Bill de Blasio for President! [View all]

[cali]

OK, not really. At least not for 2016: He's running for mayor of NYC, but he's a real Progressive running for Mayor in the largest city in the country; the flagship city of the nation, and he's talking A LOT about economic issues and racial justice issues. He has a proven track record as a Progressive.

Forget Weiner: There’s a real progressive for NYC Mayor-

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People are talking lately about how Democrats have become one big happy family on social issues – gay rights, women’s rights, even to some extent abortion, even guns at least in the blue states — but we’re divided on economic issues. Do you see that party split: great on cultural issues, but on economic issues, a lot of Democrats have become more like Republicans?

I couldn’t agree with your analysis more. It is a glorious thing, in New York and to some extent the country, that we have moved so profoundly forward, particularly on gay rights, less so on choice and guns, although here, in the city, we’re fantastic on both. In the city of New York there’s a consensus that was not true not so long ago. On economics, though, we have the farthest thing from it. Sharp, sharp divisions. Twenty years of governments in this city that were explicitly not interested in reaching people in need, dealing with the growing crisis of reduced wages and benefits or lack of affordable housing.

This election, post economic crisis, post-Occupy, post-2012, where Obama wins partly by going after Bain Capital: economic issues matter in a way social and cultural issues don’t here. This is an election about economic fairness. There is not a consensus in this town about that issue. Bloomberg’s presence looms large and negatively. But even among Democrats: It’s clear Quinn wants to continue the Bloomberg legacy. It’s clear Thompson is trying to set himself up as a moderate. I’ve proposed a tax on the wealthy for preschool and after-school programs; Quinn and Thompson opposed that, as did Bloomberg. Quinn and Thompson are both very close to the real estate industry. I think people want a very different approach. They want to see the city respond to their suffering. I think this is the faultline of this election, I think the debate for years to come will be around economic fairness, and so far the lack of city responses to the challenges. And I think that’s gonna change our politics profoundly.

I think what is being missed in the whole discussion in this election — when we finally get back to discussing issues rather than one couple — is everywhere I go I find people on the street disgusted. There is a rawness, an anger in the city I have not seen since I started working in New York public life in 1989. There is a sense of dislocation, a sense of options becoming more and more limited, and what people are saying to me is the decline of wages and benefits, the decline of the middle class, the huge increase of housing costs, it’s all happening so quickly, and they see no response. Now, we don’t see a response in Washington…

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http://www.salon.com/2013/07/26/forget_weiner_theres_a_real_progressive_for_nyc_mayor/

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De Blasio’s campaign is a test of just how liberal New York Democrats really are. The key question isn’t about the big cultural political issues—abortion, gay rights, gun control. The city is solidly in favor of all of them, and so are its Democratic mayoral candidates. The new, unsettled battleground is economic liberalism. His campaign is easily the most intellectually coherent and focused when it comes to inequality. Everything from his proposal for beefing up bus service to his plan for restructuring development subsidies extends from his central premise: that New York has become dangerously split between rich and poor, and the ­disparities in government priorities and services need to be closed. De Blasio sound-bites his view of the problem—­predictably—as “a tale of two cities,” but his platform offers the most thorough liberal critique of what’s happened to New York in the Bloomberg years.

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http://nymag.com/news/politics/citypolitic/bill-de-blasio-2013-7/index1.html