Dream on, Bill!
MAYOR IOWA-BOUND WITH GRAND VISIONS FOR 2020 PRESIDENTIAL YEAR
FRESH OFF winning his second and final term, Mayor de Blasio has his eyes set on Iowa — and the national stage, despite bombing there before.
The mayor is heading to the home of 2020’s first presidential beauty contest, the Iowa caucuses, 13 days before he’s inaugurated at City Hall for his second term. He announced the plan just weeks after his barely challenged reelection — suggesting that his attention and ambitions ARE drifting from City Hall.
“These rumors have always circulated — and now that he’s a lame duck, he can leave New York City,” Fordham University political science Prof. Christina Greer said.
Giving the keynote at the holiday fund-raiser for Progress Iowa will enable de Blasio to tout progressive credentials that could be valuable, should he decide to pursue the Democratic nomination, against formidable potential contenders such as U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.
And the friendly forum will likely give the mayor a pass on less flattering issues that he left at home — like his pay-to-play scandal, failure to conduct thousands of healthpreserving lead inspections in NYCHA apartments and struggle to raise reading scores as promised.
City Hall says the mayor simply wants to put a national spotlight on issues important to home.
The city is facing major threats from a GOP tax bill that would do away with state and local tax deductions that would throw the economy into chaos, and another bill that would make it easier for people from other states to carry guns around the Big Apple, which NYPD brass say would jeopardize citizens’ safety.
A group of New York district attorneys is headed to Washington on Wednesday to speak out on the guns issue, but de Blasio is taking a different tack with the Dec. 19 Iowa trip. “The mayor’s managed the nation’s largest city to crime reductions, job and wage increases, and progress in our schools. While he intends to serve out his term as mayor, not many Democrats nationally can match those results,” spokesman Eric Phillips said. “He plays a role in the national debate because that advocacy helps New York, and because he’s delivering wins on challenges the rest of the country is facing.”
De Blasio, too, has said he intends to serve a full term — which would end in 2021, after the presidential contest.
Even if he doesn’t run, de Blasio aims to play broker or gatekeeper, Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf said — a role that could allow him to spite a longtime nemesis, Gov. Cuomo. “The mayor wants to define what is a progressive, what is the progressive Democratic agenda — and he also wants to do his best to exclude people who don't fit that definition,” Sheinkopf said. “And at the top of that list would be one Andrew Cuomo.”
But de Blasio has tried that move before — and failed in spectacular fashion. Nearly every effort he made during the 2016 presidential primary season backfired.
For months, he withheld his endorsement from Hillary Clinton, whose Senate bid he had run in 2000 — in a misplaced claim on certifying when her platform crossed the progressive threshold.
But the party’s left flank always assumed de Blasio would endorse Clinton over Bernie Sanders, reducing his hedging into a stunt that peeved Clinton. The mayor wound up largely cut out of her campaign and the national discussion. His plans to hold a forum for progressive candidates in Iowa were canceled when none would attend.
He eventually invited himself to Iowa to do lowly door-knocking work for Clinton.
This time around, the mayor may be “reading the tea leaves” about the diminishing role of the Clintons in the party, Fordham’s Greer said — leaving room for new candidates and new kingmakers. “I don’t know if he necessarily wants to run, but he definitely wants to be at the table,” she said.
A City Hall aide said the mayor does plan to travel more frequently in the next year, likely with the help of a federal political action committee to fund his trips. His jaunts to Washington and elsewhere ahead of the 2016 race opened him to criticism that he wasn’t paying enough attention at home — something that will likely come up again, experts said. But this time, he won’t have voters to answer to.
“I really do wonder what New Yorkers will get from someone who, realistically, doesn’t need us anymore,” Greer said.
If de Blasio intends to get involved in the presidential primaries as a candidate, he’d face many pitfalls. Opponents would be sure to seize on his troubles at home. And he’d face the same problem as any mayor would in a presidential
run: No sitting mayor of any city has become President.
Being mayor of New York in particular has been a political career killer — no mayors in recent memory have gone on to hold higher office, despite the presidential ambitions of Rudy Giuliani and John Lindsay. Sheinkopf posited that was because being mayor meant being at home to run the city — which is at odds with running for President.
“Mayors never get out of here alive because there’s things like toxic lead in the housing,” he said.
And yet, the changing tides of the Democratic Party — with progressives rising and centrists waning — do align with de Blasio’s politics. In addition to his ideology, he’d come ready with a record to run on, one Democratic operative who is not aligned with de Blasio argued. “A lot of the Democrats who are running can say they voted to save Obamacare,” the operative said. “He can say he actually created (universal prekindergarten) for all 4-years-olds in the largest city in the country.”
He’s got experience in Iowa, having driven there to work on behalf of Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards in 2004. He’s cozy with the biggest locals of many of the nation’s biggest labor unions — who are particularly important in Iowa. He’s also tight with the hotels union, which is a key force in the caucuses in Nevada, another early bellwether state.
And while his favorability has plummeted with many New York voters, he remains popular with African—American voters — which could boost him in the age of Black Lives Matter and in the increasingly diverse South Carolina electorate.
Matt Sinovic of Progress Iowa, at which de Blasio will speak next month, said the group booked the mayor because of his strong progressive record and maintained it was too early to start wondering about 2020.
“I feel like people come in and even if they don’t run for anything or have no plans to run for anything, because you’re in Iowa, it’s an opportunity to raise the profile of whatever issue or issues are important to them,” he said.
In New Hampshire, home of the nation’s first primary, Neil Levesque, executive director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, said Democrats there have had a number of successes at the state and local level in recent years — and are itching for a presidential candidate to rally behind.
“I think they’d roll out the red carpet for him at this point,” Levesque said. “There's a vacuum right now. There’s no activity, and yet there’s a lot of Democratic activists that are angry at the direction of the country, led by the White House and Trump in particular — and also because they’ve been winning here, and yet at the top at it’s quiet.”
New York is not far from New Hampshire, a state of particularly civically engaged voters who probably know some of de Blasio’s greatest hits — that he launched a pre-K program and has won two elections. But it’s far enough away that they don’t know, at least not yet, about scandals like lapsed lead paint inspections in public housing.
“New York politics is really tough, but we’re not watching the day-to-day up here,” Levesque said. “I think the activists are looking for more of somebody who can win and can bring their issues forward.”
One liability at home might help him up north: his Red Sox fandom.
“I guess it shows that he can be an honest man — because a less honest man would have been a Yankees fan when he put his name on the ballot in New York City,” Levesque said.