Last week’s Rolling Stone piece made one thing unmistakable: Mayor de Blasio is living in a bubble — in fact, a double bubble.
Every New York mayor is besieged by suck-ups, isolated by the inescapable trappings of power. But de Blasio also opts to live in an ideological echo chamber — ignoring people and facts that might challenge his progressive prejudices.
Take the article’s most quoted line, de Blasio’s comment that “A lot of people outside New York City understand what happened in the first year of [his mayoralty in] New York City better than people in New York City.”
He plainly said that without a thought as to how it would sound to those people in New York City.
The ones whose votes he’ll need in just a couple of years — and whose support he needs if he’s going to keep having his way with the City Council, or ever get his way with the Legislature.
In a democracy, popularity is power: Call your own voters ignorant, and you weaken yourself.
If de Blasio truly wants to lead a national movement, he needs to show not just that he can pass his reforms, but that he can make them work.
As for that “lot of people outside New York City”: Yes, Mr. Mayor — tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of folks across this great land agree with you and laud your achievements.
But it’s a country of 320 million: Ted Cruz has a big following, too; Sarah Palin had a huge one for a while. So what?
Those outsiders applaud when, say, the mayor gets something labeled “universal pre-K” — but what’s inside the box doesn’t matter. They’re just fans cheering a symbolic win for their side.
It’s only the people of this city, in their 8 million different ways, who bother to truly evaluate the mayor’s performance.
If de Blasio truly wants to lead a national movement, he needs to show not just that he can pass his reforms, but that he can make them work — that he can make life in the city clearly better.
He’s not achieving much when he leaves the city. His campaigning last year for Democratic state Senate candidates wound up as a selling point for their Republican opponents.
And he visited Britain to give the keynote speech at last September’s Labor Party Conference — telling the crowd, “You are on the right side of history” as he urged a forthright progressive agenda. Labor chief Ed Miliband offered just that in the recent campaign — and got crushed.
Rather than lecturing fellow-thinking out-of-towners, Mr. Mayor, maybe you should spend some time listening to New Yorkers who don’t toe your line.
It won’t feed your ego the way a fawning Rolling Stone profile does — but hiding inside your bubble is no way to build a movement or to lead a city.