After years on the sidelines, New York's liberals retaking control

“It’s seen as an opportunity by progressives to do something different,” said Douglas Muzzio, an expert on New York City politics and a professor at Baruch College at the City University of New York. “People projected their frustration, their anxiety, their expectations, their dreams on Bill. In that sense it wasn’t dissimilar from the 2008 election of Obama. Now he’s got to deliver.”…

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Earlier this month, the City Council took the rare step of rejecting a rezoning of Manhattan’s East Side, delivering a blow to Bloomberg and developers who had forcefully backed the plan.

Then, the city’s mass-transit agency announced it was cutting its planned fare increases for 2015 and 2017 by nearly half. The agency cited an improved fiscal outlook, but Gene Russianoff, a lawyer and the spokesman for the New York Public Interest Research Group’s Straphangers Campaign, said he saw the move as reflecting a changed political climate.

“They realized in the current political atmosphere it’s unsustainable to raise the fare a lot every year,” Russianoff said. “Bloomberg’s attitude was, ‘Everything goes up.’ I think de Blasio will play it differently.”

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