NO ONE LIKES BILL DE BLASIO: “Vanity Fair profile littered with unflattering quotes,” as spotted by Lachlan Markay of the Washington Free Beacon, who includes these gems:
From “a longtime political operative who admires the mayor”: “I’ve known Bill a long time, and he is really more like a liberal professor or political activist than he is actually a mayor. If you look at mayors around the country, look at Rahm in Chicago, Garcetti in L.A., they tend to be more nonpartisan than not. They tend to be problem solvers: ‘What’s the problem? What’s the solution?’ Bill comes from a very different perspective. When Bill is presented with a problem, I always imagine him musing, ‘Hmm, what’s my political philosophy on this?’ He’s not a natural manager—I mean, that’s an understatement.”
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From an “operative and longtime acquaintance of the mayor’s”: “The founding myth of the de Blasio administration is that people heard his transcendent vision about income inequality and there was a mandate for that … when in fact there was a win by default. He was elected because he was running against three Democrats and a Republican who ran a shitty campaign … He has taken this as a mandate for running this city on what he campaigned on. Bill thinks he was elected on income inequality, and he wasn’t. I think he misunderstands the electorate.”
So Obama on the Hudson, then?