The Thirteenth Episode of The Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

This is the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast. I’m Dave.

The Mayor of New York City, the only city in the world, has a podcast. The only person listening to it is a dog walker in Queens named Dave.

If this is your first time listening, thank you for checking this out and I hope you like it. I’d recommend listening to this series in order from the beginning, but if you want to listen to this first, who am I to tell you otherwise. Today, I’m talking about the 13th episode of mayor Eric Adams’ podcast, the Get Stuff Done Cast, titled S1 E13 Defending Democracy: Showing Up and Engaging with the American Voter, released July 31st 2023.

Adams is interviewing Representative Steven Horsford, a member of the House of Representatives from Nevada and the Mayor of Enfield, North Carolina, Mondale Robinson.

Adams says he met Horsford by chance when a friend of his told him to give Horsford a call, which is not what the term ‘by chance’ is typically used to communicate. Adams asks his usual vague ‘tell me everything that’s ever happened to bring you to this point’ opener, and Horsford obliges, telling him about his youth, including the tragic loss of his father in a shooting when Horsford was only 19.

“That’s a powerful snippet,” says the mayor extremely normally.

Horsford is now chair of the Congressional Black Caucus in the House of Representatives. He’s working hard on the issues and he knows the mayor is also working hard on the issues. Everyone’s working on the issues.

The mayor says we need to dam every river that leads to gun violence. For example he says 30% of the prison population has dyslexia, so if we screen for it, and prevent it, we can dam that river.

Screening for dyslexia doesn’t prevent it? The mayor is dyslexic? He must know this? It may help get people care, if there’s resources for their care, but the mayor is cutting most services, so…

Also, this sorta implies that dyslexia causes people to become violent.

Horsford talks about how he ran a large culinary jobs program before entering public service, and the mayor says he knows how important jobs are and says he wants his team to meet with Horsford, and talk about his job training efforts, so that they can learn from him, and Horsford agrees. Interview evidently over, and it seems like it could have been an email.

Music plays and we switch to the other interview, with Mayor Robinson from Enfield North Carolina, which wikipedia tells me is a town of about 1,900 residents in the north of the state.

Adams also asks for Robinson’s “trajectory to politics”. Robinson says that being born Black in America he didn’t have a choice but to be political. He talks about growing up poor, and how the criminal justice system locked his father into poverty by saddling him with a felony.

His town is 90% black, and poor. Outhouses were widely in use until the 90s, despite being right down the road from Raleigh.

He went into the Marines, didn’t find it was a place for social change. He went home and ran a progressive campaign for mayor endorsing universal basic income.

Robinson tells Adams that Enfield is the 8th poorest town in the country. Adams responds that this is why storytelling is so important.

Robinson and Adams talk about the importance of encouraging Black men to vote, which Robinson has created an organization to work on. They don’t really talk about the specifics of the program that Robinson created, and if they said its name, I missed it. They don’t talk about its metrics of success, how many people it has reached, etc. But it’s important, certainly. It’d just be nice to know what they’re doing and how, what they need, perhaps how I can help or donate, but this is an Eric Adams podcast, so that’s not on the offing.

Adams says the Congressional Black Caucus is also working on this, and Horsford responds that they are, meaning he’s been sitting here quietly for the last 5 minutes? I sorta assumed these were two different interviews since otherwise Adams would have interviewed one guy while making the other sit there doing nothing, before reversing roles, but apparently that’s exactly what he did, and I suppose, to be fair, I’m the fool for forgetting that Eric Adams will never do something normally.

Horsford says that our democracy is under attack, but that we, the people, have the power, and he gives a website we can check out, democracyforthepeople dot org. It’s not in the show notes of Adams’ podcast, but fear not, I went and took a look and, with the understanding that this was recorded in July, and I viewed the website in November, the organizing toolkit can’t be downloaded and the events listed on the site all took place in July and August.

The interviewees both make good points and I don’t doubt their commitment to this cause, and it’s one I find very compelling and important. Mayor Robinson in particular talks about specific ways he wants to help, job trainings that he’s doing with people with felony convictions to get them good jobs in end of life care, for example. They want to expand this program to NYC and are hoping the mayor will help.

The thing I’m struggling with is that this feels… There’s a lot of talking, particularly from Adams, about talking. Like saying that they need to meet people where they are and talk about why they’re not voting and give them a reason to vote, but not saying what that reason is. Adams keeps talking about the need to convince people to vote but doesn’t really seem to understand that, yes there are absolutely intentional, systemic barriers that prevent people, particularly Black people from voting, and there are also many people who are simply disengaged from voting, who don’t believe it does anything to help them. When talking about this latter group, Adams seems to miss that the people who aren’t voting by choice may not be voting because of the policies Adams is promoting.

What I mean is: there’s three guys in this room. Adams, a centerist, possibly center right, former cop, former republican, mayor of a huge city, we’ve talked about him a bit here and there. Then there’s Horsford, a member of the House of Representatives, whose district includes parts of Vegas. He votes with the Democratic party 100% of the time in the House, but hasn’t talked at all about what he’d like to see the party do next. The House is quite possibly the most dysfunctional it has been since prior to the Civil War, and seems incapable of passing serious legislation. Horsford doesn’t currently represent the party in control of that body, because the Democratic party badly flubbed its efforts to hold the House, despite historic turnout for the incumbent’s party in the 22 midterms. Oh also, Horsford, while married, had an affair with a 21 year old intern of Harry Reid’s when he was 36. Can’t say if that’s what ended his marriage, but he’s not married anymore. And then we have Robinson, the a mayor of the 8th poorest town in the country who ran as a progressive and trounced his competition running on a platform that included universal basic income. Only one of them actually articulates a position that most people would find exciting and successfully turned out a landslide. But he’s from a struggling town of 1900 people, it’s not like most people in the country will ever have the opportunity to vote for someone running on his platform, unless the other two guys in the room, and people like them, start advocating it.

So, what’s supposed to excite voters? What are these guys doing to save our democracy? Aside from the fact that they agree it’s under attack, and that the people have the power to protect it, have they identified the danger? For what do they want people to vote? If not that, then what do they want people to vote against?

A lot of people make a lot of paper with a downstream mindset, pulling people out of the river, says Adams. He thinks they should meet people where they are. I am not sure his metaphor makes sense, since once people are in a river, pulling them out is how you meet them where they are, but I take his point that politicians often fail to meet voters where they are, and fail to convince them to vote.

Also around this point the mayor says that people tell him all the time that his life story can’t be true, and honestly if everyone is calling you a liar maybe it’s time to look inward and figure out why they might be doing that.

It’s here that Robinson makes some more interesting points, ones that might excite voters: when black people say they want public safety, he says, they typically mean something different than white people, who say it wanting more cops and more policing of black people. But black people are saying they want to be policed the way white people are, and that requires less cops. Adams, who spends a lot of time telling white New Yorkers how many more cops he’s going to get them laughs nervously and moves the conversation along by saying that he’s been told, ha ha, that racism is over, right, how ridiculous don’t we all want to talk about how silly that is and stop talking about cops going away?

Robinson counters by saying as soon as the town voted to take it down, he got a tractor driver and had him knock down the confederate statue in his town himself. Hell yeah.

The mayor then basically says well, good podcast everyone. And that’s more or less it.

I don’t know, man. Is there something to vote for here? Something to energize people to turn out? These guys have all won elections, but as a member of the house, a mayor of a huge city, and a mayor of a tiny one, as a practical matter, they’ve done so more or less locally. For Adams, turnout in the mayoral election, which took place in 2021 was 23% of eligible voters. By contrast, almost 60% of New Yorkers voted in the 2020 presidential election. Robinson’s got my attention, I’ll keep an eye out for any national moves he makes, but by my count, at the moment anyway, there’s something like a thousand people who are eligible to vote for him in the entire country. And Horsford doesn’t appear to have won his elections particularly handily, and actually lost once as an incumbent. Also his behavior with Reid’s staffer sorta reinforces my policy of avoiding voting for cis-het men whenever possible, not that I’m planning on moving to or really ever being in Vegas, so that’s not really a concern for his political future.

If I wasn’t an engaged voter, I’m not sure I’d feel less frustrated by the process, if I was unlucky enough to somehow be listening to this stupid podcast of the mayor’s.

Anyway, quick recap on what the mayor was up to between July 21st, 2023, when the episode before this one was released, and the release of this episode on July 31st. God the release schedule of this podcast is so strange. He’ll go weeks at a time without doing one and then two in 10 days. It’s just so unlike the mayor to be erratic. To do this I lean heavily on the reporting of two fantastic New York City outlets, The City, and Hell Gate, both of which I support financially, and I encourage you to do so as well. Links to their websites are in the show notes.

The city’s right to shelter law, which is exactly what it sounds like, failed to compel the city to find shelter for people requesting it. At the main intake for migrants arriving to the city, the Roosevelt Hotel, many found themselves sleeping on the street, without AC or bathrooms, overnight. Adams blamed the number of migrants, and not the weird contractor DocGo, which the city had been using for Covid testing services (before that, in the 2010s it was a private ambulance and urgent care company called Ambulnz), and which was awarded the migrant care contract without a bidding process. It’s a 432 million dollar contract, and apparently that did not buy the logistical ability to process a few dozen migrant arrivals, so, for at least one night, the city was in violation of a basic human right that it has identified.

At an outdoor press conference given by the mayor, a woman walking by yelled “Fuck you, asshole, you’re fucking with homeless people you dick”, to which the mayor responded, to the assembled press: "She said I'm messing with homeless people, you know that? One should be happy if someone wants to make love to them."

What. There’s all kinds of things one can immediately say about how inappropriate, kinda uncomfortable, potentially sexist and obviously gross that is to say, but also, just: what?

At a different press conference, the mayor said something that went relatively uncommented on: “From monkeypox to COVID to asylum seekers, this is a moment where leadership matters.”

And it goes by fast, but two of those things are viruses that kill people and one of those things is people, and if one were inclined to be uncharitable to the mayor, one could note that it may reveal something about him that’s not great that he did that, and that certainly there’s a very dark history of relating refugee populations to viruses and vermin.

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https://stuffstuffcastcast.wixsite.com/stufftranscripts

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See you next time.