New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has earned the ire of many in his city for his lack of focus on what's happening on his own streets.
He left last week on a four-day tour of San Francisco and Washington, D.C., all the while missing out on crucial issues facing the city, including heightened violence — with 13 shootings and five murders in the days he was away — as media outlets chronicled his seeming detachment.
"Look, we’re not clingy. We can handle four days without seeing you. It’s not like the city’s top boss was needed around here this week or anything. There was only violence on the streets, chaos in homeless shelters and trouble in schools to deal with.
"Oh, and a spike in shootings, a deadly derailment of a city-bound Amtrak train, and a hammer-wielding madman on a rampage,"
wrote the New York Post in a sarcastic editorial decrying de Blasio's most-recent "progressive national tour."
When he did return to the city, de Blasio had "no public schedule," showing up to work out at the Park Slope, Brooklyn, YMCA on Sunday with his wife after missing the city's annual AIDS Walk New York, which Gov. Andrew Cuomo attended and later toured the city, essentially taking the mayor's place,
the Post noted.
"This guy has no interest in the nitty-gritty of running the city," one former City Councilman Sal Albanese, a Brooklyn Democrat, told the Post. "He seems to be bored, and he’s only been in office for a year and a half. He should have run for U.S. Senate if he wanted to travel around the country pontificating."
Black leaders are also backing off from their support of the mayor, The New York Times reported, saying that they are showing "signs of frustration." They think the mayor has "eased up on his commitment" and "lost his appetite for criminal justice reform,"
the Times said.
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat from Brooklyn, spoke to the Times about the mayor's poor administration of minority communities, including his ongoing "broken windows policing," described as "the aggressive enforcement of minor violations."
"The disenchantment relates to policing issues, the mayor’s support of broken windows, his lack of support for banning chokeholds and his willingness to support making resisting arrest a felony," Jeffries told the Times of black voter concerns. "We’re very early in the mayor’s first term, and there’s a lot of room for progress."
The Post said the mayor enjoys talking about the city's "transcendent" changes since he came aboard. It noted, however, that while he was traveling around the country preaching his progressive message, folks back home hoped he would refocus on running New York — meaning less pontificating and more pothole fixing.
"In keeping with the increasingly airy and disconnected nature of his transcendency-hungry mayoralty, de Blasio is already showing signs of boredom with New York City after less than 18 months in office. Instead, he’s taking his ministry on the road to preach the good word,"
the Post said.
It added that he was making speeches decrying today's "economic crisis" caused by the 2008 Great Recession, seemingly oblivious that it "ended six years ago."
"He seems to think he was hired to do something more transcendent than mere governance," the Post said in slamming his lack of focus on New York itself. It noted that de Blasio needed to do "the job he was hired to do."
With an approval rating at 44 percent, the mayor should be rethinking his care of the city, the Post said, not trying to position himself as leader of the liberal left of his party.
"If he wants to manage this city, he should be in City Hall," the Post said.
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