This may be the most delusional idea in American politics since Bill de Blasio ran for president.
New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has reportedly told people he wants to run for governor of New York. This may be the most delusional idea in American politics since Bill de Blasio ran for president. At least when de Blasio was mulling a run for governor back in March, it was possible to argue that somebody needed to challenge scandal-tarred Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary, and Bill de Blasio is somebody. But Cuomo is gone now; New York Democrats may prefer a more progressive Democrat than Kathy Hochul, Cuomo’s successor, but they are no longer desperate for a non-Cuomo candidate. Even with Cuomo as an option, however, test polls in August of who Democrats could support found Cuomo at -4 just days before he resigned in disgrace, but de Blasio at -30. A June 2019 poll found that de Blasio’s favorability in New York state was lower than that of Donald Trump, who — you may have noticed — is not very popular among his fellow New Yorkers, having lost the state by 22.5 points to Hillary Clinton and 23 to Joe Biden. Today’s New York Times report by Katie Glueck and Dana Rubinstein collects some choice quotes from New York Democrats:
“Osama bin Laden is probably more popular in Suffolk County than Bill de Blasio,” said Rich Schaffer, the chairman of the county’s Democratic committee, who endorsed Gov. Kathy Hochul on Monday. “De Blasio, I would say, would have zero support if not negative out here.” . . . “I very seldom pass, but I don’t want to get involved in anything that would be negative,” said Charles B. Rangel, the former congressman from Harlem, after laughing when asked for his thoughts on a potential run by Mr. de Blasio. “And I cannot think of anything positive.”
Elected in remarkably low-turnout elections with the support of fewer than 10 percent of the city’s residents, de Blasio avoided killing kittens (the question that tripped up his hapless 2013 Republican opponent, Joe Llhota), but managed to personally kill the Staten Island groundhog and failed in his crusade (opposed loudly by Liam Neeson) to end the city’s horse-drawn carriage business. Animals have only been the tip of the iceberg. De Blasio has been a disaster as mayor, and is universally loathed in every nook and corner of the political spectrum. Just to scratch the surface, you could start with John Podhoretz’s epic cover story in National Review, which among other things detailed how de Blasio doesn’t even appear to like the city he runs, or Tevi Troy’s review of Seth Barron’s book The Last Days of New York. A June profile in Politico set out to examine “his relationship with a city that loves to hate him,” and Ruby Cramer caught this vignette walking through a park with him:
De Blasio is barely in sight before the father stops, spots the mayor, and yells: “No one wants you! You’re the worst. You’re the WORST!” His son watches in silence. “I CAN’T WAIT FOR YOU TO GET OUT.”
Nobody hated de Blasio more virulently than Cuomo did: “At a party in the pool house at the Governor’s mansion, in Albany, Boylan recalled seeing a dartboard bearing a photo of Bill de Blasio.” A “source close to Cuomo” was feeding regular quotes to the media trashing the mayor before it came out that the source was Cuomo himself. Cuomo often took perverse pleasure in waiting for de Blasio to announce he was doing something, then going immediately on TV to declare that he was using his powers as governor to overrule the mayor. But the NYPD has been a close second. A mayor with a poisonously dysfunctional relationship with both the governor and the cops was uniquely ill-suited to handle 2020’s one-two punch of a pandemic and a summer of George Floyd protests that left everybody mad at the mayor:
The chant could be heard clearly in the crowd of hundreds at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge: “De Blasio resign! De Blasio resign!” The Black Lives Matter protesters in Chinatown Tuesday night were not the only ones to share the sentiment lately. Hawk Newsome, president of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, called for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s resignation in an interview on NY1 Tuesday morning, saying that the mayor “has failed black New York time and time again.” Mehdi Hasan, a columnist at the leftist outlet The Intercept, wrote that “de Blasio needs to resign.” And it’s not just the left. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, now a close ally of President Donald Trump, said that either de Blasio should resign or that Gov. Andrew Cuomo should remove him from office. A petition demanding de Blasio’s resignation, started by Republican Staten Island Assembly candidate Marko Kepi, had nearly 1,000 signatures as of Wednesday morning. Another petition that called for de Blasio’s impeachment in 2014 because he is “anti-police” and a “socialist” has resurfaced and has more than 80,000 signatures.
It seems everyone can find something to be angry about when it comes to de Blasio. The protestors like Newsome have excoriated the mayor for the NYPD’s heavy-handed response to the largely peaceful protests and marches that mourn the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and call for an end to police brutality, especially against black people and Latinos. The mayor earned his strongest criticism for his initial defense of the NYPD officers who drove their SUV forward into a crowd of protestors blocking them even though it appeared that the cars could have backed up. On the other side, conservatives like Giuliani attacked de Blasio for not doing more to stop the widespread destruction of property that has occurred on recent nights, sometimes following on heels of Black Lives Matter protests.
When de Blasio ran for president, progressives were as vicious as anyone. Ed Kilgore in New York magazine: “De Blasio Stubbornly Moves Toward Presidential Race That Could Humiliate New York. . . . The human ego is a powerful beast that grows luxuriant in the soul of career politicians. We are seeing an egregious example in the proto-presidential campaign of New York mayor Bill de Blasio.” Harry Siegel in The Daily Beast: “NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio Unites the Nation: No One Wants Him to Run for President.” Clio Chang in The New Republic: “Why Is Bill de Blasio’s Presidential Dream a Sad Joke?”:
As de Blasio weighs entering the 2020 race, the prospect of a President de Blasio has been met with widespread derision. The New Republic’s Alex Shephard termed his interest in the presidency an “embarrassing quest for national fame,” while the mayor’s own allies (anonymously) told Politico that his flirtation with a presidential run was “f***ing insane.” De Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, has said the “timing is not exactly right” for him to launch a campaign. The New York Times, which seems to take gleeful pleasure in dinging de Blasio for everything from calling errant snow days to ostentatiously hanging around Iowa, recently noted that Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has generated far more presidential buzz than the mayor of the country’s biggest city. Even in his hometown, there seems to be only one person who thinks a de Blasio presidential campaign would be anything other than a joke: de Blasio himself.
When that predictably flamed out — de Blasio rarely polled ahead of the mayor of Miramar, Florida, and far behind the mayor of South Bend — and the rest of 2020 went sour, the mayor let his inner Jeff Spicoli take over his public persona. A profile by Henry Grabar of Slate in May, reviewing de Blasio’s increasingly “weird” behavior at press appearances (for which he is often hours late), observed that “de Blasio, too, is preparing to leave his post, and the vibe is a little like seeing your high school science teacher giddy in the last week of class. You thought you were thrilled to be rid of him, but he’s just as happy to be rid of you!”
Given de Blasio’s reputation, it is probably redundant to ask what he’s smoking. But while we have lived to see so many strange things in the politics of the past two decades that it is hard to ever rule out anything, this much is fairly certain: At least everyone can agree to laugh at de Blasio thinking he could be New York’s next governor.