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Nov 6, 2013 · Bill de Blasio, who was elected to become the first Democratic mayor of New York City in 20 years, will have a far grander stage on which to test the liberal worldview that has been the...
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After returning from Nicaragua, de Blasio moved to New York City, where he worked for a nonprofit organization focused on improving health care in Central America.
- Overview
- Early life
- Political career: campaign manager and councillor
- Mayor of New York City
Bill de Blasio (born May 8, 1961, New York, New York, U.S.) American Democratic politician who was mayor of New York City (2014–21). He also served as Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager for her successful senatorial run in 2000 and as a New York City councillor (2002–09).
At age five he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his mother, Maria, a public relations manager, and his father, Warren, a veteran of World War II who had served in the Pacific theatre and lost a leg in a grenade attack. His father, after struggling with alcoholism, later committed suicide. De Blasio graduated from New York University in 1984 ...
De Blasio proved himself to be politically savvy early in life: as a student activist in high school and college, he advocated for student rights and protested issues as diverse as library hours and nuclear proliferation. After graduate school de Blasio served as a social relief volunteer in Nicaragua—a country then torn by a civil war between the Marxist government of the Sandinistas and counterrevolutionary forces—and returned to the United States a committed socialist. Though adopting more-centrist views with time, de Blasio continued to defend left-leaning policies.
He entered municipal politics in 1989 as a junior staffer in the mayoral campaign of David Dinkins and later became an assistant for community affairs in the Dinkins administration. In 1997 de Blasio was appointed as a regional director in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, working under Andrew Cuomo. De Blasio left that position two years later after being hired to lead Hillary Clinton’s first bid for the U.S. Senate. As campaign manager, de Blasio encouraged teamwork and open deliberation, to the point of being criticized by some as indecisive.
In January 2013 de Blasio announced outside his Brooklyn home his intention to run for mayor of New York City. Underestimated during much of the Democratic Party primary, de Blasio secured the nomination with more than 40 percent of the vote, 14 points ahead of second-place finisher William Thompson, the former city comptroller. De Blasio was again underestimated by his opponents in the mayoral race, but his campaign gained traction as he came to be seen as the embodiment of change in a city led for more than 12 years by independent Michael Bloomberg.
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Support for de Blasio transcended class and racial divides. Under Bloomberg’s mayorship, New York City had become safer, more prosperous, and arguably more pleasant (notably through bold urban development projects) but also infamously unaffordable for all but the wealthiest New Yorkers. De Blasio placed economic inequality at the centre of his campaign, adopting the theme of New York as a tale of two cities where a few do incredibly well while the many struggle to pay for life’s necessities. More concretely, de Blasio promised to raise taxes on New Yorkers earning more than $500,000 a year and to use the resulting monies to improve education in the city, notably by providing universal prekindergarten. De Blasio also vowed to promote affordable housing and to better protect renters against abusive landlords.
Another key element of de Blasio’s campaign was his commitment to reform the so-called stop-and-frisk program of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) authorizing police officers to stop, question, and search individuals suspected of criminal activity without the need of probable cause. Seen by some as an effective crime-reduction tool, the NYPD stop-and-frisk practice was decried by many, including de Blasio, for unfairly targeting African Americans and people of Hispanic descent.
Republican Party mayoral candidate Joe Lhota and other critics warned that de Blasio’s policies would lead wealthy taxpayers to leave the city (negatively affecting tax revenues) and jeopardize the drastic reduction in violent crime achieved in the city by the previous two administrations, but in November 2013 de Blasio won the mayoral race in a landslide, receiving almost three-quarters of the vote. He was the first Democrat to win the New York mayoral election in more than two decades. At his inauguration in 2014, de Blasio was sworn in by former U.S. president Bill Clinton.
Mar 27, 2020 · “The de Blasio administration is prepared for the likelihood of the novel coronavirus in New York City,” Dr. Raul Perea-Henze, the city’s deputy mayor for health and human services,...
Dec 30, 2021 · De Blasio preserved or started building more than 200,000 affordable homes, far exceeding the totals of his predecessors, when working-class and poor New Yorkers struggled to find housing.
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Dec 30, 2021 · De Blasio proved himself to be a capable manager who shepherded New York from the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic to a city that reopened schools, restaurants and theaters — all while...
