Don't Fear the Squeegee Man The New York mayor's race is barreling toward November. The once-crowded primary bus now has just one Democrat and one Republican, Bill de Blasio and Joseph Lhota, grappling for the wheel. An independent, Adolfo Carrión Jr., is in there, but a few rows back. A contested election for a soon-to-be vacant office should mean a bracing battle between nonincumbents with clearly contrasting visions for the city going forward. But all everybody's talking about is the past. The race is awash in anti-nostalgia, much of it coming from the critics of Mr. de Blasio, who see his distinctly liberal campaign, with its promise of taxing the rich to close Dickensian class divides, as a throwback to the worst of times, the 1970s and "80s, when a string of Democratic mayors presided over a "crime-ridden, crumbling and alienated metropolis," as The New York Post despondently put it. The conservatives" theme is that the city is stable and safe today only because of the strong hands of the Republican Rudolph Giuliani and the on-and-off Republican Michael Bloomberg, and that disaster is right around the corner in the form of squeegee men and vagrants, crack houses and near-bankruptcy. This is nonsense, but it keeps coming up, and Mr. Bloomberg hasn't been helping. Though he hasn't endorsed a candidate, he has summoned that somewhat-distant past of rampant crime and bitter race relations to attack Mr. de Blasio. He made and retracted, through a spokesman, a bizarre remark accusing Mr. de Blasio of running a "racist" campaign featuring his biracial family. He went apocalyptic in predicting anarchy if the next mayor forbids the Police Department to unconstitutionally stop-and-frisk innocent young black and Hispanic men by the thousands, as Mr. de Blasio has vowed to do."God help us if we stop doing what we have been doing," Mr. Bloomberg said. When Howard Wolfson, a deputy mayor under Mr. Bloomberg, accused Mr. de Blasio of having "a very 1960s, 1970s vision for the city," he wasn't talking about cheap Greenwich Village rents and a great N.B.A. team. Mr. Lhota, seizing on Mr. de Blasio's inequality theme, hit a bleak note as well: "I believe that "the tale of two cities" is a divisive device that he's using. A divide-and-conquer strategy. It's class warfare. A few thoughts, to challenge the grim mind-set: Policing can be successful and constitutional. The city's rebirth from its 1970s nadir is real, and sturdy. The city is growing, not shrinking. The city is a tough place for the middle class, but not because its members are desperate to flee urban decay. People dearly want to live here but can't afford it. Crime might keep dipping to historic lows, or it might start creeping up - but policing is far better than it used to be, thanks to innovations by Mayor David Dinkins and in particular Mr. Giuliani's police commissioner, William Bratton. The city is well equipped to keep the peace. No New Yorkers, least of all Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Lhota, should surrender to complacency; the city faces acute problems and the ever-present threat of a sudden disaster. In the worst of these in the last decade or so - 9/11, the great recession, Hurricane Sandy - New York was tested greatly, but did not crumble. The social fabric held. And crime kept falling. Whoever is the new mayor will need to protect the considerable gains Mr. Bloomberg oversaw in the last 12 years, and extend them more broadly. Mr. de Blasio is right - and we're sure Mr. Lhota would agree - that a central challenge for the next mayor is making this city better for the non-rich. This is true in the poorer of Mr. de Blasio's "two cities." It's true in the Hurricane Sandy zone, from the Rockaways to Coney and Staten Island, where many middle-class New Yorkers have seen stable lives pushed to the limits. Mr. de Blasio won the Democratic primary with a powerful theme - but he surely knows that if elected he'd be the mayor of one actual city, not two metaphors. He, Mr. Lhota and Mr. Carrión are competing for a hard job. But the city they want to run is not on the brink of instant ruin. Ratso Rizzo died on the bus to Florida; Travis Bickle moved on. The Bronx stopped burning.