With an average speed of under eight miles per hour, New York’s buses are still the slowest in the country, and while I’ve seen many passengers ride without paying, the fares remain unchanged. As for the rent, it is still “too damn high.” But as nearly every commentary on Mamdani’s first 100 days in office noted, from the laudatory account in The American Prospect to the grudging graders at the New York Post, on universal childcare the administration has made real progress. As the mayor likes to put it, “on Day 8 of our administration,” he and Governor Kathy Hochul announced a $1.7 billion plan to expand childcare provision across the state.

Skeptics have accurately noted that only $73 million of those funds are directed at the city this year, allowing just 2,000 places for 2-year-olds. Another 12,000 spots (less than a 10th of the city’s eligible population) are earmarked for 2027, which is when the state’s commitment ends. Even so, this was “a significant step on an issue Mamdani’s critics were quick to dismiss as a pipe dream,” as I wrote at the time. The mayor’s announcement (on his 99th day) that the default model for 2–K childcare provision will be for the full day (8 am to 6 pm) and year-round—unlike the current program, which typically ends at 3 pm and leaves out summers, school breaks, and holidays—was more good news for the city’s working parents.

Progress has been far more halting on free buses—which Mamdani recently acknowledged won’t happen this year—and the rent freeze, which is up to the city’s Rent Guidelines Board (whose nine members, appointed by the mayor, are expected to vote on it in June). He has also had to postpone the promised opening of subsidized, city-owned grocery stores; to renege on his promise to expand CityFHEPS (New York’s program of direct rent subsidies); and to drastically scale back the creation of a new $1.1 billion agency, the Department of Community Safety, intended to “prevent violence before it happens by taking a public-health approach to safety.”

Instead, the mayor’s proposed budget includes only what his finance commissioner, Sherif Soliman, described in an interview with The Nation as a “down payment on the capital” needed for municipal grocery stores, and a placeholder Office of Community Safety, allocated a mere $260 million (all of it from existing programs) and a staff of two. And while candidate Mamdani pledged to drop the Adams administration’s appeal of a court ruling ordering the city to comply with a 2023 law expanding the housing-voucher program, Mayor Mamdani, perhaps mindful of CityFHEPS’s ballooning costs (already at $1.7 billion for the current fiscal year, and projected to double every two years), is still litigating.

In the time-honored tradition of mayors facing a budget pinch, Mamdani also proposed cutting nearly $30 million from the city’s libraries—a direct contradiction of his campaign pledge to increase the budget line for libraries and “end the practice of using library funding as a bargaining chip in budget negotiations.”

Yet the welter of articles assessing Mamdani’s first 100 days revealed remarkably little about the reality of city government. Instead, they offered a full-spectrum display, from Jacobin to the New York Post, of observer bias. The phenomenon seemed especially acute at The New York Times, whose attitude has shifted from editorial fearmongering during the campaign to watchful worrying to torturously evenhanded assessments of the mayor’s agenda-in-progress.

I blame Fiorello La Guardia. Just as no one had thought to assess a president’s first 100 days before 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt prodded an emergency session of Congress to pass landmark legislation laying the groundwork for the New Deal, New York’s mayors once enjoyed longer learning curves. That is, until La Guardia delivered a 1934 national radio broadcast celebrating his own first 100 days in office, which he mostly spent cleaning up after decades of Tammany Hall corruption: “bulging payrolls choked with useless, politically sponsored supernumeraries.”

The graft of Mamdani’s predecessor, however, was strictly small-time, like a cop who doesn’t pay for his doughnuts. Stopping the city from paying to defend Eric Adams from a sexual-assault suit was sensible, but not the stuff of heroic headlines. Similarly, the New Deal–scale expectations evoked by the 100-days timeline does scant justice to a roster of accomplishments under Mamdani that have been more demonstrations of intent than a revolution in government.

“Low-hanging fruit” is how the Fordham political-science professor Christina Greer described them on the FAQ NYC podcast. “It’s a snack,” she added, “while people are waiting for the mayor to do big things.”

When it comes to the biggest thing of all—taxing the rich to pay for the kind of municipal renaissance associated with Hoan or La Guardia—New Yorkers may have some time to wait. Hochul, though happy to work with Mamdani on delivering universal childcare, has made it clear that she has no appetite for raising income taxes—a prudent stance for any incumbent in an election year.

And while it may frustrate some of his supporters, the same can be said for Mamdani’s refusal to go after the governor on the issue—or even to show his face at the “Albany Takeover” rally intended to pressure Hochul. Without Mamdani on the bill—and on a very cold day in February—the rally attracted a mere 1,500 activists to a venue that could have held nearly three times that number. As what my late friend Jane McAlevey, The Nation’s former strikes correspondent, used to call a “structure test,” this was not a success.

Mamdani’s determination to avoid fights he can’t win was already evident on Day 36 of the new era, when he endorsed Hochul’s reelection bid—and probably helped scuttle Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado’s anemic primary challenge. Mamdani also directly intervened to end Brooklyn Council member Chi Ossé’s bid to primary House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. And he famously has forged a remarkably cordial relationship with Donald Trump, appealing to the president’s vanity with a fake newspaper to solicit federal support for a Queens housing project, and seldom uttering a harsh word about the New Yorker in the White House.

On a much smaller scale, the same dynamic seems to be at work in Mamdani’s relationship with Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. The politician who’d tweeted “NO to fake cuts—defund the police” five years earlier angered some supporters when he decided to retain Tisch, who had been appointed to the office by Eric Adams. But keeping Tisch not only served to neutralize Mamdani’s past comments as an issue; it also reassured some segments of the city’s permanent government that he was a socialist they “can do business” with. An heir to the $10 billion Loews family fortune (which started with hotels and theaters and now encompasses insurance, natural-gas pipelines, and a major share in the New York Giants), Tisch clearly doesn’t need the job. And as she noted when she agreed to stay on, she and the mayor don’t “agree on everything.”

In particular, Mamdani and his commissioner disagree over his campaign promise to abolish the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, a militarized unit notorious for its heavy-handed policing of Black Lives Matter and pro-Palestinian protests. They also disagree about the mayor’s pledge to eliminate the NYPD gang database, which candidate Mamdani had condemned as a “vast dragnet.” The situation was sufficiently confusing for the mayor to inform reporters from the Times that while “our police commissioner runs the N.Y.P.D., our police commissioner reports to me.” Deeper fault lines between the two are likely to emerge over the way that Tisch, who once served as the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for information technology, continues to embrace what the Polis Project calls “a system of racialized surveillance [and] tech-integrated policing.” For the moment, however, Mamdani and Tisch both seem resolved to get along.

All this makes the battles the mayor has chosen more significant. Representative Nydia Velázquez, the first member of Congress to publicly endorse Mamdani’s candidacy, was furious when, just days after his inauguration, he declined to support her chosen successor in New York’s Seventh Congressional District, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. Instead, Mamdani backed his former Assembly colleague Claire Valdez—a fellow DSA activist—in the primary to replace the retiring Brooklyn Democrat. “Honeymoons are short,” warned Velazquez, long the most powerful voice of New York’s Hispanic left.

Reynoso, frequently described as “a progressive,” is not a DSA member. (As for Valdez, ever since she told me she took the oath of office on a copy of No Shortcuts, McAlevey’s organizer’s bible, I’ve been unable to view her objectively.) But the increasingly bitter contest will serve as a test of Mamdani’s clout.

As will his endorsement of Brad Lander’s campaign to unseat Representative Dan Goldman in New York’s 10th Congressional District. Here, the reasoning seems clearer: Without Lander’s hechsher, the torrent of baseless accusations of antisemitism directed at Mamdani during the campaign might have done far more damage. And though some observers expected Mamdani to appoint the City Hall veteran Lander as his first deputy, that could have diluted the mayor’s authority. Besides, Lander will make a great congressman—if he wins, that is.

As an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, Goldman is one of the richest members of Congress and has no need of AIPAC funding. But he remains happy to accept the lobby’s endorsement, though judging by his campaign literature, Goldman—a raging moderate and former prosecutor—is now working hard to burnish his left credentials. Here, too, Mamdani has entered a public test of strength.

We won’t really know the full reach of Mamdani’s clout before the end of June. That’s when the city must agree on a balanced budget. The mayor’s preliminary proposal, released in February, had many veteran budget watchers shaking their heads—initially over the way he professed shock at the scale of a deficit that Lander, his successor Mark Levine, and state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli had all predicted. Nor were many impressed by Mamdani’s initial negotiating gambit with Albany: threatening to raise property taxes if the governor didn’t agree to let him raise income taxes on the rich.

It wasn’t just the governor, who reiterated her view that the city—which had already downsized the estimates of its budget gap from $12 billion to $7 billion in a few weeks and then, thanks to a $1.5 billion lagniappe from Hochul, down to $5.4 billion—had no need to raise taxes. City Council Speaker Julie Menin said significant property-tax increases “should not be on the table whatsoever.” Menin also condemned Mamdani’s proposal to dip into the city’s rainy-day reserves as fiscally irresponsible. And since the mayor declined to perform his traditional role of putting city spending on the chopping block, Menin and the council rushed to fill the gap, offering a remarkably detailed proposal requiring neither major service cuts nor significant tax increases.

Mamdani hit back hard, slamming the speaker’s proposal as “unrealistic” gimmickry that relied on “double-counting previously identified savings, overestimating revenues, and exaggerating debt-service savings”—some of which is doubtless true. But since the mayor has yet to identify more than $245 million of the $1.7 billion he’s already counted in his own proposal, he may not be in the strongest position to criticize.

“The budget is the mayor’s first major foray into governance,” a veteran of numerous budgets who’s no longer in city government told me. “And this was handled like politics.”

Yet Mamdani shows no signs of backing down. Indeed, his social-media team released a video aimed directly at Menin, while an obliging news outlet got even more personal, focusing on Menin’s “quiet fortune” and her wealthy real-estate-developer husband.

Conflict between a mayor and a City Council speaker is nothing new—and given Menin’s support for Israel, clashes with the strongly pro-Palestinian Mamdani are probably inevitable. But Menin’s bill, which Mamdani declined to support, passed with a 44–5 majority. Still, since only the mayor has authority over revenue estimates—the council’s remit extends only to proposed spending—he has strong cards yet to play.

The charge that Mamdani is better on performance than policy also misses something important. Every small act of repair, every action to lift up tenants, or workers, or immigrants, is also a visible means of answering the fundamental question of politics: Which side are you on?

It probably makes more sense to view Mamdani’s everything-everywhere-all-at-once style of governing as the 21st-century version of what the writer Sidney Blumenthal called “the permanent campaign.” Instead of endorsing the traditional shift from “politics” to “governance,” Blumenthal observed that campaigns—especially insurgent ones—can never let up.

This was a lesson that Barack Obama—who would go on to disband Obama for America, the movement that had put him into office—never learned. Has Mamdani? In March, the Times ran an admiring profile of the mayor, “a politician who can be a ruthless operator.” The story cited instances of what it approvingly described as “a pragmatic and cunning politician” unafraid of “delivering a sharp elbow to old friends and compromising his ideological purity as a democratic socialist.”

The problem, as my friend Corbin Trent, one of the founders of Justice Democrats, wrote recently, is that “Mamdani is being ruthless in exactly the right direction for the wrong goal. He has power…[but] he is just using it to protect the people who stand between us and the change he ran on.” As Trent concedes, Mamdani has enormous charm—a form of political capital. The trap, he writes, is believing “that if you are careful enough about managing your relationships with the people who currently have power, you can eventually get them to share it.”

If it has shown nothing else, Mamdani’s feud with Julie Menin shows he is willing to fight. What we don’t yet know—and probably won’t know even after this year’s budget circus strikes its tent—is what he’s willing to fight for. But as the mayor set out his vision of pothole politics that night in Queens, it was just possible to see the outlines of an answer.