New York City mayor Bill de Blasio is a life-long Boston Red Sox fan. That dichotomy is about all you need to know about his life and political career.
For a start, he doesn’t even use his real name. Bill de Blasio was born Warren Wilhelm Jr., later became Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm, and in 2001 – just as he ran for elected office – adopted his current identity.
It is hardly the only thing which makes the 6′ 5″, two-term mayor an unlikely White House contender.
He is personally unpopular in his own back yard, he alienated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, and even his wife Chirlane McCray said it was not the time for a run when she was asked in January, then spent months walking back her comment.
His record in the city has attracted opprobrium from all sides: homelessness has soared; the federal government has taken control of much of the city’s public housing stock; a schools initiative was ended after $1 billion was spent with nothing to show; rank-and-file police protested him; and his wife’s mental health initiative has become a fiasco.
But de Blasio is now on the national stage, one which he has been publicly clamoring for since the day he became New York mayor.
That stage is likely to bring fresh scrutiny to his rise.
Born in New York, he was brought up largely in Massachusetts, and as a result is a lifelong fan of the Red Sox – probably the team most hated by New York baseball fans.
He went to work for New York City Council after his undergraduate degree, then became a professional political organizer and even traveled to Nicaragua in support of the left-wing Sandinista government – although would later claim he was not supportive of all their policies.
That flipped into a political campaigning career, working to elect New York’s first black mayor, David Dinkins, for whom he became a City Hall aide, and to re-elect Harlem’s Charles Rangel to Congress.
Then he worked for the Clinton administration and in 2000 managed Hillary’s successful run for the New York Senate seat, something which seemed to put him into the family’s inner circle.
His time with Dinkins led to his unlikely marriage to Chirlane McCray, who served as a speech-writer for prominent New York officials as well as a part-time poet.
She penned a 1979 essay, ‘I Am a Lesbian,’ about her sexuality and coming out as a gay black woman at a time when many Americans kept it from the public sphere.
McCray, six and and a half years de Blasio’s senior, would later tell Essence magazine that she made her relationship with her husband possible ‘by putting aside the assumptions I had about the form and package my love would come in.’
McCray does not use the label bisexual.
During his political rise she became a top confidante.
The couple have two children, Chiara and Dante.
He campaigned for mayor on a ‘Tale of Two Cities,’ promising to tackle inequality in a New York where Manhattan and his area of Brooklyn had boomed thanks to financial services and plunging crime, but where the outer boroughs were, he said, seeing little benefit.
Successfully elected in 2013 on the back of the lowest turnout in recorded city history, he set about delivering his progressive vision – which had included tackling homelessness.
But in fact homelessness in the city kept going up, and rough sleepers, who had all but vanished in Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg’s tough-on-crime era, returned in droves to the streets and the subways.
De Blasio first tried to claim numbers were down, and was accused of rigging the counts to minimize the problem, then eventually in 2015 admitted there was a crisis but called it a ‘perception problem and a reality problem.’
If anyone had a perception problem, the city’s tabloids pointed out, it was de Blasio, who rarely took the subway, unlike Bloomberg, and in any case was notoriously late for meetings.
He was even late for the memorial to the 265 victims of the November 2001 Belle Harbor air crash – prompting the New York Post to give him an alarm clock.
Lateness was one charge, but charges of hypocrisy were a constant attack from his critics.
Despite having run Hillary’s 2000 Senate campaign, he declined to publicly endorse her in 2015 fast enough for her inner circle’s liking.
WikiLeaks revealed the cold shoulder he got afterwards despite a stream of emails he sent to John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager.
Then he decided to burn the bridges completely, getting Bernie Sanders to swear him in in January 2018 – rewarding that gesture now by running against him.
If there is one Democrat he loves to hate, and who loves to hate him, it is the pugnacious New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who has made big footing de Blasio a hobby.
When aides whispered that de Blasio had siestas built into his schedule, Cuomo mocked: ‘I’m not a napper really, I never have been.’
Former friends turned enemies, no slight is too small to be remembered, and Cuomo blamed de Blasio for Cynthia Nixon’s high-profile, but failed, primary run against him in 2017.
The governor even broke decades of precedent to station state troopers in the city in a move said to be done simply to irritate the mayor, who controls the NYPD.
De Blasio’s fortunes as mayor, however, have not been hit by New York descending into its crime-scarred past, and his record on keeping crime low has seen the murder rate fall to its lowest-ever recorded level.
That has helped the city boom economically, and the de Blasio years have seen real estate values spiral and a building boom in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.
But the boom has brought its own issues, with de Blasio complaining about private enterprise and its effect of the city.
He brings some unusual abilities to the race for the presidency; he speaks Italian,and sometimes mangles Spanish at city press conferences; can apparently mimic a goose’s honk, and is surely the only presidential candidate to recently pose with Big Bird – after whom he is frequently nicknamed – and virtually look him in the eye.
Now de Blasio has to see if he can transcend his unusual personal background, elite city status and the dislike of his own New Yorkers to beat 23 other Democrats, among them Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, then take on his city’s most brutal political campaigner so he can kick him out of the White House.
It’s reality that de Blasio joins a crowded Democratic primary field that includes former Vice President Joe Biden, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Cory Booker, Rep. Eric Swalwell, Gov. Steve Bullock, Sec. Julian Castro, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Gov. Jay Inslee, and Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Rep. Tim Ryan.