Editorial: Bill de Blasio for Mayor

The city’s next Mayor will confront several challenges in areas that directly affect municipal workers, foremost among them a public-school system that has failed to properly educate too many of those who come from the city’s poorest neighborhoods, Federal monitoring of the Police Department resulting from a judge’s finding of constitutional violations in the execution of the stop-and-frisk program, and a contract logjam under which it has become the norm for employees to be working for three or four years under expired wage agreements.

Of the two major candidates to succeed Mayor Bloomberg, we believe Bill de Blasio is the one best suited to address the current administration’s failings in these areas, despite his lacking the proven executive experience of his rival, Joe Lhota. On their merits, however, the difference between the two candidates is not nearly so great as the polls have suggested. The wide gap is less the result of a huge registration advantage among Democrats—the last five mayoral elections have been won, after all, by Rudy Giuliani and Mr. Bloomberg, who got two terms on the GOP line and the last as an Independent—than the quality of the campaigns each has run.