As much as Mr. de Blasio positioned his wife and children at the center of his efforts to market his progressive politics, Mr. Adams has kept his son, Jordan Coleman, and his partner, Tracey Collins, in the distance. Apart from his outspoken veganism, few New Yorkers could tell you anything about his personal life, which appears to be how he prefers it, allowing him to inflate the empty space with bravado.“When a mayor has swagger, the city has swagger,” Mr. Adams said in a speech on his third day in office. Giving us a strong indication of where he is cementing his brand, he used the word nearly a dozen times, remarking that “leadership should have that swagger” and that “swagger” is what had been missing in the city for so long.The last time New York was governed by someone committed to this affect was during Prohibition, when Jimmy Walker reigned in fur-collared coats, saying things like, “I’d rather be a lamppost in New York City than the mayor of Chicago.” Walker, whose life became the basis for a Broadway musical, ultimately resigned amid a corruption scandal before leaving the country for France with his mistress.Rather than confront crisis with the steeliness implicit in “swagger,” Mr. Adams suggested, we were beaten down and “all we did was wallow in Covid.” Leaving aside that doctors and nurses would surely have a different view, the mayor will not indulge any more wallowing — not from you or me or even famous non-wallowers like Goldman Sachs. Several big banks have allowed staff to work remotely during the Omicron wave, but Mr. Adams wants them to get everyone back in the office, just as he is determined that schools remain open.“You can’t run New York City from home,” he said in a television interview this week, a directive that seems to suggest he is prepared to out-alpha Wall Street. The framing of this imperative led to the first social-media attacks of his mayoralty. Mr. Adams had referred to “low-skilled workers”— cooks, dishwashers, messengers — who lacked the “academic skills to sit in the corner office.” However infelicitous the wording, he was making the point that the city’s broader economic infrastructure depended on white-collar workers showing up to support the satellite businesses of commercial districts. But Twitter in its infinite sensitivity refused to see it that way; the mayor appeared not to care.