New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio made it official: He’s running for president. New Yorkers, somewhat less officially, mostly greeted the announcement with the city’s beloved middle-finger salute.
Katherine Miller at BuzzFeed was one of the first to notice the …ahem… unenthusiastic reaction, in a piece headlined “Everybody’s Having A Great Time Hating De Blasio.” Describing the protest scene in front of the mayor’s Good Morning America appearance today, Miller writes that “the entire situation melded into one big ‘LIAR’ chant, subsuming a variety of other chants about inability to run the city and so forth, and uniting the people.” Or as Twitter user ComfortablySmug noted, “Really wonder just how many people will reply with ‘Fix the subway.'” Although to be fair, New Yorkers don’t usually wait for their progressive mayor to announce for president before righteously complaining about the condition of the subway.
And it really does seem to be everybody. If nothing else, de Blasio has brought Left, Right, and Center together in a great big Meh to the idea of President de Blasio.
Even reliably Democratic union guys joined in the fun:
There he is. Crowd outside chanting “no friend to labor,” really laying into those whistles pic.twitter.com/fekB59ISRe
— Jake Offenhartz (@jangelooff) May 16, 2019
Politico’s — hardly a right-wing publication — first hit came out so quickly you’d think they had it in for him from the start. Dana Rubinstein and Sally Goldenberg wrote:
His tardy entry into the already crowded primary underscored one of the mayor’s most enduring characteristics. But de Blasio’s longstanding inability to keep to a schedule speaks to a deeper chink in his political armor: He’s not just late to ribbon cuttings and memorial services. He’s late to progressive causes, too.
“He’s a progressive who’s very conservative,” said George Arzt, a long-time Democratic operative in New York who was press secretary to former Mayor Ed Koch. “He likes to take leftist stances, but he always is late to issues. He thinks about the issues too much before he can make a decision.”
Got that? De Blasio is too far Left for most of America, but not revolutionary enough about it for many of his fellow Dems. There’s just no pleasing some people.
Even the New York Times got in on the act. Their big announcement report was headlined “Heckles, Support, Shrugs,” but the story’s accent wasn’t exactly on “Support.” And in case you think this was a one-off, last month when the rumors about de Blasio’s impending decision really got going, NYT ran this hit piece:
“Nah, he should run the city,” said John Mays, 78, a retired warehouse worker who was out near Mr. de Blasio’s favorite Y.M.C.A., shopping for a Mother’s Day gift for his wife. “He’s a good guy, though. He’s good for mayor, and that’s about it.”
Victoria Braxton, 42, a teacher, was waiting for a bus not far from Mr. de Blasio’s regular coffee shop, Colson Patisserie. Mr. de Blasio should be focusing on things such as class-size reduction and affordable housing, she said.
“It’s a distraction from running the city,” Ms. Braxton said about Mr. de Blasio’s presidential aspirations before climbing onto the B61 bus. “It’s going to be a tough election. If he doesn’t have the support in New York, what’s going to happen in other states?”
Keep in mind please that this is coming from de Blasio’s hard-left hometown paper. And if he can’t make it there, he can’t make it anywhere.
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