Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Crusade
“He’s the furthest-left mayor by far,” says one observer. “I don’t think people realized what an ideologue he was.”
For five terms, supposedly liberal New York had been governed by a Republican (Rudolph Giuliani) and a quasi-Republican independent (Michael Bloomberg). So when a full-throated progressive like de Blasio bounded into City Hall in 2014 with an astounding 73 percent of votes in the general election, it felt like more than simply a mandate for local change. To leftist Democrats around the country, long frustrated by what they saw as the thwarted hopes, tactical errors, compromises and outright betrayals of the Obama administration, the ascension of one of their own to one of the highest-profile elected offices in the country made for a momentous, potentially thrilling development. Just as past mayors had taken advantage of New York’s unique status as a cultural and media capital to globalize their agendas — think of the far-reaching influence of Bloomberg-era public-health policies like the smoking ban, or the way Giuliani exploited his reputation for “cleaning up” the city by starting a lucrative international consulting firm specializing in security and policing — could de Blasio use the singular platform provided by his new position to showcase, as brightly as a Times Square billboard, the civic benefits of unfettered liberalism?
If judged on his ability to deliver on ambitious campaign promises, even de Blasio’s sharpest critics acknowledge he’s been successful. State Assemblyman Joe Borelli, a Republican who represents the most conservative district in New York, Staten Island’s South Shore, admits, “The mayor has been very forthright. He campaigned on a platform of ideological values — albeit, they’re not mine — but he was very honest, and he’s delivering.” Only 16 months into his term, de Blasio has expanded paid sick leave and won a hard-fought battle to secure free full-day universal pre-K (huge boons for working families), dialed back the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy and effectively decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana (both of which had a massively disproportionate effect on young men of color), launched the largest municipal-ID-card program in the country (allowing undocumented New Yorkers to more easily open bank accounts, rent apartments and access hospitals and schools), and announced a $41 billion plan to build or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing over the next 10 years (eclipsing Bloomberg’s 12-year record of 165,000 new or preserved affordable-housing units).
Despite these considerable achievements, however, the story line of de Blasio’s Year One has been consistently undercut by establishment pushback, both organized and spontaneous, from Wall Street to the state government in Albany. Wealthy backers of charter schools broadsided de Blasio with a brutal television advertising blitz after he attempted to slow down the expansion of a hedge-fund-backed charter operation with a mixed track record but impressively high testing scores. (The mayor blinked.) Meanwhile, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a centrist Democrat, seemed to relish undermining, and at times humiliating, the mayor at every turn, killing de Blasio’s proposed tax on rich New Yorkers and siding with the charter-school backers. “Historically, the relationship between mayor and governor is worse when the two are in the same party,” notes Clyde Haberman, a former New York Times metro columnist who has covered city politics since the 1960s. “It’s about who is the alpha male in town. And here, it’s Cuomo.”
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