Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter.
As a voter in the New York City mayoral race, I keep thinking about the rats and the garbage cans. The story of the election, as generally framed, is that Andrew Cuomo has come down to New York from the suburbs and back from political exile to offer his own hard-nosed, practical experience as an alternative to a field of candidates who are some combination of too idealistic, too leftist, or too unseasoned to handle the serious business of running a great and difficult metropolis. The city, he declared in Wednesday's mayoral debate, is in a "management crisis"—as well as a "fiscal crisis" and a "societal crisis"—and he is the one person who is prepared and willing to take on "dysfunctional city management."