Always Count On Politico To Smear Bill De Blasio At Every Opportunity

Earlier we looked at the Washington Post’s silly list of potential 2020 presidential nominees. It’s not in the comedy section but it included Beltway nonsense non-candidates like The Rock (a wrestler who may be a Democrat… or not), Andrew Cuomo, Oprah Winfrey, Kamala Harris and Howard Schultz (the Starbucks guy) and Jerry Brown. Removed from The List: Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Kaine, Sheryl Sandberg and Trump hater Mark Cuban. Nowhere on any list: NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio. That’s sensible… but The Post list isn’t remotely sensible so… why not de Blasio. The Beltway, according to Politico, hates de Blasio. Too progressive for the Beltway and Politico’s most dependably ridiculous excuse for a journalist is here to reinforce that. “Friends and allies,” he wrote, “literally roll their eyes when they hear the New York City mayor is trying to go national again, and his own aides have become experts in stalling when he asks to do more, or at throwing distractions or making up excuses for why they weren’t able to pull something together. They hate it. They wish he would stop.” Do they? Friends and allies, no less. And impartial faux-journalists.

Here’s the paradox of Bill de Blasio: He’s the mayor of the biggest city in America, with now four years of a progressive record and just reelected with 66 percent of the vote, without any significant challenger, despite all the griping New Yorkers have been doing about him since Day One. He’s had major successes on universal pre-kindergarten and expanding affordable housing, while crime has continued to go down— stop-and-frisk, his predecessor’s hated police tactic, is all but gone— and development in New York has continued full swing. He was talking about progressive policy ideas literally decades before they became the Democratic Party mainstream. Between Eric Garcetti, Mitch Landrieu and Pete Buttigieg, it’s become normal to talk seriously about mayors making 2020 runs.

Yet among Democratic insiders, the reaction to putting de Blasio on that list tends to be, at best, an exhausted chuckle. Is he running for president? “No,” he said, simply and quickly. But because he’s Bill de Blasio, he takes pleasure in insisting that asking that question— even as he’s sitting at the Marriott Downtown in Iowa, recording one of several long interviews he did that day— is small-minded to the point of being ridiculous.

No, no. He’s up to something bigger, he says. Obviously.

“There’s a lot of people in the political media and the political class who can only think through the prism of elections and only the very next elections, rather than understanding that social change is made in a variety of fashions. It’s the electoral process. It’s what happens at the local level as well as the national level. It is through issue-organizing,” de Blasio argued on Politico’s Off Message podcast, describing his trip as the natural outgrowth of being “a progressive who wants to change things”— and therefore “needs to work with people who are trying to create that change all over the country.”

That was his official explanation for accepting an invitation to headline the recent Progress Iowa holiday party, where he talked about President Donald Trump sparking “the beginning of a progressive era,” but also about “my own personal grass-roots connection to Iowa”— his grandmother, born in Blanchard, Iowa in 1888— and all the “skeptics” and “doubting Thomases” who didn’t think a progressive could run a city.

That he could pull it off in New York City in this moment when progressive politics has been chased out of Washington and most state capitals is proof to de Blasio that he has earned the right to help set the direction of the Democratic Party going forward. He proudly bashes the Clintons, the post-2016 obsession with the loss of white working-class voters and the people who see the Ralph Northam and Doug Jones wins as proof that the party needs moderates to win. [In Politico-speak “conservative Democrats are always, always, always referred to as “moderates,” the most highly favored political description among American voters.]

“Part of why we’re in the mess we’re in is because we fell into a trap of triangulation and moderation, lost a lot of our identity and became unappealing to the very people who had been our support base,” he said in the interview.

The problem for de Blasio is that many progressives, Democrats and other mayors say they also don’t want him in this role— which adds up to a sort of national version of the public advocate job he held for four years in New York before becoming mayor. They’re already fed up with his pledge, now that he’s won a second and final term in City Hall, to make Iowa the first of many stops traveling the country to talk about progressive politics and progressive candidates.

“It’s laughable to think that the response to Trump is going to come from a progressive mayor whom progressives don’t rally around and mayors don’t respect,” said one high-placed Democratic operative.

They also don’t believe de Blasio will follow through. Remember that bold, but low-on-answers, “progressive agenda” he put out with a big news conference at the Capitol in Washington in May 2014? Remember the forum he was going to host in Iowa for presidential candidates to prove their progressive credentials? Remember the threats he made against other politicians— most prominently, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, his Tom & Jerry partner in the local media— to exact punishment against people whom he’d judge to have not followed through?

Nothing came of any of them.

…As long as they’re talking off the record, many Democratic leaders and operatives will trash de Blasio. They think he’s smug. Annoying. In it for himself without any follow-through. The rap on de Blasio is that he likes to make a lot of noise but doesn’t like to do a lot of work, that he has an oversize sense of his own importance.

It’s often visceral. One mayor, pondering why so many national Democrats don’t like de Blasio, took a long pause and could only summon, “I don’t know.”

Maybe it’s because they spend too much time reading Politico phony journalists who write “A number of them quietly pointed out that de Blasio spent much of that Saturday off to the side of the convention center hall by himself, checking emails on his phone.”