Leadership Quote by David Dinkins

Dinkins is doing the oldest trick in New York politics: projecting calm while the knives are out. "There is no point in me worrying" isn’t just a personal mantra; it’s a strategic refusal to validate rivals by narrating his own campaign through their moves. In a city where elections are treated like blood sport and the press loves a feud storyline, the line signals discipline: he will not be baited into reactive politics.

The naming matters. Bloomberg and Badillo evoke two different threats. Bloomberg represents technocratic money and managerial competence packaged as inevitability; Badillo, the insurgent appeal of ethnic coalition-building and anti-establishment energy. By pairing them, Dinkins flattens the field into a single category: other people’s agendas. The subtext is: I can’t control their ambition, but I can control my message, my ground game, my governing vision. It’s also a subtle assertion of incumbency or statesmanship, depending on the moment: worry is for underlings; leaders keep their hands steady.

There’s a deeper New York realism here, too. Dinkins knew how quickly alliances shift and how often "front-runners" are media inventions. The quote works because it rejects the dopamine economy of political gossip. It sells maturity in a marketplace that rewards panic, turning restraint into a form of power: the ability to not perform anxiety on command.