Bill de Blasio will be the next mayor of the nation’s largest and most important city.
He will be the first Democratic mayor of New York City since 1993, when Rudy Giuliani defeated David Dinkins amid high crime rates and racial strife. De Blasio worked in Dinkins’ City Hall, and prior to that volunteered with the radical socialist Sandinista movement in Nicaragua.
At age 26, de Blasio “went to Nicaragua to help distribute food and medicine in the middle of a war between left and right. But he returned with something else entirely: a vision of the possibilities of an unfettered leftist government,” according to the New York Times.
De Blasio, who currently holds the largely symbolic position of “public advocate,” will now have the chance to put that vision in action. He campaigned far to the left of his opponents in the Democratic primary, promising to roll back education reforms opposed by teachers unions and raise the city’s already high taxes.
After a series of ads highlighted his racially diverse family, de Blasio surged in the polls. In September’s Democratic primary, he defeated the comparatively centrist Christine Quinn, who would have been the city’s first lesbian mayor.
Once dismissed as ungovernable by liberals, New York City enjoyed a renaissance under Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.
The latter, a billionaire technocrat frequently lambasted by conservatives for his “nanny state” policies regulating food and cigarettes, will soon be missed.
