{"id":34653,"date":"2013-11-11T11:38:19","date_gmt":"2013-11-11T11:38:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=34653"},"modified":"2013-11-11T11:38:19","modified_gmt":"2013-11-11T11:38:19","slug":"the-99-mayor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=34653","title":{"rendered":"The 99% Mayor"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 99% Mayor<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

New York Magazine<\/a>
\n2013-10-27<\/p>\n

Chris Smith<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Bill de Blasio\u2019s<\/a> promise may also be his problem.<\/em><\/p>\n

He is joking, but he\u2019s not kidding. \u201cWhen I spoke last time, they needed a much smaller room,\u201d Bill de Blasio<\/a> says to laughter. \u201cThis is the glory of American democracy!\u201d Exactly one year earlier, De Blasio had appeared before the same group, the Association for a Better New York, an alliance of city businesses and civic organizations; the turnout then, in October 2012, was 400, and the reaction was chilly\u2014especially when De Blasio unveiled what would become a signature element of his run for mayor, a proposal to tax the wealthy to pay for new pre\u00adkindergarten and after-school programs. This morning\u2014fresh off an improbable, resounding victory in the Democratic primary\u2014De Blasio is greeted by a sold-out crowd of 800 and a standing ovation.<\/p>\n

Still, there\u2019s a bit of tension served with the scrambled eggs: De Blasio unflinchingly repeats his vow to boost taxes, to which he adds emphatic praise for labor unions and higher minimum wages. To lighten the mood, De Blasio improvises a running joke. He decries the decline in city and state funding to the City University of New York, and the table directly in front of the podium\u2014full of CUNY executives\u2014breaks into loud applause. A few paragraphs later, De Blasio says he wants to restore $150 million in funding to CUNY, producing the same thrilled, noisy result. \u201cI love these guys!\u201d he cracks. \u201cWhenever I need a little pick-me-up, I\u2019ll just say the word \u2018CUNY\u2019 and this whole table will erupt!\u201d When he opens the floor to questions, a woman from a tech firm asks how the likely future mayor feels about her industry. \u201cI would like to have seen the same vigorous applause as from CUNY,\u201d he says, \u201cso you need to think about that.\u201d But De Blasio quickly makes it clear he\u2019s joshing, that he loves the tech sector, too. Then, a few minutes later, a representative of the hospital industry stands up and praises De Blasio. \u201cYou know, I just want to say, I\u2019ve lost my interest in CUNY,\u201d De Blasio says, smiling. \u201cI think the health-care sector is where I want to put my attention after all! They placated me better than CUNY did! CUNY, it was great while it lasted.\u201d<\/p>\n

More laughter, but this time there\u2019s an uneasy undercurrent. And, at a table of real-estate executives, raised eyebrows and shaking heads. They\u2019ve got nothing against hospitals or city colleges, mind you. They\u2019re just wondering what, exactly, the city\u2019s next mayor really stands for…<\/p>\n

…Enter the candidate, sweating and laughing. \u201cHey!\u201d De Blasio says, bounding through the front door of his Brooklyn house and spotting me sitting at the kitchen table with his wife and son and noticing that I\u2019m wearing a dress shirt and tie. \u201cChris Smith thinks he\u2019s on East 79th Street, in a townhouse!\u201d<\/p>\n

Which is funny and self-deprecating, because this sure isn\u2019t the $30 million Bloomberg manse. The De Blasio homestead in Park Slope<\/a> is a humble three-story rectangle covered in faded green-painted wood paneling. Inside, the first floor is a combined living room and kitchen, all of it well worn. On one wall is a small, framed drawing of the \u201cSodium Avenger,\u201d a superhero created by daughter Chiara to lovingly tease Mom for banning salt from the dinner table. On the opposite wall is a vivid yellow-and-red floor-to-\u00adceiling poster commemorating the mid-eighties Artists Against Apartheid movement; his wife, Chirlane McCray<\/a>, did poetry readings and is listed among the performers. If I needed any further indication that the city is on the verge of a radical change in mayoral style from Bloomberg<\/a>, who seems as if he were born in a pin-striped suit, there\u2019s the 52-year-old De Blasio himself: He\u2019s just back from his daily workout at the 9th Street Y and wearing a frayed, sweat-soaked blue T-shirt and baggy gray sweatpants…<\/p>\n

…As his own life has become more public, De Blasio has propelled his family into the spotlight with him. Having cheery, mixed-race kids has paid political dividends, but De Blasio claims his motivation is educational as much as anything else. \u201cYou have to understand our family is different in the way we think about things. Chirlane and I met in City Hall; we had both had a history of activism,\u201d he says. \u201cWe talked about it in broad ways; it was unspoken that we were going to pursue not only our love, our relationship, but our commitment to the world, and that was going to be a given in our lives \u2026 These are kids who, by the time Chiara was 5 and Dante was 2, they had slept overnight in the Clinton White House. [The kids] both got so much out of this experience this year, they got some real-life lessons about how the world works, but they also gained a lot of strength, a lot of confidence, a lot of understanding.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 99% Mayor New York Magazine 2013-10-27 Chris Smith Bill de Blasio\u2019s promise may also be his problem. He is joking, but he\u2019s not kidding. \u201cWhen I spoke last time, they needed a much smaller room,\u201d Bill de Blasio says to laughter. \u201cThis is the glory of American democracy!\u201d Exactly one year earlier, De Blasio […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8,26,20],"tags":[15381,16325,2711,596,12972],"class_list":["post-34653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-bill-de-blasio","tag-chris-smith","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-magazine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34653\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}