The mayor fights the power

True to form, Bill de Blasio slipped the shackles of his press corps and his city this weekend to fight the power in Hamburg along with his son, Dante, who’s spending the summer in Germany. Our mayor flew there to protest President Trump outside the G20, continuing his efforts to ride the Donald’s slipstream to the position of national prominence that’s eluded him throughout his first term in office, even as he appears to be coasting to reelection.

Being there meant missing, among other things, the police academy graduation ceremony two days after the second assassination of NYPD officers on his watch. (The trip was announced only hours beforehand, de Blasio said, because he had to ensure it wouldn’t make him miss Officer Miosotis Familia’s funeral).

There’s always something happening in New York, and complaining any time the mayor leaves town is a kinder, gentler version of asking when he stopped beating his wife. But it irks for this mayor to skip town in the middle of an election — he who just months into the job famously complained that “a lot of people outside New York City understand” that “something special” was happening on his watch “better than people in New York City.”

“Good morning — and good afternoon to you, Mr. Mayor,” one New Yorker greeted de Blasio, who called in to WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show at 10 a.m. Friday, our time, to explain that he was in Hamburg (where, ironically enough, anarchic protests of the sort that the anti-globalization movement largely abandoned after 9/11 are returning to confront a new breed of nationalist presidents) because “we increasingly recognize that cities are going to have to lead the way in very material ways.

“It’s not just symbolism,” de Blasio continued. “Mayors are more and more having to create the policies because our national policies don’t, so this rally is really to affirm our values but also the role that the grassroots have in keeping those values alive . . . . It was incumbent upon me as the leader of the biggest city in the county to set a tone and say we’re not going to be intimidated by President Trump.”

On Friday, Bill Hyers, who ran de Blasio’s well-executed 2013 campaign — when the image of Dante broke through and a quarter million votes in a five-way primary turned out to be enough to effectively win control of New York City for eight years — tweeted at me in defense of de Blasio’s trip that after Trump’s election, “People look for different things in there politicians. de Blasio has been protesting for years, part of the reason he was elected.” I called and asked him to elaborate. Said Hyers: “He put himself out there as this person. You know, he was protesting for the Sandinistas back in the day. When he was first elected to the City Council, he got arrested with Steve Buscemi protesting the closing of the fire house in Cobble Hill.”

Despite the protests, Mayor Bloomberg closed that fire house. When Mayor de Blasio — having spoken his truth into a position of real power — was pressed to reopen it in 2015, his City Hall referred reporters to the FDNY.

“And then of course LICH during the mayor's race was big,” Hyers continued, meaning Long Island College Hospital.

The photo of candidate de Blasio cuffed in the back of a police van for protesting the plan to close Cobble Hill’s “vital community hospital” helped swing that race. When LICH closed the next year, Mayor de Blasio called a deal that ultimately led to some health-care facilities at the base of the luxury condos going up in its place “truly historic.”

Hyers went on: “Throughout his entire life, when he was a young activist and when he was first in politics, he’s always been a protester. I think the authenticity is there and I think it’s just as much second nature as it is anything else.

So why

“If he protests in New York it’s a much different thing. Look, he’s got a different job to do in New York. He’s in charge of the police force, He’s in charge of other things. There’s a different context to do it here than to do it in other places,” said Hyers.

“This is more of a core person. You don’t give up your core person when you get into office. It doesn’t mean you use it all the time. I mean, there’s a lot to protest in New York and he hasn’t been in the majority of those, but that doesn’t mean he’s not going to get out every once in a while at the right time and the right place. I mean when it's the right thing for him.” fly to Hamburg?