By the time Bill de Blasio made his long-awaited announcement yesterday that he was running for president, the conventional wisdom had long since formed.
So it was no surprise when yesterday morning, as the eyes of the nation turned to de Blasio, the
Post
ran
a montage on its cover of people laughing hysterically. Or that in
The Times
, Jennifer Senior
mocked him
in a column that was if anything even more contemptuous.
“You may have read that Bill de Blasio spends a lot of time at this gym,” Senior wrote, in a tipoff that she was not going to be kind. “Whenever I am there, so is he, as enduring a fixture as the baskets of used towels in the locker room.” Later in the piece, Senior referred to him as “essentially an asterisk.”
It was still early in the morning when de Blasio released his announcement video, and then appeared on
Good Morning America
for an interview with George Stephanopoulos. He finished up with an afternoon press conference on Liberty Island.
“The 23rd candidate to enter the Democratic presidential field found a slice of the limelight by botching his carefully planned announcement rollout,” it reported.
“
Three out of four New Yorkers
didn’t think
that de Blasio should run for President, which pretty much qualifies as consensus in American politics,” wrote Eric Lach. “That de Blasio has launched a campaign anyway might be explained by his confessed inability to read his constituency’s mood.”
Who knew the
New Yorker
hated Bill de Blasio? Was it always the case? Or is it this race that's making people so crazy angry at him?
When we got home at the end of the day, we turned on CNN for its coverage of the announcement. After first running video of police union members chanting
“Liar!”
outside of the
GMA
studios, Erin Burnett turned to interview political journalist Joan Walsh.
Erin Burnett:
Why is Bill de Blasio running? What is his path to victory?
Joan Walsh:
It does not exist. I’m sorry if I’m the first one to tell him that….He seems to be bored with his job.”
And that from a reporter for
The Nation.
To be sure, a 17 year old
got the jump
on de Blasio’s announcement and forced his aides to spill the beans earlier than planned. And police union hecklers did make it onto TV.
But de Blasio did fine yesterday. His video was slick, he stuck to his theme of putting working families first, and his event at Liberty Island was picturesque as planned.
It wasn’t perfect, but so what? At this point, the conventional wisdom
on the mayor is driving the coverage instead of the other way around. Bumbling Bill strikes again – even when he doesn’t.
Not a dynamic you want on the presidential campaign trail.
