Mamdani’s own supporters have turned on him. Who could have seen that coming?

There’s an old problem in politics that never seems to go away. You can promise people the moon, but once they elect you, some of them will complain that you haven’t delivered Mars.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is discovering this firsthand. And judging by what I heard on Thursday’s Rush Hour, the honeymoon with some of his most enthusiastic supporters is getting rather chilly.

We opened the show with the sounds of protesters heckling Mamdani as he made his way to a Palestinian vigil on October 7, the anniversary of the Hamas massacre in Israel. It was an extraordinary scene, not simply because a mayor was being confronted by angry demonstrators, but because some of those demonstrators came from the very political movement that helped put him in office.

Imagine running as the great progressive hope, only to discover that your progressive supporters think you’re insufficiently progressive. It’s like being expelled from the vegetarian club for eating a carrot that once stood too close to a hamburger.

What made the moment especially troubling to me was the occasion. October 7 is a date that should immediately bring to mind the Israelis murdered by Hamas, the hostages dragged into Gaza and the families whose lives were shattered. Instead, Mamdani’s appearance at a Palestinian vigil became another political confrontation.

When a reporter asked whether he would change anything about his anniversary statement, Mamdani spoke of the pain October 7 caused New Yorkers. But he also returned to his accusation that Israel’s government had used the attack to justify what he calls genocide.

I found that deeply inappropriate on the anniversary itself. There are 364 other days in the year to argue about Israeli policy. Surely the anniversary of a massacre can include an unambiguous remembrance of its victims without immediately turning into another indictment of Israel.

But Mamdani has another problem. His critics on the activist left don’t seem particularly impressed by his attempts to satisfy them.

We played an interview with a young activist who explained that people focused on what she called “global liberation” were beginning to move away from the mayor. She complained that he hadn’t delivered on promises involving Palestine, the NYPD and surveillance.

Global liberation.

I had to stop and consider that one. I thought the mayor of New York City was supposed to worry about garbage collection, public safety, housing and whether the subway gets people to work on time. Apparently the job description now includes liberating the planet.

And the NYPD is still there, doing police work. For some of these activists, that seems to qualify as a broken promise.

Now, I understand that voters have every right to hold politicians accountable for what they promised. That’s how representative government is supposed to work. But there is something revealing about a movement that becomes angry when its own elected officials encounter the realities of governing.

Campaigning is easy compared with running a city. At a rally, you can promise sweeping transformation and everybody cheers. At City Hall, you discover that police officers still have to answer emergency calls, budgets have to balance and millions of residents who didn’t attend your rallies expect their government to function.

Those residents include Democrats, Republicans, independents and people who couldn’t care less about the latest revolutionary slogan. They just want a reasonably safe city that works.

And that’s where Mamdani’s political problem gets interesting. The more he tries to reassure ordinary New Yorkers that he can govern responsibly, the more he risks disappointing activists who expected something much more radical. But the more he indulges those activists, the more questions he raises among everyone else.

We heard another version of political awkwardness later in the show when I played CNN’s reporting on Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, who is preparing to welcome Barack Obama to campaign for him.

CNN dug up El-Sayed’s remarkably harsh assessments of Obama’s presidency. He had argued that Americans weren’t better off after eight years of Obama, criticized the Affordable Care Act and complained that the former president’s promises of hope and change hadn’t produced the transformation he expected.

Yet El-Sayed also insisted he loved Obama.

I couldn’t resist. He loves Obama, but he can’t stand what Obama did. Obama was a disappointment, but apparently he’s still useful when it’s time to campaign.

Politics produces some fascinating relationships.

The Mamdani and El-Sayed stories aren’t identical, but they expose a similar tension. Politicians on the progressive left can spend years insisting that yesterday’s Democratic leaders didn’t go far enough. Then they discover that governing requires compromise—or that yesterday’s Democratic leaders still have something valuable to offer.

And suddenly the revolution needs a little help from the establishment.

Rush understood this contradiction. He spent years pointing out that ideological movements often have a difficult time accepting anything short of complete victory. Compromise may be essential to governing, but to the true believer it can look suspiciously like surrender.

Mamdani is learning that there may be no amount of ideological reassurance sufficient to satisfy people who regard every concession as a betrayal.

I don’t know how this fight within his political base will end. But I do know that New York City has enough genuine problems without City Hall being dragged into a contest over who can sound the most revolutionary.

The mayor was elected to run New York.

Some of his supporters apparently thought they were electing someone to remake the world.

That’s a rather large misunderstanding to discover after Election Day.

— Bo