Mr. Lhota has the misfortune to be running for mayor of deep blue New York City as Republican jihadis in the United States House of Representatives have shuttered our federal government and threaten to shoe-stomp senseless national health care and our credit rating.  So there he stood at the mayoral debate on Tuesday night, this Republican former deputy mayor and a still far-too-little-known candidate, as Bill de Blasio, his Democratic opponent, fitted him, time and again, for an early Halloween elephant costume.  Mr. Lhota talked of his support for charter schools.  âThat is right out of the Republican playbook,â Mr. de Blasio interjected.  How about tax cuts? Thatâs his âRepublican ideologyâ kicking in, Mr. de Blasio said.  Iâm pro-choice, Iâm pro-gay rights, Iâm pro-marriage-equality, Mr. Lhota protested. âDo not lump me with the national Republicans. Itâs unbecoming, Bill.â  True. But itâs also true that Mr. Lhota is no faux Republican, like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who donned whatever party coat he could acquire at election time, and damn the sticker price. Mr. Lhota is authentically Republican, though not of the Tea Party variety.  In a debate in which the two candidates agreed more than you might guess, Mr. Lhotaâs challenge â make that headache â was clear. Long ago he enrolled as a knight in Rudy Giulianiâs mayoral crusades, and it remains his defining characteristic.  Mr. Giuliani was a wartime, smile when heâs more naturally inclined to sneer, mayor. That city was one of rough edges and cantankerous hooting. From Bensonhurst to Brownsville, the sense sometimes was of a city as a ball of thread unspooling.  Now? Young people from Montclair, N.J., and Shaker Heights, Ohio pour in looking for cheap apartments on Troutman Street in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where in 1992 â to firmly date myself â I spent a month in a heroin shooting gallery. (For a story, not out of personal need).  That city is long since pasteurized; the pain now is economic. Those young people live four to an apartment next door to working class Latino families. And they all spend more than half their income on rent.  Our city feels profoundly O.K. and profoundly broken. And Mr. de Blasio long ago made this dissonance a theme in his mayoral sprint. Can he make its economics less unyielding? Or as a reporter put it to him last night: Can a man who runs an office with a budget of $2 million manage a city with a budget of $70 billion?  He insists he can. But his claims can prompt tickles of doubt. So in his eagerness to tar Republicans as the cause of the cityâs discontents, he accused Mayor Bloomberg of producing mostly luxury condominiums.  Mr. Bloomberg in fact ran a remarkably progressive housing program that produced more than 155,000 units of affordable housing. A Mayor de Blasio will most likely turn to these same housing officials to realize his own vision.  The Democrat also draped a fare increase necklace around Mr. Lhotaâs neck. (Mr. Lhota ran the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees all the subways and buses). The claim was true, but incomplete, as the State Legislatureâs urban Democrats are just as guilty of refusing to finance the cityâs transit system as rural Republicans.  Watching Mr. Lhota on Tuesday night, you got a sense of a man trying to dance to an unfamiliar tune. He proudly claimed that mantle of Rudy the Micromanager. I will be the strong chief executive, and commissioners will jump to my command.  But he ignores that Mr. Bloombergâs style, which was to give his commissioners much latitude, produced successes from transportation to streetscape to housing, the environment and health. Again, a non-wartime mayoralty is a different beast.  Can I digress, too? This substantive debate spoke well of each candidate. But then reporters asked the men to make a clean breast of their sports loyalties.  And so I learned that Mr. de Blasio, the man who would be mayor of New York, is a fan of the deeply hated Celtics basketball team. Had he laid claim to the arriviste Nets, it would have been pathetic but acceptable.  But to acknowledge heâs a Celticsnista? The horror.  Mr. Lhota tossed down his strongest card toward the debateâs end. You want a city, he asked, where New Yorkers, gay, straight, black and brown can feel safe, have fun, and raise families? Heâs that manager.  This is Mr. de Blasioâs challenge, too. A New York mayor can be as progressive as he wants, but he better make sure the garbage is picked up, the streets are plowed, and that the subways run. And that the unions donât strike.  So the thought arose: Joseph J. Lhota for first deputy mayor in a de Blasio administration?
In his debate with Bill de Blasio for mayor of New York City, Joseph J. Lhota, who emerged as a knight under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, seemed better suited for a city of another era.