Bill de Blasio

Bill de Blasio (born May 8, 1961, New York, New York, U.S.) is an 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).

Early life

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 and obtained a master’s degree in international and public affairs at Columbia University in 1987. (Though called Bill from an early age, he changed his name in 1983 to Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm—his mother’s family name was de Blasio—and then adopted Bill de Blasio as his legal name in 2002.)

Political career: campaign manager and councillor

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.

After serving on a New York City school board, de Blasio was elected in 2001 (taking office in 2002) to represent the 39th district of Brooklyn in City Hall. After three terms as a city councillor, de Blasio successfully ran in 2009 for the citywide position of public advocate.

Mayor of New York City

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.

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.

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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.

As mayor, de Blasio undertook a number of progressive initiatives, including his campaign pledge of universal prekindergarten. The program, which made “pre-K” available to every four-year-old in the city, was widely seen as a success. He also oversaw a continued decline in the police’s use of stop-and-frisk. Despite critics’ prediction of an upswing in crime, the city’s crime rate fell. In addition, de Blasio focused on income inequality. However, his efforts to impose a “millionaire’s tax” on wealthy New York City residents met resistance from state legislators, who were responsible for approving tax changes. In 2017 de Blasio was easily reelected mayor.

In May 2019 de Blasio announced that he was running for president the following year, joining a crowded field that included 22 other Democrats. However, he was unable to garner much support, and he dropped out of the race in September.