Tax-paid nannies for Blasio
FOR the entitled family of mayor wannabe Bill de Blasio, the big and tall champion of big government and bigger taxes, every day of the year was Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day.
Why pay for child care when you can get it for free, and on the public dime?
Several sources have complained to me that when the candidate’s wife and political partner, Chirlane McCray, was a speechwriter for city Comptroller Bill Thompson, the couple’s kids were frequently dropped at Thompson’s executive suite in downtown Manhattan, where the tykes were often looked after by staffers who didn’t feel they had the right to say “no.’’
“This wasn’t a onetime thing where they needed to be parked in the comptroller’s office,’’ said a former staffer. “They were a constant presence.’’ And a disruptive one.
From early 2002 to 2004, when Chirlane moved on to Citigroup — a shift to the 1 percent that curiously does not appear in her bio on de Blasio’s campaign Web site — a preAfro Dante, who would have been around 4 at the start, and Chiara, then 6, learned about government from the inside.
While my source, a man, was able to close his office door and tune out “Romper Room,” others weren’t so lucky. “They were in the middle of the office. We would have coloring books for them and such,” said another exstaffer. “Kids are disruptive. “They were, to me, cute.” But cuteness did not appease yet another former staffer, a woman, who moaned to a colleague that babysitting duties fell to her when Chirlane was in meetings.
“Other people had kids,’’ said a former employee. “But no one else brought in their children, except on Take Our Kids to Work Day.”
This free babysitting by public employees is particularly galling. And not just because de Blasio demonized working parents who employ nannies — often hardworking immigrants who need the work — in an infuriating commercial that ran during the primary campaign for the Democratic may oral nomination, which he won.
“If you live on Park Avenue,” he sneered, “you got everything you need. Nannies and housekeepers.” Now we know why de Blasio didn’t need household help.
The Post reported in August that when Blasio was a city councilman from 2002 to 2009, he also violated the separation of work and baby care, enlisting governmentpaid peons to round up his kids and drop them at his Brooklyn office. One claimed to have gone to the de Blasio house in tony Park Slope, Brooklyn, to run the personal Nanny State.
But after denying he used staffers to pick up his kids (he insisted he always watched them himself when they came to the office), de Blasio relented.
“There may have been a couple of times in an emergency where a staff member may have stepped in to help,” he said.
De Blasio did not comment for this column. His spokesman, Dan Levitan, did not respond to a call and emails.
Asked about the nursery operating out of the comptroller’s office, Thompson said, “No comment.’’
The hypocrisy is stunning. De Blasio, who the latest polls show is crushing Republican candidate Joe Lhota, portrays himself as a man of the people — some of the people.
De Blasio, once a selfdescribed “democratic socialist” who honeymooned illegally in communist Cuba and fixed parking tickets for relatives and constituents, while lately, hilariously, calling himself a “fiscal conservative,” never saw a government program he didn’t like. Or couldn’t benefit from.
Somehow, many of us parents manage to work without the benefit of taxpayerfunded child care. This perfectly illustrates de Blasio’s Tale of Two Cities.
In de Blasioville, wellconnected politicians get the breaks.