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May 20, 2022 - 3:16pm
New York’s former mayor Bill de Blasio has agreed to represent the city’s 10th Congressional District, covering lower Manhattan and a swath of Brooklyn, in Washington DC. From his lofty perch in a hotel suite near Brooklyn Bridge, where he and his wife are residing while his Park Slope home is renovated, de Blasio has called on wealthy real estate developers — his primary constituency — to drum up support for his campaign.
De Blasio has been keeping busy since he left the mayoralty five months ago. He recently wrote an article for The Atlantic, in which he offered himself to Joe Biden as an example of what not to do as a chief executive. “When it comes to being unpopular, I’m unfortunately somewhat of an expert,” he began.
He has never spoken truer words. However, in the manner of someone in a job interview saying, “my main flaw is that sometimes I’m just too much of a perfectionist”, the former mayor is humble-bragging. He explains that his number one problem as mayor was that he failed to “present a clear, sharp message and repeat it incessantly”. It’s hard to imagine anyone who’s lived in New York in the last eight years failing to find this amusing.
According to de Blasio, his biggest failure as mayor was that he was too busy solving the city’s problems, focusing on “real policy,” and so he “let a focus on individual initiatives, no matter how noble or substantive, distract [him] from offering an overarching vision for the future.” In other words, he didn’t talk about himself enough. Which is odd, as many New Yorkers seem to remember that that’s all he ever did.
Bill de Blasio took a prosperous, secure city and cut out its heart — public safety — leaving its residents to the mercies of criminal thugs. He oversaw a wholesale sabotage of quality-of-life law enforcement, put the NYPD under a federal monitor, pushed for the reform of bail laws, and signed legislation that destroyed effective policing. He left the city with a murder rate 50% higher than before the pandemic.
He developed and pushed through an absurd plan to cap our city’s jail population at 3,300 by closing Rikers Island and building “community-based” jails that nobody wants. In turn, this has made our streets and parks filthy and dangerous, and enabled drugged-out zombies to overdose on our boulevards.
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