Blasio draws a 'crowd' - of 20
Most on hand for NH panel were on it
CONCORD, NH — Mayor de Blasio’s ongoing tease of a presidential run didn’t exactly pull in the crowds during a campaign-esque event in the Granite State on Sunday.
Only 20 people showed up to hear the leader of America’s largest city hold a roundtable on mental health — the 14 people on the panel and just six in the audience.
There were also about six reporters on hand to make the room at the Sugar River Valley Regional technical school look a bit less empty.
De Blasio — who continued to refuse to commit to a White House run — pulled a well-worn page from his mayoral campaign playbook and put First Lady Chirlane McCray center stage on what was his second day touring the primary battleground state.
The day began with de Blasio and McCray touting her $1 billion mental-health initiative, ThriveNYC, to a roundtable of local officials in the town of Claremont, even as city lawmakers have been demanding answers about its spending and effectiveness back home.
“She’s my partner in everything I do, and that is a phrase we say every opening and have said for years,” de Blasio said. “They feel her humanity, and they feel her compassion.”
He added: “What Chirlane says and does is very, very powerful.”
It was a return to form for Hizzoner, who put McCray front and center in his victorious-but-initially long-shot campaign to become New York’s 105th mayor.
“It’s a huge crisis,” McCray told the small number of panelists.
The small crowd was similar to what some lower-tier candidates who have actually announced their runs have gotten in the early-primary state, such as Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.
By comparison, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has been in fourth place among Democrats in New Hampshire primary polls, drew 300 people to a recent event.
The City Council will hold hearings next week on the efficacy of Thrive NYC, as new figures from the NYPD show the initiative received 23 percent more reports of people in mental distress in 2018 than in 2015, when it launched.
The second public stop for New York’s first couple in Claremont also took a page from the political playbook — showcasing McCray’s biography.
Hizzoner and McCray headed to a modest yellow house her family called home for a century after emigrating from Barbados. McCray said that for decades, they were the only black family living full time in the tiny New England town.
“We came up here many summers. We’d have family gatherings where we’d come up and visit them,” she said of the place where her mom, Katharine, was born and raised and would return to in the summer with a young Chirlane.
“My grandmother would make yellow cake,” McCray said.