A New Generation Steps In — Now Comes the Hard Part

By Roger Paradiso

There was a moment during this year’s mayoral race when something felt different. Watching Zohran Mamdani on the trail, I thought: This smells like Clinton. This smells like Obama. Not in imitation, but in that unmistakable way a generational political figure announces himself. After decades of stale, transactional politics, here was a candidate who felt and sounded like fresh air.

Young voters had been tuning out civic life for years. Disillusionment became apathy, apathy became silence. And then along came Zohran. His cadence, his clarity, his insistence on speaking to the people who had stopped expecting anything from City Hall—those things mobilized the very voters we’d nearly lost.

Elections, however, are the easy part. Winning by a healthy margin gives you a mandate, but a mandate is only useful if you can convert energy into policy. Now Mayor Mamdani must confront the great American immovable object: bureaucracy—council paralysis, legal red tape, and the lobbyists who prefer the status quo. The question before him is simple: Can he make government move?

As Barack Obama reminded us, “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time… We are the change that we seek.” Mandates mean nothing without results. And New Yorkers, especially the young and the working class, want results: affordable housing, reliable public transit, and the ability to buy fresh food without sacrificing half a paycheck.

Mamdani has already floated ideas bold enough to unsettle the comfortable—free buses, real affordability, city-run markets offering low-cost produce. If he delivers even two out of three in his first term, he’ll earn a second on achievements, not slogans.

This is New York, a city that pretends to worship capitalism but runs on the labor of those who sweep the streets, stock the bodegas, and keep the lights on. For every billionaire, there are hundreds of thousands living paycheck to paycheck. The balance has been lost. And as Scripture warns, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” You don’t need theology to see the truth in that.

We’ve watched a “criminal White House”—from Trump to Musk and the other grifters—normalize corruption on a national scale. New Yorkers expect better. They expect a mayor who can clean up the swamp on the Hudson.

Mamdani’s young supporters believe he can save them. If he saves them, he may save the rest of us. Because he will be mayor to every New Yorker, across boroughs and bank accounts alike.

For now, New Yorkers are watching. And hoping. Because we have seen enough candidates promise change only to fail to deliver. Mamdani has a chance to be different—a generational figure in a city that still sets the tone for the country.

All he has to do now is deliver.