Is Bill de Blasio The Future of Progressive Politics In The Democratic Party?

[Douglas Carpenter]

2. I posted this salon article about three weeks back - now he is leading in the polls

salon.com: Forget Weiner: There’s a real progressive for NYC Mayor By Joan Walsh

Bill de Blasio tells Salon he'll break from Bloomberg, end racial profiling and tax the rich to fund preschool


Bill de Blasio (Credit: Reuters/Keith Bedford)

The day the latest Anthony Weiner scandal surfaced, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg vetoed anti-racial profiling legislation, a young woman was murdered in the East Harlem housing project where mayoral candidates had stayed two nights earlier, and Bill de Blasio held a press conference to talk about his work to block the closing of two New York hospitals – which wound up dominated by questions about Weiner.

That’s mostly been the story of de Blasio’s campaign since Weiner jumped into the mayor’s race in May and immediately became City Council President Christine Quinn’s top rival. While the exhibitionist former congressman still has progressive fans from his days shouting about health care reform on Fox and MSNBC, de Blasio is the genuine progressive in the race, with bold stands on police controversies and economic inequality that set him apart. Still, he’s been stuck in the middle of the pack in the polls, behind Weiner, Quinn and former comptroller Bill Thompson, who lost to Bloomberg in 2009.

New York magazine, in a largely admiring profile of de Blasio, called his campaign “easily the most intellectually coherent and focused when it comes to inequality… but his wonky ideas are also in danger of getting lost in Weinermania” – and that was before the latest revelations of Weiner’s sexting habits after he left Congress.

Yet de Blasio, New York’s Public Advocate, may be the beneficiary of Weiner’s latest troubles: In the Wall Street Journal/Marist College poll released Thursday – the first poll taken after the new sexting news — Weiner had dropped far behind Quinn, and de Blasio had climbed into a tie with Thompson at 14 percent. He was in second place among voters who said they were likely to vote in the city’s Democratic primary — significant, because unless a candidate gets more than 40 percent of the primary vote, the top two vote-getters will compete in a run-off — though polling experts say surveys consistently undercount the African American Thompson’s support, which is how he came close to upsetting Bloomberg in 2009.

New York, the laboratory for the New Deal, hasn’t had a Democratic mayor in 24 years, since Rudy Giuliani displaced David Dinkins in a city riven by racial tension and fear of crime. De Blasio got his start working for Dinkins and has been a voice for a renewed New York liberalism ever since, serving on the City Council before becoming Public Advocate. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Chirlane McCray, who is African American, and their two children Dante and Chiara, who attend public schools.

read the rest of the article including an interview:

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