DE BLASIO MUST GO!
As the lights went out in NYC, the mayor was a thousand miles away in Iowa. That moment captured his ego-driven failure of a mayoralty. Enough is enough. Now ...
THE lights went out on Broadway Saturday night, and Bill de Blasio was a thousand miles away in Iowa. It was the moment that perfectly captured his distracted, ego-driven failure of a mayoralty.
Bill de Blasio does not care about New York City. He does not care about its people. He does not care about how it’s run. He does not care about you or your taxes, creating jobs or improving lives. All Bill de Blasio cares about is Bill de Blasio.
And so, for the good of the city, Gov. Cuomo needs to remove the mayor from office.
Let’s face it: It’s only by accident de Blasio is mayor in the first place. Without Anthony Weiner’s onanistic implosion, the Campaign Fi
nance Board’s sidelining of rival lefty John Liu, or the support of one peculiar, but wellfunded, constituency — people who hate carriage horses — de Blasio would probably be calling for a socialist uprising on Community Board 6.
But there he was, the designated survivor of 2013, suddenly in charge of your money. And boy, did he spend it. He paid off the unions with generous contracts, expanded the taxpayer-funded workforce and poured cash into pet projects. Thanks to the success of Wall Street and real estate, he never lacked for funds, never had to make any tough budget choices.
Yet from the start, his lack of interest was apparent.
After his one initiative, pre-K, passed in Albany, de Blasio had no other ideas. The self-described champion of the poor didn’t even notice when a nursing home was sold for luxury condos under his nose.
He couldn’t show up on time. For anything.
Every day, he drags himself out of bed at the crack of 10, has himself driven to the other side of town so he can do a halfhearted couple of minutes on the elliptical, and then maybe goes to City Hall. Of late, even that is optional. He goes back to Gracie Mansion to hold meetings about running for president.
Think of all the failures he has overseen, any one of which would have embarrassed a lesser man.
After a number of children died when the Administration
for Children’s Services failed to act, de Blasio defended its commissioner — until he forced her out. After the number of homeless skyrocketed, he defended his Homeless Services chief — until he forced him out.
When it turned out that the chair of the New York City Housing Authority lied about lead-paint inspections that could lead to kids being poisoned, he defended her — until he forced her out. Even then, the city ran NYCHA so badly that the federal government interceded and set up a monitor.
De Blasio gave his wife $850 million for her ThriveNYC mental-health initiative, and when questioned by the City Council, she couldn’t come up with one thing it succeeded in doing.
He spent a jaw-dropping $773 million on his Renewal program to turn around failing schools. It did absolutely nothing except keep kids trapped in institutions the city knew were terrible. Shamed? You don’t know Bill. He claims the biggest threat to education is charter schools, which actually deliver results, not his own mismanagement.
Dead kids on the ACS’s watch. Poisoned kids as NYCHA lies. Kids languishing in failed Renewal schools. All because this mayor didn’t care enough to put effective government ahead of his political games.
But New York City is safe, you say. Yes, thanks to programs introduced under Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg, and Commissioners Bill Bratton, Ray Kelly and James O’Neill, the NYPD has achieved a miracle in crime reduction. In a rare moment of wisdom, de Blasio decided not to mess with success — but he still can’t resist the chance to disparage cops as racists in his hunt for votes.
He runs the largest, greatest city in America, but Bill de Blasio is bored. He doesn’t relish New York. Doesn’t ride its subways, see its shows, eat in its restaurants (except for one cafe near his gym). Once he realized he didn’t need the votes anymore, he skipped the Puerto Rican Day Parade this year. He threw a parade for the Women’s World Cup soccer team just so he could give a tone-deaf campaign speech.
He must know he has no chance of winning the Democratic nomination, polling as he does below 1 percent, but still spends much of his time in South Carolina, Nevada and Iowa.
And we sit here, in the dark, wondering about the infrastructure not being worked on, the disorder not being addressed, the city he’s too indifferent to run.
How much more money will he waste? How many more bad decisions must we endure? We cannot live with an absentee mayor — and we cannot live with him here, either.
Per the City Charter and state Constitution, the governor can suspend the mayor immediately for 30 days, then prepare charges, present de Blasio with them, give him a chance to answer them — and finally officially remove him. Or the mayor could do the right thing and resign.
Either way, Bill de Blasio must go. Now.