Nobody’s mentioned his name in the context of a Presidential run just yet, and the verdict is still out on whether New Yorkers are happy with his tenure in leadership, but Bill de Blasio is, reportedly, talking in hushes and whispers with Democratic insiders, sniffing out whether there’s room for a “progressive” challenge to Hillary Clinton.
Clinton, of course, is prime to get, as we now say, “Rahm-ed”: that is, while she’s spent the last week crafting her progressive credentials, trying to establish a fake friendship with Elizabeth Warren, and pretending to care about the lesser worldly concerns of the poor people by complaining about CEO pay (she makes more than the average), and chastizing SCOTUS for Citizens United (as though she’d ever willingly submit to a publicly-funded campaign), she’s barely made a dent in her solidly moderate public profile. There’s a reason they refer to a particularly middle-of-the-road, pseudo-Socialist political ideology as “Clintonesque.” And as such, she’s opened the door to a progressive challenger, who may not be successful, but will at least add that extra twist into Hillary’s granny panties.
And, since Elizabeth Warren stubbornly refuses to throw herself on the pyre of public humiliation, Bill de Blasio seems to believe he may be just the man for the job.
Bill de Blasio is going up against Hillary Clinton as the Democratic presidential candidate, it has been claimed.
The Mayor of New York is allegedly entering the race as a ‘leftist’ alternative to Clinton in the hopes that this will see him represent the party in the 2016 elections.
This claims come in the wake of a television appearance last week, just hours before Clinton announced her candidacy, where de Blasio refused to back her…De Blasio’s intentions to throw his hat in the ring as Democrat presidential candidate comes from a ‘national party operative’, according to the New York Post.
The mayor’s bid for presidency is backed by the Working Families Party, and he hopes that left-leaning ‘progressive activists’ will join them in supporting him over the coming months, the source claims.
He could, of course, just be looking to sketch out of his current job before everyone realizes how problematic his decision-making has been. But that’s for another article entirely.
Like I said, if Chicago is any indication, these attempts at “punishing” the Democrats who don’t fall in line with the progressive agenda will be short-lived, but that doesn’t mean it will be any less entertaining to watch Clinton twist herself into knots in order to part from nearly every previous position she’s held, particularly because she’s gone to so much effort over the last several decades to “scrub clean” her uber-progressive past. Hillary Clinton was a radical, willing to attach herself to far left causes and wear the most egregious 1970s trends without fear, but as her husband ascended to national office, Clinton had to pretend that her affair with progressive politics was a wrongheaded youthful fling.
If Warren’s polling numbers are any indication, de Blasio will be less popular with Americans than the Target decisionmaker who cut off the supply of inexpensive Lilly Pulitzer to millions of clamoring American women armed with Twitter. But if he wants to make the Democratic debates endlessly entertaining, I don’t see why anyone should stand in his way.
