this city. And he was seen as somebody who had paid his dues, come up in the ranks, had deferred appropriately to other leadership when they were running for Congress, when they were running for mayor or other offices. He had deferred appropriately and his time had finally come. And so it was fine and appropriate for him to just rock up and ask for their support.

Zohran Mamdani is an insurgent. From the beginning of his campaign to even now, through his transition, this is an insurgency through and through. He did inspire the kind of volunteer mobilization in this city that I had personally not seen or experienced, the city hasn’t experienced since 1989. But it’s always been this kind of outsider versus insider sentiment that he’s been able to carry and project and organize through.

David Dinkins was very much not an outsider. His movement was not an outsider movement, with the exception of African-American activists who had always felt like they were on the outside looking in on the Donald Manes, Stanley Friedman, et cetera, mafia that dominated the politics in every borough of this city. So I think that’s an important difference between them.

And on the volunteer base, I think that— We had a trial run for the David Dinkins campaign, it was the Jesse Jackson campaign, right? There wasn’t anybody who was in the senior ranks of the Dinkins campaign, or even the junior ranks of the Dinkins campaign, who had not been involved in some meaningful way in Jesse ‘88. That was the first time that I did any national campaigning and traveling across the country with a candidate.

And then Ed Koch famously said that New Yorkers, particularly Jewish New Yorkers, would have to be crazy to vote for Jesse Jackson. And we overperformed projections in the city, which told us, Oh, we can actually beat this. We can finally beat this guy, and we’re gonna find the candidate and do the thing. So there was a trial run. We had proof points. There were reasons for the church crowd to have confidence early on that David Dinkins and this movement could do that.

There was no reason at all to think that Zohran Mamdani could emerge in this field and that he could beat a name, a historic, dynastic figure like Andrew Cuomo, despite Andrew Cuomo’s considerable challenges, let’s just say. So very, very different dynamic then.

And we also had a city now that I thought had the space to be more aspirational than we had in 1989. The tagline from the Dinkins campaign was vote your hopes and not your fears. We had to work really hard to overcome people’s fears. And it wasn’t just fears about race, but you know, this was a town that was still recovering from the fiscal crisis and surging crime and all these challenges that we had to allay in order to get the people to a place of affirmation. That was not a challenge this many years removed from the pandemic for Zohran in narrative building in this campaign.

Josh Greenman
So this is pretty directly close to that, which is, he has excited a lot of young people that came out. That canvassed for him, etc. etc.

Patrick Gaspard
104,000 to be exact.

Josh Greenman
So what should he do with them now? You know, there’s the famous Kennedy “ask not” speech. It doesn’t seem like he’s necessarily channeling them yet for any action within his administration. Should there be some volunteer movement?

Patrick Gaspard
He will.

Josh Greenman
What should he point them to do?

Patrick Gaspard
There needs to be— He’s very cognizant of the responsibility that he feels to not just those who voted for him, and his responsibility for the eight million people, many of whom didn’t vote for him. But he feels an acute responsibility of kinship, mentorship even, for people who were feeling the diminishment of community and civic engagement in this city and in this country. And they came out and they did a thing that is historical. And he believes that the victory belongs at least as much, if not more to them than it does to him and those who were part of his core team.

It was interesting, I thought, and really powerful to see him make the decision based on accountability and transparency to go before the DSA part of his base a number of weeks ago. And not just make phone calls behind closed doors recommending that they not support New York City Councilman Chi Ossé and his challenge against Congressman Hakeem Jeffries.

Very few politicians, absent that animated base that he had that went out and door knocking, did all those things—I don’t think that you’re gonna see the habit of any politician where they go out in a very transparent way in an open meeting and say, Yeah, this young person who supported part of this journey should not have your political endorsement and here’s why. And here’s why I think you should go with this other person who you see as maybe not completely aligned with your views. I thought that was a bold thing that was really about the responsibility, the accountability he feels that’s owed to the movement that he’s steeped in, that he grew out of. And that made such a meaningful contribution.

You know that he’s had several conversations with former President Barack Obama, my old boss. I won’t tell you the readout from those conversations, but I will say that I personally pressed him to have a dialogue with the president about what his evolving views have been about the decisions that we made coming out of the 2008 campaign to fold Obama for America, our movement that was independent of the traditional Democratic Party—because Barack Obama was not the choice, if you recall, in the primary, of the unions, of the elected officials, of their institutions.

We made a decision to fold OFA into the DNC. It’s a decision that I disagreed with strongly and I didn’t voice. I didn’t have the courage and the ability to voice my strongly held views about that. I’m not proud of the way that I held my views in that moment. And I pressed Zohran to have a conversation with the president about his evolving sense of how he managed or didn’t manage that movement coming into his presidency, and whether or not there were ways to deploy that energy that could have accrued to our benefit as we tried to pass major legislation and tried to shift the tenor of the politics in the Democratic Party and beyond the Democratic Party. And I know that he’s had that conversation, he’s thinking clearly about what it means to hold that together as he litigates his—

Josh Greenman
And you’re talking about them doing things on the ground too, in addition to — I know Alyssa has a question — in addition to calling legislators?

Patrick Gaspard
No, no, no. This is not about calling legislators. These are people who have skin in the game, and who are ready to go out and knock on doors again and do the thing on street corners, in front of supermarkets. And so they’re ready to be called to a purpose, and he’s ready to organize that to a constructive purpose in all the essential parts of his agenda, but also the crisis du jour that will invariably come up.

Alyssa Katz
So, you know, you talked about this example of transparency where Mamdani has been transparent with DSA and his organizing base around this very difficult decision that he disagreed with. You also have another decision where he’s committed to keep Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, and she said she will stay on.

And he’s also getting pushback, of course, from many people who went out and knocked those doors and so on. And he hasn’t necessarily yet at least been as clear about the reasons for his decision or even just—

Patrick Gaspard
I would disagree.

Alyssa Katz
Yeah.

Patrick Gaspard
I think he’s been very, very, very clear. I’m happy to go through—

Alyssa Katz
No, no, it’s fine. But I do want to ask, he’s going to continue to have to make very difficult decisions of this nature that are gonna be controversial with the base. What do you think is his path to bring them along as he’s making deals with the business community, working with Tisch on very unpopular enforcement and so forth?

Patrick Gaspard
Yeah. Hard things are hard. So I think that one of the things that I found to be amusing the last several weeks during transition, there is a group that’s circulating a petition with the argument that Zohran Mamdani is already breaking his campaign promise because he’s decided to rehire Jessica Tisch for this role.

And I thought, oh, the same Zohran Mamdani who during the primary campaign said out loud on a debate stage that he would consider retaining Jessica Tisch? The same Zohran Mamdani who during the general election campaign said multiple times, I think that Jessica Tisch is deserving of another term, because she’s managed to confront the question of corruption in the police department in a fulsome way, and she did it despite the fact that City Hall was still trying to keep their thumb on the scale on how the police department is managed. Crime has come down significantly under her watch in this city. And she’s been incredibly thoughtful and directly engaged at the intersection of the physical threat that many New Yorkers feel in the subways and elsewhere, and the reality that we have many people who are suffering from mental health, who need different kinds of intervention.

And Jessica Tisch has been engaged in these questions in ways that Zohran Mamdani believes are impactful and are moving us in the right direction. He said that multiple times during the primary, said that multiple times during the general election. People hear what they want to hear. And of course, he made the ultimate pledge that he would keep her on, not during transition, but during the campaign. So, he promised that he would do that in the campaign, and he’s fulfilled that promise in transition.

And I thought he could not have been any clearer on the reasons why he kept her. I remember when I joined him during the general for his first meeting with New York City Partnership, and while he was on stage, he said, Look, let me be very clear that my police commissioner, my director of DCAS, whoever’s running HPD—they don’t have to agree with the nuances of my position on Gaza. They don’t have to agree with me on my tax policies. But they have to be damn excellent at the job that I’m asking them to perform, and their excellence has to come with some broad values alignment about what it is to build a city as inclusive as it can possibly be, where we need to have a more broadly shared prosperity. That’s all I would ask of them, and I need their excellence.

And for him, Commissioner Tisch fulfills that. Now, on this other question about how we make these tough decisions and manage to keep a coalition together. I think that—and it’s interesting, I listened to some of the outtakes of your conversation with my friend Bill de Blasio. And it was powerful to hear Bill say to all of you that he thought that he had too much of a chip on his shoulder. That he didn’t engage in the work of continuous outreach in the way that he should have. Both with those who disagreed with him, but even those who were allied with him, just felt that he just was not communicating enough. And that there was a sharpness to his communication.

I remember at the time, and this would have come out in the FOIL-ed emails. At the time I used to say to him, You sound too sanctimonious about this stuff, and you are using progressive as a noun, a verb, an adjective, in a way that can’t be heard and felt by people who don’t describe themselves that way but may share a point of view with you about certain aspects of policy making in this city. And you gotta figure that out.

I think that Zohran has a capaciousness in how he organizes, in the language that he uses, in his ability to be a kinetic listener, even with people who are offering a sharp critique. And I think that he is really well-positioned to translate the movement to elites, and the elite back to movements, in ways that enable us to find the Venn diagram space of enough consensus to move an agenda forward, keep a politics together, and ultimately win—put points on the board for the city.

Alyssa Katz
Yeah, I think you’re talking about clarity kind-of pivoting into persuasion, right?

Patrick Gaspard
Yeah.

Alyssa Katz
He’s been clear about why he’s keeping Tisch, but is he going to persuade people? And we shall see, but you’re saying he has time to do that.

Patrick Gaspard
So when you run a campaign, you acquire a kind of currency when you win that you then have to draw down on. You gotta draw down on that currency. And drawing down on that currency means that by day 200 you might not be as popular as you were on day number two. And you have to accept that going in. But you have to think, All right, here are the ways that I think it’s worth it to draw down on that deep reservoir of goodwill that I’ve built with this part of the community. And I think that over time it will help them understand and see why it’s worth it to stick with me on this journey because they’re gonna get the outcomes that they want.

Josh Greenman
You make choices what to prioritize and what to maybe not prioritize.

Patrick Gaspard
100%. 100%.

Myles Miller
Can I just follow up on what you’re saying?

Patrick Gaspard
Governance leads to dissatisfaction in some camps. And that’s OK as long as you’re seen to be true to the core values and true to the things that you promised to fight for and champion, and you got to achieve some of them!

Myles Miller
Well, I want to talk about hard truths because you’ve got a person who’s an idealist, who’s coming in with a very broad progressive and populist pitch that a good amount of New Yorkers bought into. What are some of the things you have to say, Listen, this is something that you’re focused on but may not be able to get done. Or, city government works in this way and therefore it’s going to be difficult to navigate. Hard truths are always—

Patrick Gaspard
That’s a great question. So here’s one of the things that I found most impressive about Zohran, Elle Bisgaard-Church—his chief of staff in the Assembly, then campaign manager for the primary, and then leader of the transition, and gonna be chief of staff in City Hall. What I found interesting about them is they reminded me so much of the old-school grizzled organizers who trained me when I joined my union as a kid.

They were clear all along about what the North Star goals were. But those young people who went out across the city to knock on doors—it was powerful for me to see how well-versed they were in the challenges of governance, right? They were clear on what the mayor-elect wanted to accomplish in mass transit, with housing, food insecurity even. But they were also clear on the relationship between the powerful exec in City Hall and the powerful exec in Albany and the state legislature, and the challenges inherent in that and how the movement that elects a mayor has to stick together for delivery.

I would, at times, go up to some of the canvassers for the Mamdani campaign and I’d pretend to be an undecided voter. And I would like, have some tough conversations with them about free buses, about the rent freeze, and all the things. And I was just impressed with the sophistication that they had, where they would be preaching patience to me. So I just think that there’s a way that many, many, many people who were active in that campaign were able to gain a purchase on how a bill becomes a law, and how the budget is made. So that’s a part of the soft landing, that’s one thing.

The other thing is that I don’t wanna overstate this, but I also don’t wanna underestimate it. We have a figure who is preternaturally gifted as a communicator, and who has the example of failed narratives and governance in front of him and he understands what it means to take people along on the journey in ways that are clear, evident, and even vulnerable every step of the way with him as he confronts a challenge in the City Council, as he confronts a challenge with Andrea Stewart-Cousins or Carl Heastie or Kathy Hochul. I think that that story’s gonna get told in real time. I know it’s gonna get told in real time, and on the ground in ways that I think will benefit the politics and benefit the ultimate outcome that he’s aiming towards. I’m confident about it.

Myles Miller
I’m missing the hard — is the hard like that these people stood with you and said, Oh, free and fair buses, or, tax the rich, and he stood outside the Edenwald projects and said, to Carl Heastie, but then that may not actually happen in the time and space in which you think it would.

Patrick Gaspard
I love a reporter who knows his political geography.

Myles Miller
I was up in the Bronx.

Patrick Gaspard
Hey man. It’s an important historic place. I think that the hard thing is when you’re in these seats, you find out in a hurry that you don’t get to control the agenda — in a hurry. Right? I remember being in the White House and we had just gotten healthcare done. Finally, we land the thing, and the president’s like, Now we’re gonna talk about the economy; here are the things that we’re gonna do. And we wake up and there’s like an oil spill in the Gulf. And every day it’s like, Mr. President, plug that damn hole. And he’s like, What? I got no scuba gear. What am I supposed to do? But this is the thing that’s dominating everything for weeks at a time.

So, when you’re in these roles, you discover in a hurry, you don’t get to control the agenda, you don’t get to always set the agenda, you gotta be clear about what you’re putting in the center of the table and prioritizing and rallying around. And you’ve got to tell the story about that. But you also have to be clear that you may not get everything in that agenda.

De Blasio, I remember when he was running for mayor and talking about universal pre-K. And of course, many of your publications editorialized about how absolutely ridiculous that was. I’ll never forget The New York Times editorial about how preposterous this notion was. And was that even a needed thing? Wow, talk about bubbles. And the then-governor during that election came out against de Blasio’s position. And now, it was interesting listening to Andrew Cuomo claim credit for universal pre-K in New York. But everyone was against it until de Blasio got the damn thing done. But he didn’t get it done to the full extent that he wanted. He didn’t get the “pay fors” that he wanted. But he was clear about what this meant in the lives of working people. I thought that was one of the few instances where he and his administration told the story well and it bled through. And they were willing to eat some compromises on that and a number of other issues that were necessary, were hard and difficult, but that made change possible.

Nicole Gelinas
You brought up The New York Times. Do you see the traditional media as hopelessly irrelevant? And if so, is there a way that they can make themselves relevant again?

Patrick Gaspard
The New York Times is a wonderful lifestyle publication that occasionally has some interesting news in it. I was thinking the other day... Look, all of our institutions are struggling and are really, really, really challenged. And this is a moment where no one trusts any of us for nothing. Right? That’s just the reality of where we live. But it does not help that reality when we’re in the middle of an ethical crisis in journalism that’s actually gotten the attention of some average folk, and you’re gonna write a story about the Vanity Fair reporter [and former New York magazine correspondent, Olivia Nuzzi] who has compromised the integrity of her coverage and many– and the coverage of many other people. But instead of reporting about this journalistically, instead you give this person a profile filled with photographs of them walking under a romantic glowing moon on a beach. And you’ve got video of their hair blowing in the wind like they’re in that scene in Kill Bill where they’re driving to finish somebody off. I thought The New York Times managed to really do all of journalism a disservice in that moment.

And I have not recovered from The New York Times announcing to the world that they are above making endorsements now in New York mayoral primaries. And we just don’t do that. That’s just—

Josh Greenman
That’s why we’re here today.

Ben Smith
That’s the spur for the creation of this [New York Editorial Board].

Patrick Gaspard
I know.

We won’t mingle with the unwashed. And yet they managed immediately after Michael Bloomberg dropped $8 million in the primary, immediately after, somehow it occurred to The New York Times that they had to weigh in and at least say, That Zohran Mamdani kid, like anybody but that.

Deeply fascinating. I think that there’s a way that so many of our institutions have become, are seen as corrupted or seen as lacking integrity or seen not to meet the values that they have historically projected in the world. They’re seen as hypocritical, and I think that all of them and all of us have to work against that and have to close the daylight that folks are feeling between stated goals and actual actions in the world.

I love your field. When I was 10 years old, I wanted to be either Andrew Young, who had then become the US Ambassador to the United Nations. I remember I was 10 years old, I either wanted to be Andrew Young or I wanted to be Peter Jennings. Those were like the only jobs that I thought had any merit to them. And I was obsessed with Anthony Lewis’s column in The New York Times. And I thought, you know, journalists do this important interrogation and this important business of accountability. And there’s a way that I think I overly romanticize the industry as being beyond the influence of powerful actors in society that had their hooks into just about everything else.

Nicole Gelinas
Will Mamdani just ignore traditional media—

Patrick Gaspard
No, no, no. I’m gonna get to your actual question, but I just wanted to do a little bit of editorializing first.

Now, I think it would be a mistake for Mayor Mamdani to ignore traditional media. I think that part of his success is that he had an all-of-the-above approach to this work. Yes, he had ways to kind of build his own media system and get messages directly to the electorate, but he also didn’t hesitate to go and have conversations with Carl Campanile at the New York Post or show up for editorial board meetings, even though he knew they would go against him.

He has kind of inculcated into everybody around him that part of the responsibility of democracy is to be subject to this conversation and the back and forth and the give and take. And that’s only gonna make you stronger as a public official, stronger as somebody who can deliver an argument and land it well.

I think that in the conversations that I’ve had with the mayor-elect, it’s clear to me that even when he has misgivings about some of the publications or the institutions or their leadership, he has a tremendous amount of respect and reverence for all of your readers, your listenership, right? And he’s not looking to go around that. And he really wants to be able to have the conversation and be subject to being made accountable. But I needed to just kind of editorialize a bit, ‘cause I do worry about where we are and I worry about an industry that continues to not have the ability to see itself in the way that average people sees it.

Ben Max
On that front, and going back to some of the lessons of—

Patrick Gaspard
Oh, can I just say one more thing? I’m sorry. And then I’ll answer your question, Ben [Max]. One of the interesting experiments that I’m excited about is the work in Vital City.

Josh Greenman
Managing editor [of Vital City] here.

Patrick Gaspard
Ah-ha, OK, I did not know that. So one of the things I love about Vital City is its ability to give space to sharp, well-articulated argument that’s backed up with data that can even move a hack like me on an issue. There’s a good column right now written by ... I forget his name, the gentleman who runs mental-health services.

Josh Greenman and Nicole Gelinas
Brian Stettin.

Patrick Gaspard
Yes. It’s a fantastic—

Josh Greenman
He got his job with Mayor Adams because of an op-ed he published in the Daily News. Adams then reached out to us and said, Who is this guy? Can you connect me?

Patrick Gaspard
I’m so impressed to hear that, because I think that too many people who are around Mayor Adams got their job because they hung out in a nightclub with Mayor Adams. So I’m really excited to hear that.

I think that piece—there are things in that piece that I disagree with. There are things in that piece that I think are overexpressed, like disagreements with Mamdani or misrepresentation of his view of the role of policing that I think are overexpressed. But I think there’s really some smart stuff in there that pushes hard against the trajectory that the mayor-elect has articulated during the campaign and during transition for mental-health services and how that corresponds with the role of the police department and where we’ve gotta find the sweet spot and the reality between what’s actually happened with 311, what actually happened in Oregon and stats that are like out there in social media that are wrong.

I thought it a fantastic piece, and I thought immediately, This is the kind of person who the mayor-elect needs to be in an active convincing session with. Like, let’s figure out how we have that conversation and many, many others like that. One of the things that impresses me in this moment of transition is, there are people who have been invited to the 400-person transition committee that have some strong disagreements with the mayor-elect. And I thought that that Vital City column was a way that ... is the kind of thing that we wanna be able to incubate in government. Sorry, Ben.

Ben Max
Building off what you said: It’s easy in campaign time to talk about, to go and talk to almost everybody, or easier than when you’re in government, right? To talk about, I’m gonna be held accountable and I want everybody to hold me accountable, and we’ve heard mayor-elect after mayor-elect talk about running the most transparent administration you’re ever gonna see and you’re gonna love when I’m mayor — and then ultimately, there’s conflict, there’s crisis, there’s failure. What’s the best way going forward to handle those things? It can be instinct to go into a bunker, it can be instinct to fight. What are the sort-of modern lessons on doing that where you don’t repeat the mistakes that we’ve seen from other leaders?

Patrick Gaspard
I think here’s a place where I’m gonna commend Michael Bloomberg. I actually think that with the exception of his personal travel, and the very, very, very big exception of how he used some of his personal resources to invest in institutions that then accrued to his benefit when he ran for re-election not once but twice—with those exceptions, I think there was a hyper-transparency in how he governed, outcomes in agencies, what their goals were, where they thought they were falling short. And I thought that was kind of a real-time practice of laying that out, that the bullpen setup was illustrative of, right?

Myles Miller
The tortured Mayor’s Management Report [MMR] that is horrible to put together.

Patrick Gaspard
Yes. But for the first time you could actually trust the MMR in ways that you couldn’t before. So I would really commend Mayor Bloomberg for that. And Dan Doctoroff and Patti Harris, bunch of people who were involved in that. I would hold that up as a model that the mayor-elect should look to.

I also think that I worked for a White House that was much more transparent than previous White Houses and the White House since, where we disclosed anybody who came in for any meeting with us on anything. We were clear about the lobbying interest and we talked openly about potential conflicts. And I thought that we enacted a set of policies about the revolving door that I thought were a good thing for the system, for America, et cetera. So I think that there are some lessons to be learned, to be kind of taken from many of these places.

I also think that, you know, you describe something that hangs on personality trait, insecurity, the ability to be vulnerable and say, I was wrong about a thing, or I used to think this way, but now I’m moving in this direction on this. I’ve appreciated the maturity from candidate Mamdani who was able to come out pretty early on and say, You know what? I think I got it wrong on affordable housing in this city. I used to have this kind of position that I think is not sustainable about the role of the private sector and the market in development of affordable housing in the city. I got that wrong. And I’m willing to admit that now in ways that I think are important if I’m gonna move forward and if we’re gonna move forward as a city.

I have a sneaking suspicion that there are things in— One of the big failings of our politics and our journalism in the city is the under-examination of a system that is intended to deliver outcomes every single day for 900,000 school kids. We don’t talk about public education in our campaigns. We don’t examine it. Politicians don’t get asked questions about this. In the 2021 campaign, I think there were more questions to Andrew Yang about why he was skating on the boardwalk in Coney Island, than there were about his education policy, which I thought was problematic policy. It was like an astonishing thing to watch from the press corps.

I think that there are things that were discussed during the course of this mayoral campaign, barely discussed, on mayoral control of the schools.

Myles Miller
Well, he wouldn’t answer on mayoral control of schools.

Patrick Gaspard
I think that there were things that were barely discussed and barely interrogated on what’s the program — the gifted [and talented] program?

Josh Greenman
And the SHSAT schools...

Patrick Gaspard
All of that and mayoral control that I thought were underexamined and that there weren’t enough questions about. And I suspect that as folks interrogate and push into that stuff, now that he’s actually gonna be in charge of 900,000 school kids, that it’s gonna have to lead to a more nuanced understanding of how the system works. How power moves through it. How procurement needs to be reformed. A number of things that I think will make him a stronger mayor for the school kids of the city.

Liena Zagara
Given how excellent a communicator he’s been on everything else, why do you think education is the exception to that?

Patrick Gaspard
I just don’t think that this is a fault of Zohran Mamdani. I just don’t think, you know, look, there are very few things that there’s a bandwidth to actually properly unpack and interrogate during a campaign. I think that there are things that a mayor is actually in charge of that got a lot of attention, like the rent controlled unit and the decisions that that board is going to have to make. The relationship with Albany on public transit, law enforcement issues, things a mayor actually controls, that got a lot of attention. And things that a mayor has absolutely no control over, like foreign policy, that got outsized attention during this campaign. And even when the candidates were not talking about Israel and Gaza, it invariably came up in just about every interview in a way that kind of choked out the space and didn’t give us enough space to go further and further into things like public education.

Liena Zagare
So was it a choice not to talk about education? Because every time, it seems that he’s struggled with answering questions, whether it’s special education—

Patrick Gaspard
I don’t know. Was it a choice for reporters to ask him 20 times more questions about—

[Crosstalk]

Myles Miller
He was not interested in talking about it.

[Crosstalk]

Patrick Gaspard
Oh my God, this is fun.

Josh Greenman
I think it’s fair to say he didn’t have a school plan, I think it’s fair to say he didn’t have a public education plan that he ever released.

Patrick Gaspard
I think it’s fair to say– And by the way, I was hoping for two things in this conversation: I wanted there to be enough instances where I could be humble enough to say, I don’t know, and that there’d be this moment of provocation where you all would yell at me. So, I’m glad that we at least got one of those things done.

So, I think it’s fair to say that unfortunately, in our politics, public education polls poorly. Like, it is not a thing that surfaces as a leading priority during campaigns. It’s not... It’s true during mayoral campaigns, it’s true during local elections. It is not the leading edge of the thing that people say they are most concerned about that will drive the decisions that they make on how they cast their ballots. When was the last time public education was a serious, like, the thing in a mayoral campaign?

[Crosstalk]

Ben Max
It was pretty big in 2013.

Patrick Gaspard
No, I think that universal pre-K became an issue.

Ben Max
There was a huge amount on charter schools and—

Patrick Gaspard
Charter schools, which is a thing that’s driven in elite discourse that affects a very, very, very small percentage of the 900,000 kids in the school system.

Liena Zagare
15%.

Patrick Gaspard
It’s grown since then, and the charter school movement I think has become so much more diverse now than it used to be. But in 2013, I remember this really well, it was driven by a very small percentage of folk who had outsized influence on donor concern in that cycle, and that surfaced a lot of questions about charters in the campaign. But it is not a thing that was driving voter preference and voter choices in the 2013 election. I know the 2013 data really well.

Myles Miller
You’re talking about Success [Academy] and they were the loudest voice—

Ben Smith
But substantively, what should we know about Mamdani’s education agenda that we don’t?

Patrick Gaspard
I think to your point about how he had an education platform, I would say across the board, probably with the exception I think of Zellnor Myrie; if I think through, I think Zellnor probably had the most detailed public education plan in the campaign. I think that’s a fair thing, if I think through what folks put forward. I think for the most part, the candidates in general were thin in their education platforms. I think there were a number of what I saw, this is my personal view, issues that are peripheral to broad outcomes in public education that got way too much attention in the debate and what was being put forward by most of the campaigns — and I include the Mamdani campaign in this. And I think at a time when a large percentage of our children are two grades behind in literacy, two grades behind on math outcomes, where we have not figured out how to focus effectively, I think, on the learning loss that’s persistent coming out of the pandemic. When we have some powerful examples like the Mississippi model that I think are really interesting and instructive in ways that need to be more socialized through the system, I think that there are some important opportunities for the mayor-elect in that space.

Josh Greenman
I don’t disagree, and I don’t want to get into a long fight about it, but we asked him about New York City Reads, about the literacy program, and he was kind of non-committal. That’s a perfect example of a thing that’s about broad learning outcomes, and actually improving literacy.

Patrick Gaspard
Yeah, I agree with...I think that my response just now would indicate that I have some agreement with you on this.

Juan Manuel Benítez
You mentioned this earlier, because the Israel-Gaza conversation took a lot of space in the race. As a former ambassador to South Africa, when people make that comparison about Israel and apartheid South Africa, do you think that’s a valid comparison?

Patrick Gaspard
So, a couple of things. I’m glad you raised South Africa right now. I think it’s astonishing and not getting enough attention that the President of the United States still every day continues to propagate this horrific racist lie about this white genocide in South Africa and is using it as an excuse to apparently block South Africa from the G20. That’s a shocking thing to experience in our politics and our foreign policy.

So, I have spent time in Israel. I’ve spent time in the West Bank. I had never been in Gaza. But during the conflict, I think it was about eight months into the current conflict, I was at the Gaza border. And I went to a kibbutz that had been overrun on October 7th [2023], and I could see just how proximate folks were living to just this everyday tension. I will tell you that in my past as I’ve gone through checkpoints in the West Bank, and as I’ve been asked—despite what Ritchie Torres had to say, as I’ve been asked what my religion is—I understand why many people, including leading human rights scholars like my old mentor, Aryeh Neier, who I think is unassailable in his credentials here; I understand why they would term it apartheid.

I think it is very, very, very, very different than the circumstances that existed in South Africa from 1950 through 1990. I could go through a number of reasons why I think it’s a very, very, very different set of circumstances — where in South Africa there was no ability for any advocacy around these issues, that you didn’t have Black South Africans who were sitting in the South African Parliament at that time who were able to take up these questions in meaningful ways, in the way that you do with Palestinians in Parliament. And there are a number of things that I could point to as differences. But I understand and respect those who use– I have not used the term apartheid to describe what I’ve experienced there, but I understand why others use the term.

Juan Manuel Benítez
You started this conversation saying that you’re a really good casting director. Who do you think the Democratic Party should start casting for the next presidential election? But you see people already making moves, right? You see some elected officials getting married, and you know, like...

Patrick Gaspard
Oh, my God. That was so cynical.

Juan Manuel Benítez
Who do you think the Democratic Party should be casting?

Patrick Gaspard
I’m not...It’s gonna take me a while to recover from that.

Juan Manuel Benítez
For the next presidential election?

Patrick Gaspard
Well, first of all, I can’t let that pass. You know, all this stuff plays out. Elements of this conversation will pop up on social media. And I wanna say for the record here that the elected official I think you’re referencing who recently was married was Senator Cory Booker, who I consider to be a good dear friend. And I have been around the senator through his romantic journey over time. And I’m really pleased for him that he has found this level of partnership and deep love.

I think that if you want to run for the presidency of the United States, that you ought to be encouraged to do that. I will not forget the sensation that I had in 2012 immediately after we received the results that Barack Obama was defeating Mitt Romney and he’d be reelected. Shortly thereafter, and I mean hours after the result, I found myself in a small huddle about how Hillary Clinton needed to be next. And I remember at the time thinking, You know, I think that all of us will be stronger and that Hillary Clinton herself will be stronger if there is a robust, dynamic, well-litigated primary where every corner of the big tent that we have can feel as if their issues were aired and they had an opportunity to organize it. We’ll be stronger for it. Just like in 2008, Barack Obama was a stronger general-election candidate, I think ultimately a better president, because he had that tough contest and had to go hard and deep on these issues. So I hope that we’re going to have a field where many, many flowers are blooming.

Juan Manuel Benítez
Now, who are you watching right now?

Patrick Gaspard
If history repeats itself as it is wont to do, there will be a figure, at least one figure, who we are not talking about right now, who’s not popping up in Politico, who will somehow manage to break through on these little devices that we carry around. It’s not gonna be anybody we’re talking about now, but it’s going to be somebody who complicates the question of what the outcome should be. And that’s the moment that I’m excited about.

I think it’s a mistake for us to have early coronations, and a mistake to make big bets early in the contest, and you will not see me do that. I think that there are some good people that are running. And then at the same time, I think that it’s problematic that we’re still in a place where people are deciding how they enter, how they have a conversation, where they’re having a conversation based on the latest poll that they read.

You know, I can say I was disappointed and exasperated when I saw leading Democrats say things like, “You know, we really shouldn’t be talking about this person who has disappeared into the gulag in El Salvador. That’s a distraction from the things that matter right now.” And then, of course, when some of us got in the streets and we made the case and the poll numbers that Donald Trump has on immigration and all of these activities started shifting, then suddenly, politicians who had described all of what we were doing as a distraction were suddenly champions of democracy and this work. So, I am very, very, very cautious about an early closing around anyone that forecloses opportunities in the future.

Nicole Gelinas
So one area of tension within the Democratic Party, which you see in New York City, is traditional union-dependent Democrats where the unions rightly, from their perspective, advocate for better pay and better benefits for their own members, versus the DSA philosophy—Medicare for all, childcare for all, a basic level of benefits for everybody—where New York City public employees, they would cringe at Medicare for all, they would not deign to accept that lower level of benefits for themselves. Is there a way that Mamdani and/or others can bridge this tension?

Patrick Gaspard
You’re asking this question of a former officer of Local 1199 SEIU, and I was responsible for politics and public-policy making for that union. And every single day, we had to negotiate the tension between what we necessarily had to drive as outcomes at the collective bargaining table, in the conversations that we would have in Albany around hospital benefits and the wages of nursing home workers and at the city over the outcomes that we were trying to drive for low wage home care workers.

And I will tell you that for the 350,000 workers, mostly women, mostly pretty low wage that I was privileged to represent, they didn’t struggle with that in the way that I struggled with it and the way that our leadership struggled with it. They had a different sense of community unionism and they wanted us to figure out a way to lift the boat, not just for them but for their neighbors as well, for the person who was in the church pew with them. And they didn’t make the neat distinction that gets made by a lot of union leadership on this issue.

I think that nationally, the union movement has grown. And for the first time in decades, first time in two generations I’d say, we have a majority of Americans who are expressing favorable views about unions. And I think that’s partly owed to the reality that many unions have been able to break out of their own comfort spaces, and they’re driving a lot of organizing around the fight for a higher minimum wage floors for everyone, more inclusive, portable healthcare plans for people who are not in their union. So I think that you’re seeing a maturation of that movement that’s creating greater and more communion with non-associated, non-aligned, people who are not in collective bargaining unions.

I think that at some point– It was interesting to see how unions in this town were– Hmm. I want to be careful about the language I use. So there are a lot of institutions in this town that were exposed during the primary because of their limited reach, and an exaggeration of the power and influence that they have over voters in communities. I think that that exposure makes them more solicitous of folks who have grown movements based on some of the ideas that you laid out. And I think that we’ll see a closing of that policymaking space between union leadership and movement leadership on some of these questions. But at the end of the day, if you’re the head of DC37, if you’re the head of 32BJ, if you’re the head of the hotel workers, you are being paid based on the outcomes that you’re gonna be able to drive for your membership. But at the same time, your ability to drive those outcomes is also dependent on a sense of the mobilizing and organizing and political strength that you have beyond your membership, and so managing that politics is something they’re gonna be compelled to do.

Nicole Gelinas
You didn’t mention the UFT, but would you think that there’s a tension between UFT advocating to represent childcare workers potentially and the scope of benefits that Mamdani can offer? If he does this through contracting, he can get more flexibility and get to universal childcare more quickly than he can if he keeps his promise to pay them at parity with UFT—

Alyssa Katz
And actually just to add to that, he’s also made promises to use union labor for affordable housing construction. There’s sort-of an across-the-board proposition here, not just in child care.

Patrick Gaspard
So I think that’s a great question that only somebody from the Manhattan Institute might be able to pose. I think that this is the moment where I get to accomplish the second part of my drinking game and say I don’t know. I honestly just don’t know how that gets reconciled for the mayor-elect. I am clear about one thing about him which is: he knows the outcomes that he wants, but he does not have a religiosity about the path to that outcome. And I think that’s an important thing to understand and appreciate about him as he has to work and negotiate with other elected officials, with union leadership, and with constituencies to land the plane.

Ben Smith
But before you go, two sort of running–

Patrick Gaspard
You’re kicking me out. Oh my God. I barely touched my eggs…

Ben Smith
…We haven’t talked about the Donald Trump meeting. We all watched it in awe of some sort, or however we watched it. And you were, I know, talking to [Mamdani] before and after. I guess I’m curious, like, everybody knows the story. What should people understand about that moment? How do you understand it?

Patrick Gaspard
How do I understand that moment? OK, I’ll make one joke, which is, you know, Donald Trump has always wanted to be seated at the popular kid’s table in the lunchroom. That’s one thing that was clear about a young Donald Trump when he was obviously really well off, but he was that outer borough Queens kid who was trying to fit in with the Studio 54 crowd. He’s still very much, I think, that guy who really, really wants to be seated. He’s never gonna be the quarterback on the football team, but he wants to be able to party with the quarterback on the football team. That’s something we should continue to appreciate about Donald Trump, and it’s probably why Kash Patel’s gonna lose his job soon ‘cause, you know, he clearly is not at the popular kid’s table.

There are a couple of things I’d say meaningfully about that meeting. I thought the most revealing moment and the most important moment politically was when Donald Trump kind of sat up tall in his seat when he said, You know, when we had our private meeting, Zohran Mamdani showed me data that said that one out of every 10 of his voters had voted for me. He showed me all the places that I did well in the city and I performed really well in 2024, got more votes than any of you thought I was gonna get in New York. And he showed me that in all those places, he did really well as well.

And then Trump said the thing that I’ve been kind of consumed with since 2016 when I watched focus groups of people going into New Hampshire and they couldn’t decide if they were gonna primary for Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. And I was trying to understand what is it these two figures share, and it’s this notion that the game is rigged against me. And I’m not interested in supporting anyone who’s just gonna be doing the small bore work of reforming some things at the margins. I want somebody who’s gonna shake the system up.

And Donald Trump said out loud in the Oval Office that day, I think Bernie Sanders got a bad hand from the Democratic Party and that there are a lot of folks who support Bernie Sanders, who support me too, because they think this game is rigged. And it was really interesting to hear Donald Trump say that out loud. Then of course, all the reporting and all the coverage was focused on this love fest between them. But Donald Trump said a powerful political thing out loud in that conversation that I think at the end of the day speaks volumes about why he felt enough alignment with this young Democratic Muslim socialist that he was telling folks, Yeah, I’m a New York guy and I want everything to go well in New York, and I have some confidence that this person who is looking for the right outcomes for people who voted for me in New York as well, that I can work with him for some period of time. So, that was an important thing that gets lost in our politics.

I think one of the most important things that’s happened politically in the last 10 years in this country was the shocking response to the execution of the health insurance executive in Midtown Manhattan.

Myles Miller
Horrible, horrible response. A year ago today.

Patrick Gaspard
It was a year ago today. The horrific response to that was not a left or right response. It was an outsider versus insider response that I think we are inattentive to and not appreciating who’s driving a lot of the zeitgeist in the politics.

Ben Smith
On that question, you worked for a guy who was sort-of seen in one light as kind of an outsider movement candidate who built a big base, and on the other is a guy whose parents were very successful academics, went to elite institutions, and when he became president, I think really turned out to be somebody with quite establishmentarian instincts who was part of a kind of continualist elite governing structure. And I wonder, you know, Mamdani also, through one lens, he’s deep cadre of the Democratic Socialists. And through the other, he’s an Upper West Side kid who came up in through these elite institutions. And I think, which way is this gonna break? Like, it seems like it could go either way.

Patrick Gaspard
I think that you just described so many people who’ve been elected to office in America over the last 250 years. I mean, I think you just described just about every Republican president for the last— in our lifetimes, by the way. Including the current one and the previous one. There’s nothing unique. Like the dynamic you just described is nothing unique to these figures at all, Ben.

That is important to understand. I think that Franklin Roosevelt, who was…I would— You said that Barack Obama’s the product of elite spaces; he’s not at all. He grew up without his father. And let’s not describe his mother as a successful academic. This was somebody who struggled economically, socially throughout her life.

I think that Barack Obama is an institutionalist. I wouldn’t describe him as an elitist. He’s an institutionalist, and he believes in the bedrock promise that we’re gonna work towards dignified outcomes for all through the work of these institutions that have a particular bent, orientation, and mandate. That’s who he was before he ran. He took up the promise of that.

Josh Greenman
Is Mamdani institutionalist?

Patrick Gaspard
I think that Mamdani I would describe as more of an insurgent than Barack Obama was — I think instinctively more of an insurgent. But I do think that he does not run for mayor in New York if he doesn’t have faith in institutions. Though he thinks that those institutions are in need of significant reform, significant transformation in the moment we find ourselves in. Where there is a crisis of economic dislocation in this country. He feels that really strongly.

And Zohran Mamdani probably had a different point of view on the set of policies that we needed to enact coming out of the financial crisis in 2008, 2009, than Barack Obama had. Like very, very different orientation on those issues. So I think Franklin Roosevelt was the ultimate elitist. Not an institutionalist. Franklin Roosevelt was an elitist. And I think that Franklin Roosevelt appreciated the pressures that the system, the institutions were under at that time. They would not be able to sustain themselves under that pressure with the economic polarization that we had, with hollowed out communities, with a dust bowl that existed in the heart of the country, without transformation, without reform, without the ability of elites to partner effectively to change the public compact.

I think that in many ways, we are still living in the shadow of that compromise and negotiation between elites and what adds up to the public good that started on, didn’t exist before the Roosevelt presidency. I think folks don’t understand how America was governed more by powerful interests before the Roosevelt presidency than it is even in this moment that we live in now. Folks, they don’t understand history at all. But we’re still in the shadow of that compromise that was litigated then, that we’re still making some sense of now.

And Zohran holds up Fiorello La Guardia as the embodiment of that and Vito Marcantonio and that whole history.

Harry Siegel
Touching on a lot of that, I see what Mamdani and Trump had in common, going back to Trump’s 2016 run, is gesturing across the table like this, and saying, How much worse could I be? And I think a lot of people who voted for him but weren’t totally on board with all of his ideas looked at the moment and the alternatives and said, Let’s give the kid a chance, are also concerned that he may well end up as the dog who caught the car, so to speak.

That as with Dinkins, in fact, that he’s gonna be taking power at a moment when the pressurizing forces hitting New York are gonna be extremely intense. And people aren’t fully aware of those pressures in part because his appeal has been so successful. I mean, he met with us when he was at 1% in the polls maybe. He said— Ben [Max] I think asked, What’s the number one function of a mayor? And he said, I’m gonna be a messenger. And I understand that, partly it’s, you’re running for mayor, that’s a campaign-phase thing to say. But for people who are hopeful for him but deeply concerned about the moment New York is at, how should they be gauging the next year? As he’s spending down his political capital and all that in this point.

Patrick Gaspard
I feel as if you just got five questions for the price of one in there, Harry, which is really impressive.

Ben Max
He always does.

Patrick Gaspard
I gotta take you bargain shopping with me during this Christmas season.

Harry Siegel
It’s a $12 Goodwill suit.

Patrick Gaspard
See? I’m impressed, brother. Look, a couple of things. Huge difference between the decisions that voters made around Donald Trump in 2016 versus the decisions that I think voters made in New York right now, in 2025, whatever year we’re in. I think that there was more affirmation here in this contest and in the votes that were cast than a kind of negative mobilization that existed in the 2016 campaign. Like Donald Trump was decidedly the anti-Hillary, somehow strangely the anti-elite candidate in that election as well. But there was something else at play that I’m not gonna let anybody ever, ever forget, and I’m gonna compare it to 1989 since you raised the Dinkins point.

So when…Donald Trump runs in 2016, he starts running in 2014 with the birth certificate. The Kenya stuff. Barack Obama’s not really one of us. He’s not really a citizen. All of that stuff starts first. He’s fomenting all of that stuff in the public. And it’s also a time when Donald Trump is making an argument against Reince Priebus and the Republican establishment. We forget that before Donald Trump started beating Democrats, he had to first bring the institution of the Republican Party to heel. We quickly forget that for a lot of convenient reasons.

A lot of that was around race. Reince Priebus and the Republican Party said, We just got our asses handed to us yet again in an election where unemployment’s at almost double digits. How did we lose to this guy again? We’re gonna have to do something to attract women. We’re gonna have to do something to attract Latino voters. We’re gonna have to use rhetoric that will make us more inviting to African-American voters. Reince Priebus put that in a memo. And Donald Trump looked at the memo and he flushed it down the toilet. He said, You’re wrong. There are a lot of disaffected white voters in this country who are open to a very different kind of message, who are gonna rally around that message. And I’m going to articulate it for them and to them and I’m gonna do that in a way that’s gonna grow the pie for us. We don’t have to be involved in the work of persuasion of those voters. We have to get our voters who feel a kind of cultural and a demographic existentialism in Ohio and Iowa, a lot of other places, to come and understand the value proposition that we’re offering as their last best chance to end an American carnage.

That’s what his argument was. It’s a very different thing than what just happened here in New York. And I’d also say that in 1989 and in 1993, I’d remind some of you who are old enough, that there were neighborhoods in New York then that people like me could not go to. Which is an astonishing thing when I say that to some of the inspiring young people who I talked to in Zohran’s campaign and in his transition. They have a hard time wrapping their brain around the reality that there were places, like Bensonhurst, I could give a long list, where I would not be caught in the daytime, let alone in the evening. And there was a price to be paid for it.

David Dinkins won an election by a little less than two percentage points in that environment. He lost an election by a little less than two percentage points in that environment at a time when all of that racial hostility was being stoked by his opposition and by a person who led a police riot and led a plan for Staten Island secession. All these things. So there’s a different proposition and equation that you had to account for in those instances and in governing in those moments.

I think that there’s something else that’s available to Zohran Mamdani that is a good deal more of an openness in this city right now. And that there are people who disagreed with him on a set of policies, who may have some ideological discomfort with where he stands, but who are proud New York nationalists, who are coming to the table right now and who are saying, You know what? I didn’t agree with you. I didn’t vote for you. I wrote a million dollar check for a Super PAC that then superimposed your face over 9/11 in a pretty horrific way, in a pretty racist way. But you know what? You won. And so now I’m prepared to come to the table to have a conversation about housing and affordability and what we do about it. And you are right in your critique that people like me have not paid enough attention to this issue and we want to do something about it now. I think there’s a thing that we can do to help on improving outcomes in the public education system. Maybe there are ways that we integrate AI effectively. All the things that we want to be part of innovating on with you for the betterment of this city.

I just think that the environment is so very different than what I experienced as a 22-year-old when I walked into City Hall with David Dinkins and Bill Lynch and that whole crew back then. Where people were not prepared to work with him and were just kind of like sharpening their knives for the next toxic campaign three or four years later. I’m not feeling that in this moment.

Now, on how he responded to you, that he was gonna be, what was the word that he used?

Harry Siegel
The dog who caught the car.

Patrick Gaspard
No, no, no.

Others
Messenger.

Patrick Gaspard
The messenger.

Harry Siegel
Oh, the messenger. I’m sorry, go on.

Patrick Gaspard
Look, I don’t know, I have not listened to that moment. I’ll go back and listen to his interview with you. I don’t know how he meant that and I don’t know what else he said, but I think that somebody who reappoints Jessica Tisch, appoints Dean Fuleihan as his first deputy mayor, attracts into his transition team people who have had public disagreements with him on policies across the board, and who’s saying clearly that I’m gonna build a team that is leaning hard into delivery and excellence and I’m gonna be a progressive that’s focused on outcomes and not sound bites. I think that makes it clear that yes, he’s an effective messenger, but that’s not why he ran for the job and it’s not what he sees as the superpower that he has now that he’s gonna have all this executive authority vested in him.

Ben Smith
Thank you, Patrick.

Patrick Gaspard
No, thank you.