Take heart, New Yorkers: You’re not the only ones put off by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s delusions of grandeur.
Turns out his dream of becoming the national spokesman for the Democratic Party’s hard left has even many of his friends and allies — not to mention fellow mayors — rolling their eyes.
According to a devastating article on Politico, de Blasio’s own aides create distractions and deliberately stall when the mayor presses them for more national events to raise his national image.
Indeed, one unnamed high-placed Democratic operative calls “laughable” the notion that any response to President Trump “is going to come from a progressive mayor whom progressives don’t rally around” and other mayors “don’t respect.”
De Blasio is so anxious to become the national face of the anti-Trump “resistance” that during a private strategy session at last summer’s Conference of Mayors, he actually proposed that cities refuse to take any infrastructure money from Washington as an act of defiance.
Was he off his rocker? New York is desperate for funds — for the subways, a new Hudson River rail tunnel and other pressing projects. Yet de Blasio would turn down that money to make a statement?
No wonder the response, Politico reports, was “eye-rolling” and “frustration.”
And that’s exactly how every New Yorker should react to their mayor’s apparent willingness to work against the city’s interests — just to boost his national profile.
Other Democratic leaders, speaking off the record, reportedly called de Blasio “smug,” “annoying” and “in it for himself.” Hey, tell us about it.
The mayor bristles at suggestions that his national ambitions have gone nowhere, comparing himself to Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Mahatma Gandhi — all of whom, he maintained, “had setbacks.”
Gee, he sure thinks highly of himself to place himself among such figures, doesn’t he?
Yet, unlike de Blasio, Edison and Ford didn’t keep trying the same ideas and material over and over, expecting different results. If one idea didn’t work, they’d try something else.
Mayor de Blasio, on the other hand, is wedded to the same rigid and tired formulas — his Renewal schools, for example — even when they fail.
And now, even his ostensible allies outside the five boroughs, it seems, have stopped listening.