Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show is

Tevi Troy. Tevi is a senior fellow at the bipartisan policy center, a former deputy secretary of

health and human services, and a presidential historian, and somebody who's been writing about

politics and policy for City Journal for some time now,

his most recent book is called Fight House, Rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump,

and his latest contribution to City Journal, which just appeared online and in our brand new January

released issue is called the de Blasio debacle. It appears in our forthcoming

winter issue, as I mentioned, and it is available online. So, Tebby, you know, thanks very much for

joining us. Good, good to talk with you as we kick off the new year. Thanks for having me, and I

will just say to the listeners,

while the piece is indeed available online,

if you get the City Journal print edition,

it has some great artwork that goes with it.

Yes, that's true.

So your piece, it's an evaluation of Bill de Blasio's tenure,

eight-year tenure as mayor of New York City,

which ended this past January 1st. So he is just left office. But you don't begin in the

piece with de Blasio. Instead, you look at the predecessors of the mayor, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, and trying to show the various

ways that de Blasio undid the progress that happened under his predecessors. So why don't we start

there, too? What was the state of the city in 2014 when Bill de Blasio first took office?

What had been its trajectory since the 90s?

...