I doubt Bill de Blasio gets many chances to play them these days, but at the end of our 40-minute conversation in the mayor’s office at City Hall Wednesday, I noticed the cardboard box full of records sitting on the floor. The first album, the only one I could see the cover of: The Clash’s 1980 triple-album “Sandinista!”
I was there to talk with the mayor about how, after two-and-a-half years, he’s lived up to his admirable promise to make New York City a fairer place, economically and socially – with universal pre-K, paid sick leave, and a renewed focus on institutions like NYCHA and Rikers that had been left to rot under his predecessor. And he’s done it while improving on the city’s public safety and without endangering its prosperity.
Also about how, even as he’s leveraged his office for the public good, he’s been dogged by overlapping federal and local investigations into how he’s raised money to advance his agenda – in his 2013 campaign operation, in the Campaign for One New York he launched after winning that contest and in his 2014 efforts to tip state Senate races and flip the Empire State’s last bastion of Republican control.
De Blasio’s mayoral campaign, of course, triumphed. But he offered no regrets about his unsuccessful efforts thereafter to shift the state and national political conversations (and to place himself center stage in them). Losers never look good, but these were smart bets with payoffs worth the risk as he saw early on that the Democratic Party is moving farther left, toward his progressive true north.
Here, then, is de Blasio on de Blasio’s New York. I’ve compressed some transitions, but the words are all his, starting with his efforts to make the state more like the city, where Democrats run the whole show.
I came into office with no illusions about either Albany or Washington. And my lack of illusions has been confirmed multiple times. In terms of the governor, it’s been a very mixed bag.
I’m certainly happy that he led the way on things like higher minimum wage and paid family leave. I think a lot of that took energy from what we were doing here, from other places like the Fight for 15 movement, but I’m still glad he did it.
Do he and I align consistently, ideologically? No. Has he been a consistent ally? No. Anyone with eyes to see knows that.
It’s very fair to ask: “What are the origins of this persistent divided government in Albany?” And I think there are many Democrats who could’ve done a lot more to avert the situation. I certainly put (Cuomo) in that group. It’s a very interesting New York State problem, that this could be like California, where Democrats have consolidated power and have done some remarkable things with it.
I have my real disagreements with the governor and then there’s individual achievements that are absolutely progressive and very meaningful. But on the question of “Have we create d a unified Democratic Party to have the maximum Democratic leadership and the maximum progressive policy of state?” Of course not. Not even close.
We didn’t start 2014 expecting to get that engaged (in the state Senate elections). A series of things happened that suggested a sort of extraordinary coalition which at the time I thought the governor was fully invested in and allowed for a labor to make a change in the state Senate that, after experiencing the first half of 2014, I became more convinced than ever was in the interest of the state, but also the people of New York City.
There were real questions about the effectiveness and the focus of the state committee (controlled by Cuomo), and the question was simply “What are the appropriate ways to support the ele ction of Democrats?” And everything we did was consistent with the work of previous leaders in the state, including what Mayor Bloomberg did to support Republicans who were running for state Senate.
This is all against the backdrop of Albany’s broken-ness. I was fundamentally convinced that a Democratic state Senate would be better, again, for the state, for the city, but also for the process of fixing Albany.
I asked about Bradley Tusk, Bloomberg’s third-term campaign manager who later helped Uber win its fight with Mayor de Blasio when he tried to freeze their business in the city, and who’s now set up NYCDeservesBetter to rip the mayor and create a campaign apparatus in search of a candidate to run against him next year. That, I said, is something Tusk wouldn’t have done without getting Bloomberg’s okay. De Blasio shook his head no:
I don’t know that and I want to be careful and smart about that meaning. I respect Mike Bloomberg. We had real differences, we had areas of agreement, we worked together on a couple of things since. I certainly don’t put it past Bradley Tusk that he has his own agenda and his own patrons.
Later, de Blasio returned to Bloomberg, and the conceit of a mayor too rich to be bought (one, it’s worth nothing, that Donald Trump has picked up in the presidential race Bloomberg also hoped to enter):
The great irony is some of the questions that have been raised about us were because we disclosed. We gave you guys a roadmap to ask questions. That was the Jeffersonian pact, essentially, we made: We will give you a perfect map of where the money came from, ask all the questions you want.
There’ve been no instances of personal corruption (in City Hall), no one’s lining their pockets in this administration and we’re very proud of being a group of people that are here for the right reasons.
Now is it true that somehow the Bloomberg model got put on a pedestal, somehow that idea that the richest person in the city being the mayor was a glorious reform? I don’t think it was healthy for this city to have a billionaire as mayor. I don’t think it’s healthy in general for billionaires to be in positions of leadership.
That doesn’t mean I don’t agree with some of the things that Mayor Bloomberg did, and I personally respect him, but I think billionaires are a lot of the cause of the problems in this country. We see some observers making a virtue of the notion that because someone is wealthy they do not have to ask for campaign contributions. I think that’s a very double-edged sword. I think those who are wealthy have wealthy friends and align to wealthy interests and favor those interests in many, many ways.
With the ongoing federal and local probes looking at the finances of his machine, I asked if he would have done anything differently in hindsight. Speaking broadly (because of those probes, he said) he offered no regrets:
When I came into office, I had every reason to believe, given what I talked about in the campaign and given the many, many voices that spoke up against my agenda that happened to have a lot of money and power, we would soon experience a lot of very strong opposition.
It first took its form, if you’ll remember, in the spring of 2014 when a number of hedge-fund figures funded an advertising campaign against me in terms of charter schools. So that very real concern that we would experience a kind of moneyed opposition that previous mayors have not was quickly proven real.
And we knew that therefore in trying to achieve our agenda we’d be constantly buffeted by huge amounts of resources that we didn’t have anything to compare with. Even in the context of trying to win pre-K, our number one agenda item and a very popular one, we saw quickly that the charter-school fight turned into an attack on the pre-K initiative.
In the vein of not believing in unilateral disarmament, we thought it was important that there be some vehicle to push an issue agenda, and that was first pre-K, later affordable housing. Both of which succeeded and I do think having a vehicle to push the issues was important.
As for his ties to the two businessmen now charged with bribing top cops (one of whom has pled guilty and is now cooperating with the feds) beginning in the Bloomberg-Kelly years, and who also were named to de Blasio’s inaugural committee and then bundled big bucks for his political pursuits, the mayor said that they’d asked for and received nothing from City Hall.
I didn’t know these guys before the general election, and in the general election an amazing array of people showed up, as I was on the verge of becoming mayor, and offered help. We always vet people. If someone gives a donation, we vet them. There’s nothing that I remember, certainly, at the time that came back negative, and people offering to support our efforts is just exceedingly normal in public life in this city and the state and this country. People come along and say, “Okay, we weren’t with you before, but now you’re going to be the next mayor, we want to support you as you have a general election.” Great. “We want to support your inauguration committee.” Great.
They appeared to be classic donors who had been on a different side in the primary election and then were trying to ingratiate themselves.
Speaking more broadly about his agenda for the city, and his need to raise money to support it, de Blasio said:
I am radical enough to say, “Let’s really get money out of politics and do full public financing of elections.” But in the meantime, I don’t traffic in unilateral disarmament. I just don’t. I’m very actively engaged in a re-election campaign, everything’s going be disclosed, everything’s going to be by-the-rules.
This entire effort has been to address income inequality, to create affordable housing, to fix our schools, to fix police-community relations. Lo and behold a lot of that’s happening, I’m proud of it. We’re going to go out and tell the people about it. I think the people are going to be with us again.
And I have not an iota of concern about the way we’ve done things because we knew all along there’d be a lot of scrutiny. We embrace that scrutiny and we disclose because we had faith in what we did.
We’ll see what more, if anything, that scrutiny exposes to count against his real record of accomplishments atop a thriving city.
Just after the interview, I asked one of the mayor’s advisers if there was a record player in his office. He told me no, he’d never seen one. Friday, I asked again to be sure, and he found one, hidden inside a cabinet, along with four more boxes of records; a secret stash, you could say.
One with some nice stuff, including “Born in the U.S.A.” and more from The Boss to balance out the Clash, and some albums a wise-guy tabloid writer could tie in with de Blasio’s politics. Etta Jones’ “Don’t Go To Strangers.” The Violent Femmes’ “The Blind Leading the Naked.” Sade’s “Stronger Than Pride.”
The closest thing to a scandal? A Jefferson Starship record.
harry.siegel@thedailybeast.com
