New York - A Bill de Blasio mayoralty would revive the city’s far-left coalition.

The New Popular Front

by Sol Stern

The early political careers of President Obama and Gotham’s likely next mayor, Bill de Blasio, have followed similar trajectories. Both Obama and de Blasio emerged from the radical activist wings of their respective big-city Democratic parties. Both achieved broad political success despite their leftist backgrounds, winning big electoral victories against the odds. Both have attractive, mixed-race families that have added to their political allure.

Each candidate also has had to deal with potentially damaging revelations about past involvement with violent anti-American radicals. Obama had personal and political ties to the ex-Weather Underground domestic terrorist William Ayers and the virulently anti-American and anti-white Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that, when he was 26, de Blasio went on a political pilgrimage to Nicaragua—then ruled by the Marxist-Leninist Sandinistas—and came back to the United States a dedicated “Sandalista” (as leftist American supporters of the Sandinistas were then called). Several years later, de Blasio and his wife illegally honeymooned in Communist Cuba.

This is where the similarities end.

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Matured, Or Just Older?

by Matthew Hennessey 

New Yorkers should wonder how much Bill de Blasio

 has evolved from his Marxist past

At 26, Joe Lhota was a newly minted Harvard MBA. Bill de Blasio was playing footsie with the Sandinistas. Guess which one is going to be the next mayor of New York City?

According to polls, Democrat de Blasio is running ahead of Lhota, his Republican rival, by more than 40 points. With such a seemingly insurmountable lead, de Blasio is on the cusp of becoming mayor of the most populous city in the United States. But his glide path to Gracie Mansion suffered a downdraft this week when the New York Times reported that de Blasio spent the latter part of the 1980s working for a U.S.-based nonprofit that sent food aid and medical supplies to supporters of the Sandinistas, the socialists who ruled Nicaragua and fought a guerilla war against U.S.-backed Contra militias. In a 1990 interview with the New York Times, de Blasio, then known as Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm (though the Times calls him “William Wilhelm”) and described as “a leader in the solidarity network,” praised the Marxist revolutionaries. “They gave a new definition to democracy,” he said.

Even in liberal, open-minded New York, these revelations raised eyebrows. The Big Apple is known as a progressive city, but New Yorkers have not elected a Democratic mayor in 20 years. Naturally, the de Blasio campaign has been eager to suggest that the candidate’s views have evolved, if not softened, since he was a young man. Though de Blasio won the Democratic nomination by running to the left of his primary opponents, he is transitioning now to a general-election strategy that he hopes will have broader appeal.

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