This was yet another weekend of failures for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, but you would never know it from reading the New York Times. While the mayor lost his bid to raise taxes on wealthy New Yorkers to fund a universal pre-K program, the Times wants us all to know that he made a cameo on the show The Good Wife.
The Times‘s Michael Grynbaum, who also penned the Times opus on Bill de Blasio’s height, describes the “hammy” mayor’s cameo as something new and “exciting” for the mayor. Mayor de Blasio appears on a taxicab television screen that won’t shut off while Nathan Lane rides in the back of the cab and has to suffer through de Blasio’s jabbering. Grynbaum assures the reader this is “an exaggerated version” of de Blasio, but the Mayor himself almost discredits that: “They were surprised at how quickly I could get to over-the-top obnoxious.”
The cameo, Grynbaum writes, is “another sign of his rapidly growing national profile,” by all accounts something to celebrate. The Mayor described the appearance as “a blast.”
While such fawning initially appears unbecoming for a news organization responsible for holding executives’ feet to the fire, for the de Blasio administration, it’s somewhat understandable: there isn’t much more good news to go on. The first poll of the de Blasio administration found that New Yorkers were less than thrilled with their pick, and with every week that goes by, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo appears to chip ever away at de Blasio’s radically far-left campaign agenda.
This week, Governor Cuomo delivered a death blow to the signature proposal of the de Blasio campaign: a large tax on New Yorkers making over $500,000 to fund a universal pre-Kindergarten program. Every time de Blasio proposed the tax, Cuomo rejected it, and finally Albany passed this weekend a $540 million bill to fund the program that would make the tax obsolete. De Blasio has accepted defeat but refuses to let go of the idea of a new tax, telling reporters Friday that the tax on the wealthy still “makes the most sense” despite absolutely no need to implement it.
The sound defeat on taxes followed an about-face from many on the left about de Blasio, most recently unions. A collection of unions sent de Blasio a letter urging the mayor to drop his campaign to ban horse-drawn carriages, noting that such an effort would eliminate hundreds of middle-class jobs that help New Yorkers pay their rents. His war against charter schools – the Mayor shut three down this month – somehow won him a lawsuit from opponents of charter schools who believe de Blasio has not done enough to end the programs. The charter school debacle also resulted in dramatic video of Governor Cuomo delivering a speech to an anti-de Blasio protest in Albany.
The above is all to say that de Blasio has not given the New York Times nearly enough to work with to make him look good, not even support from the far left whence he came. A television cameo following a feature on his height is the best it is going to do for quite a while.
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