De Blasio Asks City to Address Its Inequalities

Bill de Blasio, left, at Memorial Baptist Church in Harlem with his wife, Chirlane McCray, and State Senator Bill Perkins

N.Y. TIMES

In a mayor’s race crammed with celebrity razzle-dazzle, historic candidacies and tabloid turns, a gangly liberal from Brooklyn is quietly surging into the top tier of the field by talking about decidedly unglamorous topics: neglected hospitals, a swelling poverty rate and a broken prekindergarten system.

Despite his left-leaning politics, Mr. de Blasio wants to become the candidate of the overlooked outer boroughs. His campaign is a frontal assault on the Bloomberg era — as being unfair, undemocratic and unfeeling. But his sharp critique of the mayor also doubles as an attack on Ms. Quinn, Mr. Bloomberg’s partner in government and Mr. de Blasio’s chief rival for the liberal white vote. For him to succeed, she must fail. Watch for him to portray her as an unprincipled Bloomberg-lite.

Now that Anthony D. Weiner’s campaign has imploded, Bill de Blasio, the public advocate, is drawing new energy and voter interest to a candidacy that presents the most sweeping rejection of what New York City has become in the past 12 years — a city, he says, that is defined by its yawning inequities.  

    

“We are not, by our nature, an elitist city,” he told a group of young Democrats a few nights ago at a cramped bar in Brooklyn. “We are not a city for the chosen few.”

It is the campaign season’s riskiest calculation: that New Yorkers, who have become comfortably accustomed to the smooth-running, highly efficient apparatus of government under Michael R. Bloomberg, are prepared to embrace a much different agenda for City Hall — taxing the rich, elevating the poor and rethinking a Manhattan-centric approach to city services.

In a city that is endlessly congratulating itself for its modern renaissance — record-low crime, unmatched crowds of tourists, streets refashioned in European style — a day on the campaign trail with Mr. de Blasio is a reminder of unaddressed grievances and glaring disparities.

Describing what he calls a “tale of two cities,” rife with inequalities in housing, early childhood education and police tactics, he promised those gathered at the Brooklyn bar that this year’s mayoral race was “going to be a reset moment. A major reset.”

Mr. de Blasio [has] climbed to No. 2 behind Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, in the latest poll by Quinnipiac University of likely Democratic voters.
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Mr. de Blasio’s message, despite the excitement it has drawn from liberal luminaries like Alec Baldwin and Howard Dean, has alarmed many business leaders and Bloomberg aides, who see him as lacking a sophisticated understanding of the city’s economic success and displaying a naïveté about how quickly it can unravel.
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Beyond that, Mr. de Blasio’s electoral path remains uncertain in a race against better-known Democrats. William C. Thompson Jr., a former comptroller, holds a natural appeal to the city’s fast-growing minority electorate, and Ms. Quinn is trying to capitalize on her history-making chance to become the city’s first lesbian mayor. In many ways, Mr. de Blasio, 52, is a man without a built-in voter base.
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At the heart of Mr. de Blasio’s appeal, according to interviews with his supporters and political team, is a willingness to deliver an unvarnished and unstinting critique of the Bloomberg era in spite of polls that show a majority of New Yorkers believe the city is heading in the right direction under the mayor’s leadership.
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Zoning changes have encouraged sky-piercing condominiums with multimillion-dollar price tags, but Mr. Bloomberg vetoed a bill requiring paid sick leave for working-class New Yorkers. By the city’s own measure, 46 percent of residents are poor or near poor, but the mayor scoffed at plans to compel companies that receive city subsidies to pay higher wages. (Mr. de Blasio backs both the wage and paid sick leave measures.)

As he travels the city, Mr. de Blasio can barely contain his fury over what he sees as the central contradiction of the Bloomberg years: a mayor who routinely unleashed the power of government to change New Yorkers’ personal behavior repeatedly balked at harnessing it to change their economic circumstances.

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Mr. de Blasio’s campaign platform is unabashedly interventionist and progressive. His most eye-catching plan would raise the income tax rate to 4.3 percent from 3.87 percent on earnings of over $500,000, to pay for universal access to prekindergarten.

Now, an overcrowded system leaves tens of thousands of lower-income residents without access to full-day programs, setting back the early education of a generation, Mr. de Blasio argues. The campaign says the 11 percent increase in the marginal tax rate would amount to about $2,120 for a family earning $1 million.

In conversations with voters, Mr. de Blasio argues that Ms. Quinn and Mr. Thompson have been either unwilling or unable to sufficiently challenge the legacy of the mayor and the city’s corporations over the past decade.

Back at the bar in Brooklyn, Mr. de Blasio’s raw indignation won him a modest electoral victory. When a straw poll of those in the room was completed, around 10 p.m., he had soundly defeated his Democratic rivals.