New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on Wednesday urged his fellow Democrats to articulate a clear progressive message and reject the “safe” campaign themes that he said doomed them in this month’s midterm elections.
“The results speak for themselves,” de Blasio told Politico’s chief White House correspondent Mike Allen. “Folks who didn’t try this message lost, sadly, overwhelmingly. The safe messages didn’t work.”
De Blasio also reiterated that he hopes to host the Democrats’ 2016 national convention and said he has secured $10 million toward his $100 million convention goal.
De Blasio told Politico that the Democratic presidential nominee “should speak to income inequality … should be willing to challenge the status quo, should be willing to challenge wealthy and powerful interests and should marry that with a grassroots organizing strategy that epitomizes the message.”
The remarks, livestreamed from Washington, D.C., echoed a column de Blasio wrote in the Huffington Post last week and suggested that the mayor, who rode a liberal campaign to a lopsided victory last year, is seeking to position himself as a progressive voice on the national stage.
De Blasio said a forthright liberal campaign serves Democratic candidates better than the moderate approach that many of them employed this year. “The moderate approach has been proven to fail so consistently, why would you not try a bolder approach?” he asked.
De Blasio, who was Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign manager, declined to say whether Clinton should run for president and said he has not discussed his campaign ideas with her.
Asked which Republican would be the most formidable foe, de Blasio said Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky “evinces a certain authenticity that any good Democrat should worry about.”
“To the extent that there is a Libertarian philosophy that he sticks to regardless of political convenience, I think that makes him a stronger candidate,” de Blasio said.
New York City officials are bidding to hold the 2016 Democratic convention at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The other contenders are Philadelphia; Phoenix; Columbus, Ohio and Birmingham, Alabama.
De Blasio said in a news release that New York will be ready “to hit the ground running the moment we’re named host of the 2016 convention.”
(AP)
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8 Responses
“Progressive” used to mean respect for civil liberties (as opposed to government enforced political correctness). It used to be for free competition, rather than government regulators choosing the winners and losers. It used to be that a progressive favored efficient merit-based government, rather than handing out patronage based on which special interest group you belong to.
But back then, “progressives” were a branch of the Republicans.
The only progress he knows is to keep the poor poor and to make the rich poor
Akuperma is almost completely wrong historically. The Republicans threw the Progressives out in 1912. Before then, the Republicans were the party of massive government intervention in the economy in ways that helped their supporters (mostly Robber Barons in a wide variety of industries); they were opposed by the laissez-faire “Bourbon Democrats” whose ranks included Samuel Tilden (the real winner of the 1876 Presidential election) and Grover Cleveland. Woodrow Wilson had been a Bourbon but embraced numerous Progressive values in his 1910 election campaign for Governor of New Jersey and in his 1912 candidacy for President. What killed off the Bourbons was the inability of laissez-faire policies to deal with the human misery that accompanied the Panic of 1893. By the time of the Panic of 1907, even the Robber Barons realized that their well-being depended on the general welfare of the country and some of them came to support Progressive policies; Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 campaign was funded by George Perkins, an associate of J. P. Morgan.
Unfortunately, the Robber Barons of today will destroy the United States in order to preserve their wealth.
Reminds me of the Hit… salute! Think about it!
Re comment no. 3: Thank you for writing my comment for me (perhaps more accurately and completely than I would have written).
Re comment no. 4: I have thought about it. Not a flattering picture, but I don’t think the mayor was giving a salute or planning on putting us in cattle cars to a gas chamber. Please don’t throw around Nazi comparisons so readily – it cheapens the memory of the Holocaust and its victims.
Cuomo and the new republican NY state senate doesn’t need to take lessons from this guy
Israel also has a ‘progressive’ party. It’s called Meretz.
CH’s writing is written so convincingly one almost assumes that what he writes is fact. Its actually not. However he does highlight an issue, that we have a nomenclature problem. The whole liberal vs. conservative/Republican vs. Democrat thing really comes down to socialism vs. freedom. Call it Liberal, Progressive, Democrat, Communist, Marxist, or any other name that is currently in vogue, the bottom line is that they all fall in line and promote policies that remove freedom from the individual and accord it to the “leadership” be they benevolent or malevolent. And this is what DiBlasio stands for. Its what the democrats currently stand for and no protestation from the myriad of LPDCM’s (see above for explanation) will ever change that. Yes, there were “Republicans” who stood for those anti-freedom ideals too. Though they shrouded themselves in “capitalism”. It is not the name or the party affiliation that’s important, its the ideas and actions that are. What Diblasio is trying to gunny up is a return to overt communism. And I hope he succeeds, because in this political climate it will virtually destroy and bury “democratic (read communist)” principles for many many years and we will finally have a hope of digging our way out of the mess that Obama (and yes, Bush) have wrought.
As for the evil minded and basically criminal 28th president of the United States, CH, please do some more reading as to the evil and damaged person he really was. Racist, eugenicist, anti-constitutionalst even as an academic years before being president, anti first ammendment, I can go on.