A Tale of Two Speeches
by Nicole Gelinas
The differences between Mayor de Blasio
and his predecessor go beyond style.
On his inaugural State of the City address today, New York mayor Bill de Blasio stuck to his campaign theme. “The state of our city . . . is a Tale of Two Cities,” he said. De Blasio noted that too many New Yorkers are poor or struggling. His goal is to “give everyone a fair shot.” Who can argue with fairness? There’s still no indication, though, that the new mayor is sufficiently competent and pragmatic to carry out his vision of making “New York City work better for everyone.” A mayor in office only five weeks may be entitled to announce goals unencumbered by details one more time. But a rereading of former mayor Bloomberg’s first State of the City speech 12 years ago is a reminder that details matter, even early on.
Today’s speech highlighted one big difference between de Blasio and Bloomberg. De Blasio isn’t interested in being conciliatory or even polite to his predecessor, as Bloomberg unfailingly was to his. “I know that these speeches have at times been used to attack the motives of our public employees,” de Blasio said today, without saying just who he is criticizing.
If one can presume that de Blasio is referring to Bloomberg, the comment also happens to be untrue. In his first State of the City address in 2002, Bloomberg praised the city’s workforce, noting that “city workers [having] lifted themselves above personal tragedy” after 9/11 four months before had helped make New York a “city of heroes.” In one of his final speeches as mayor, last December, Bloomberg said that “New York City has the best workforce in the world, and for that to continue, our employees must be competitively compensated.” Bloomberg praised New York’s municipal workers, but he was careful to point out that New York has fiscal and economic pressures that prevent it from giving the labor force every taxpayer dollar in sight.
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Read more: www.city-journal.org
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Bill de Blasio’s Red Apple Agenda
The further left a radical politician wants to go, the more likely he is to wrap his agenda in a mainstream Republican brand. In his interview with Bill O’Reilly, Obama compared himself to Nixon (not for the reason most Republicans would expect) and in his State of the City address, Bill de Blasio compared himself to Fiorello H. La Guardia; a former Republican mayor of New York City.
The constant mentions of La Guardia, a universally popular figure, were a poor mask for a radical address filled with ugly divisive rhetoric, class warfare and schemes that will bankrupt the city.
If William Wilhelm Jr., aka Bill de Blasio, had been more honest, he would have compared himself to Mayor Dinkins, his old boss, who was sitting in the audience, while the first Democratic mayor since the end of the disastrous Dinkins era unveiled a package of class warfare, high taxes and ID’s for illegal aliens.
But Dinkins, despite being almost as friendly with Al Sharpton as De Blasio, was a moderate compared to Red Bill whose State of the City address was another call for a Red Apple. For all his many shortcomings, Dinkins had never embraced divisive rhetoric to the same extent that Bill de Blasio did in his address.
Instead of simply laying out a series of programs, Bill de Blasio ranted about the rich (a group that he is a member of) and announced that he wanted to discuss “the core values we share as New Yorkers pursuing progressive change.”
Not every New Yorker is a fan of progressive change, especially once he finds out that it means dangerous streets, high taxes, poor services and lots of buck passing, but Red Bill was really saying that non-progs who weren’t committed to his extremist program had no place in the city that his corrupt allies had taken over.
Instead of uniting New Yorkers, Bill de Blasio harped on his “Tale of Two Cities” story that is as much a work of fiction as the Dickens original.
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Read more: www.frontpagemag.com
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