What If Andrew Yang Wins?
This article was published online on April 7, 2021.
Andrew Yang is in the Throgs Neck neighborhood of the Bronx, standing next to a lectern on an empty city street.
He’s just resumed his campaign for New York City mayor after taking two weeks off to recover from COVID-19. The strain of the illness shows. He’s hard to hear through his two masks. He coughs occasionally. He seems tired, though his trademark egghead affability—think “that chemistry teacher the middle schoolers really like” or “the guy who you have to admit leads a good team-building exercise”—is on full display. He hams it up for passersby, posing for thumbs-up selfies, reminding commuters that primary day is June 22, telling people in impressive streetwear, “You look so cool !” with a genuine sense of awe.
From the lectern, he announces a very big idea to the assembled crowd, which includes curious locals, a few journalists, and a gaggle of staffers in masks that say Andrew Yang. It is called the Big Apple Corps. (This also happens to be the name of a popular gay-and-lesbian community marching band.) Yang proposes that the city hire 10,000 recent college graduates to tutor the 100,000 public-school kids suffering most from learning loss due to the pandemic. He cites statistics on the digital divide and on the effectiveness of tutoring. He makes it personal. “I’m a public-school parent myself,” he says. “This year has been terrible for our kids.”
