"Why weren't they grateful?" – From "The Power Broker" by Robert Caro
Mayor de Blasio is on the progressive ramparts, appearing on MSNBC, planning a liberal summit in Washington D.C. next week, penning an op-ed with his ideological soulmate Elizabeth Warren, and giving a lengthy and revealing interview to Rolling Stone magazine.
It must be a bummer today when he actually has to get back to his day job and give a budget presentation to a local press corps that just doesn't seem to get it.
"A lot of people outside New York City understand what happened in the first year of New York City better than people in New York City,'' de Blasio tells Rolling Stone's Mark Binelli.
In office for less than a year-and-a-half, de Blasio feels very comfortable dishing out advice to politicians across the country, chiding them last year for not staying true to their roots and losing the U.S. Senate. And he's still dangling his endorsement in front of his old boss, Hillary Clinton, whose Senate campaign he pseudo-managed more than a dozen years ago.
Looking higher, President Obama gets a little whack in Rolling Stone from the mayor who notes: "[T]]he progressive economic vision that I adhere to was not front and center in President Obama's vision."
Looking to his right, de Blasio rips Rudy Giuliani, saying: "We've proven not only was my model more electorally popular than his — by a lot — but that you can manage this place much more effectively if you're not in fact creating division through the process."
But what has de Blasio actually proven politically in his career? With historically low turnout, he was able to eke out little more than 40 percent in a Democratic primary to avoid a runoff and then overwhelmingly beat a Republican opponent in an overwhelmingly Democratic town.
But when you can't even carry Staten Island in the mayor's race, maybe it's not smart to be telling former Senator Mary Landrieu how she should have run her campaign in Red State Louisiana. And maybe it's a little presumptuous to be giving any advice to an African-American man whose middle name is Hussein and still managed twice to be elected president.
De Blasio might want to focus a little more on his own poll numbers which this week show his approval rating to be at an anemic 44 percent. Before heading off to the fields of Iowa again, perhaps it's time to look homeward.
And looking homeward isn't really about shoring up his political base – it's about doing the right thing and governing under a bigger tent. Despite those lackluster poll numbers, de Blasio is still sitting in the catbird seat; it's extremely difficult to imagine anyone beating him in a primary and it would take a very well-known and well-financed Republican to beat him in the general election.
Political freelancing can be fun – but the mayor shouldn't be quitting his day job when he's still dusting off the new West Elm furniture in Gracie Mansion. For almost 150 years, no mayor has been elected to anything else after he entered City Hall's West Wing. It might be smart for de Blasio to put all of his resources into running the city and worry about someone else giving advice to Hillary Clinton. After all, she didn't take it from him when he worked for her.
Bob Hardt