Sandinista on the Hudson

New York City’s mayor-elect wants to change a socially divided city back into a community. He belongs to that rarest of species: The liberal Democrat.

No other city in the world is home to so many billionaires: New York claims 70 of them. One of them is now forced to seek employment elsewhere: Wall Street magnate Michael Bloomberg — with a $31 billion fortune — lost his job as mayor of the city of 8.4 million inhabitants after 12 years on the job. The anti-Bloomberg will take over as of January. Liberal Democrat Bill de Blasio, standing close to 6 feet 6 inches tall, is hard to overlook. He was elected mayor at the beginning of the week after defeating Republican Joseph Lhota, an investment banker. Bloomberg was prevented from running again due to term limits.

Fifty-two-year-old Bill de Blasio described himself as the “unapologetically progressive” alternative to Bloomberg era politics. He complained that New York was actually two cities existing side by side: On one side, Bloomberg’s city of bank buildings and rich people, including 400,000 millionaires; on the other, a New York with 50,000 homeless people who spent their nights in public shelters, a city with a 16 percent unemployment rate, where 22 percent lived below the official poverty line and the demise of the middle class was a real threat. Those in the lowest quintile income group earned an average of $8,933 annually while the richest 5 percent earned $436,931 a year citywide; the top 5 percent in Manhattan took home $799,969.

Editorials for the Candidates

No city can live very long with such income disparity, de Blasio warned during his campaign. He proposed increasing income tax rates for anyone earning more than $500,000 a year to finance preschool programs and increase support to small businesses to raise minimum wages. He was arrested for demonstrating against the closure of threatened hospitals. It was a timely message, even if the Bloomberg campaign decried it as class warfare. Some leading media concerns wrote editorials — if at times nervously — supporting de Blasio’s campaign. But as late as September, The New York Times warned that de Blasio had been “an ardent supporter of the Nicaraguan revolutionaries.” His opponents even accused de Blasio and his wife of spending their honeymoon in Cuba(!).

Multicultural New York, where more than one-third of the population is made up of immigrants, has an image of tolerance and liberalism yet hadn’t elected a Democratic mayor since David Dinkins in 1989. Multiculturalism brings with it an atmosphere of wheeling and dealing and tensions between ethnic groups easily exploited by conservatives. From 1994 to 2001, New York was ruled by Rudolph Giuliani, the strong man for all those New Yorkers who were fed up with corruption and criminality.

He was replaced by Bloomberg, a Republican who was elected mayor as an independent in 2009. His vision for New York was as an attractive location for the financial industry. He was the benevolent patriarch who gave out hundreds of millions of dollars for charitable causes; in the cultural wars, he supported same-sex partnerships and opposed further restrictions on abortion. But a patriarch also supports law and order. Many citizens thought in doing so, he had created a surveillance state. He razed the camps set up by the Occupy movement in Zuccotti Park and authorized the police to “stop and frisk” suspects at will. The suspects were mainly young black and Hispanic males. In August, the courts decided that the practice was unconstitutional. That prompted Bill de Blasio to declare that as mayor he would fire Police Chief Ray Kelly.

With a Large Microphone

De Blasio, a native New Yorker who grew up in modest circumstances — his parents were divorced and his father an alcoholic — became familiar with New York politics from the bottom up as a Columbia University student and through his involvement with the Nicaraguan solidarity movement. He began as a campaign worker for David Dinkins, who became New York’s first African-American mayor. De Blasio then went on to various posts in municipal government. In 1997, he became regional director for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for New York and New Jersey in the Clinton administration. In 2000, he managed Hillary Clinton’s campaign when she ran for the U.S. Senate. Then in 2001, he was elected as a city councilman and was subsequently elected as New York City public advocate — an ombudsman position with little power, but a large microphone with which he represented the public interest. That was how Bill de Blasio became a professional politician.

He and his family have come to symbolize for many the hope for a better New York City with less prejudice. De Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, is an African-American author known, among other things, for her essays on feminism. The public got to see a lot of the de Blasio family during the campaign — featuring Dante, de Blasio’s 15-year-old son, who said his dad would make people forget Bloomberg, raise taxes on the wealthy for a better society and as mayor of all New Yorkers, put an end to “stop and frisk.” If one asks today what the Occupy movement accomplished, the answer might be that the protests against society’s wealthiest 1 percent helped make it possible that someone like Bill de Blasio could become successor to a billionaire.