Bill de Blasio: Rhetoric and Reality
City Journal Audio
Manhattan Institute
4.7 • 656 Ratings
🗓️ 16 January 2019
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nicole Gelinas joins City Journal associate editor Seth Barron to discuss Mayor Bill de Blasio's State of the City address, his aspiration to run for president in 2020, and his attempts to position himself as a national progressive leader.
"There's plenty of money in the city—it's just in the wrong hands," de Blasio proclaimed in a speech loaded with tax-the-rich rhetoric. Since his first mayoral election in 2013, de Blasio has tried to position himself as a revolutionary. But in practice, Gelinas notes, he is "more old-school, big-city Democratic pragmatist than new-school, Democratic Socialist of America."
The Big Apple mayor took to national media outlets like Morning Joe and the Washington Post to unveil his latest proposals: a "universal" health-care plan for New Yorkers and a mandate that private employers give full-time workers two weeks' paid time off. Closer to home, though, nonpartisan reporting has exposed his failures: crumbling public housing, unaddressed challenges of homelessness and mental illness, transit dysfunction, and political corruption.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast. |
| 0:02.9 | This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. |
| 0:06.2 | I wanted to remind our New York City listeners about signing up for our e-newsletter, The Beat. |
| 0:11.8 | You'll get insight on housing, education, homelessness, infrastructure, and more delivered right to your inbox three times a week. |
| 0:19.2 | You can find it and subscribe to it at |
| 0:21.6 | www.thebeatMI.com. That's it for today, Seth Barron, Associate Editor of City Journal. |
| 0:56.8 | Mayor de Blasio gave his State of the City speech last week, and he had some pretty strong words about wealth and the direction of the city. |
| 1:04.5 | And just this week, he indicated that he's open to the possibility of running for president in 2020. |
| 1:11.9 | Joining us today is Nicole Jeline, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor to City Journal. |
| 1:17.7 | Nicole writes frequently about public policy for a range of outlets. |
| 1:22.0 | Her latest piece for City Journal is called Empty Words and counsels us to keep an eye on de Blasio's actions, less so on his |
| 1:30.1 | rhetoric. Thanks for joining us, Nicole. Thank you, Seth. It's good to be back. So what about what |
| 1:37.1 | de Blasio said in his state of the city speech? I mean, he made some very radical claims about |
| 1:43.3 | things he's doing in the city, but you caution us not to take it all entirely at face value. |
| 1:51.6 | What do you mean? |
| 1:52.7 | Well, de Blasio is playing a very interesting game. |
| 1:56.5 | He ran for office talking about the tale of two cities in New York, the rich versus the poor city. |
| 2:03.0 | But now he's really looking for a tale of two audiences, that after five years of being a mayor in New York, |
| 2:10.2 | he's really tired of the New York City Press Corps. |
| 2:13.3 | The Press Corps has done a pretty good job of going after his public corruption problems with top donors and so forth and favors. |
| 2:23.6 | And some of his failures of governance, whether it's public housing or failing to deal with some of the problems of the mentally ill, homeless on the streets, things like that. |
| 2:36.7 | And so he knows that he's not going to get to the presidency through the New York City Press Corps. |
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