It’s a bit early for us to be thinking in earnest about endorsements in the upcoming New York City municipal elections. Yet the flap over Mayor Bill de Blasio’s recent trip to Germany to be the featured speaker at a major anti-Trump protest rally outside a meeting of the G-20 economic summit got us thinking about the list of similar against-the-grain antics of this mayor.
That he fancies himself as the paradigmatic “progressive” and charter member of the anti-Trump “Resistance” is nothing new. But there is something particularly off- putting about the notion that the mayor of New York City would follow the president of the United States to a foreign country and lead raucous, public protests against him.
It’s one thing to rally the opposition here at home. But to do so overseas in front of foreigners was a spectacle we think should have been beneath him.
He told a German TV station that his appearance was in part to provide an opposing position to President Trump’s worldview. However one packages it, it’s still undermining American policy abroad. And that is to say nothing about his leaving the day after a police officer was assassinated, when most of New York City was mourning her death.
It calls to mind the mayor’s recent behavior in connection with this year’s Puerto Rican Day parade. His equivocation over whether to participate in its celebration of a convicted terrorist, a self-styled Puerto Rican nationalist who spent more than 35 years in federal prison for a bombing that left four New Yorkers dead, was particularly egregious. (The mayor ultimately marched.) But it was just another of the mayor’s bows to the syndrome first named nearly fifty years ago by the writer Tom Wolfe as “radical chic.”
And then there was the mayor’s endorsement of congressman Keith Ellison for chairman of the Democratic National Committee. This despite Mr. Ellison’s past association with Nation of Islam leader Rev. Louis Farrakhan, his opposition to U.S. funding for Iron Dome, his support for the BDS movement, and his efforts to get the Obama administration to force Israel to ease the Gaza blockade. Never mind, too, that Mr. Ellison was the darling of the Bernie Sanders anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party.
Finally, while the mayor has not shown much hostility toward the Orthodox Jewish community of New York per se, there is a notable lack of Orthodox representation in senior decision-making positions in the administration of this ostensible champion of inclusiveness.
As the incumbent, Mr. de Blasio is at this point doubtless the odds-on favorite to win in November. But let’s not lose sight of the above. And as the campaign gets going, let’s also look very carefully at how he has run the city. Burnishing progressive credentials does not necessarily a successful mayor make.