Has Bill de Blasio gone bonkers?
The mayor chose to give voice to the rage he and his people have felt over the past month because they think Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s budget and p꧋olicy negotiations wiཧth the state Legislature were designed to disempower de Blasio.
Which is certainly true.
De Blasio wanted to be given control over the city’s schools for the balance of his term; he got it for only a year. He didn’t want new charter schools; he 🌳got 25 more shoved ✱down his throat.
Then there was affordable housing. On this matter, America’s most unambiguously “progressive” politician was astonished to find himself outflanked on his left by Cuomo, who claimed de Blasio was pushing policies that favored rich landlords and b🅠uilders.
It was a hilariou🐎s piece of jujitsu by Cuomo — in part because you just know he was giggling and rubbing his hands together with glee as he was saying it, so tickled was he to get de Bౠlasio’s goat in this manner.
So de Blasio has a lot to complai🌟n about when it comes to Cuomo, and dare I say there’s even something refreshing about✱ a politician opening a mouth (as my grandmother would have said) the way the mayor did about how Cuomo’s people were badmouthing him last week.
“Some unnamed sourc🌠es well-placed in the Cuomo administration had a few things to say,” the mayor declared. “I’m here in front of you on record saying what I believe. And what I believe here is the governor worked . . . to inhibit the agenda that New York City put forward.”
Refreshing — but nuts.
The mayor told NY1’s Errol Louis yesterday he’s been “diᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⭕ᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚsappointed at every turn” by Cuomo.
“What I found was he engaged in his own sense of strategies, his own political 𝓀machinations, and what we’ve often seen is if someone disagrees with him openly, some kind of revenge or vendetta follows,” de Blasio said of the governor, a fellow Democrat.
Well, that should make working with Cu𒐪omo easier♈ in the months and years to come.
Wha📖t de Blasio has done here is openly acknowledge he stinks as a p🐈olitician.
That’s what one must take away from his complete failure to get his agenda a serious hearing during the political negotiations in Albany. And it’s what his utter incapacity to find comm꧅on ground with Cuomo means. The mayor of ౠNew York City needs the governor on his side, at least some of the time, and that means courting and flattering and doing whatever’s necessary.
One doesn’t usually associate the word “diplomatic” with Rudy Giul💫iani, but during his first year in office, in 1994, Giuliani was so desperate to maintain good relations with the state’s governor — a man named Mario Cuomo, father to the present occupant of the mansion — that he actually endorsed Cuomo instead of his fellow Republican, George Pataki.
Pataki won, and while he and Rudy certainly never much liked or trusted each other after that, the mayor did try to calm the waters and manage a 𓂃working relationship.
Not so de Blasio. If he didn𓆉’t have a ruthless, take-no-prisoners enemy in Albany before, he sure has one now.
What’s more, de Blasio is lucky today he changed his 𒊎last name from Wilhelm and took his mother’s maiden name instead, because without that “o” at the end of his new one, he’d be dealing with accusations that he basically called Cuomo a mafioso. The use of the word “vendetta” was . . . perhaps a bit much.
De Blasio may have a political strategy in his head. He knows he’ll likely go before the New York City electorate in 2017 without much to claim for himself — and possibl🌟y with various quality-of-life me𒆙trics looking worse than when he took office in 2014.
So he might be trying out a line of argument according to which he stood alone against everybody — Republicans, landlords, carriage-horse drivers, bankers, cops (sometimes) and Cuomo — to serve the in♉terests of forgotten and mistreated New Yorkers. And if he lost, well, he went down fighting.
It’s not much of a꧃ case; better to say you got something done than that you were impotent, outplayed and outmuscled. But it may be all de Blasio’s got.