Metro

Tardy de Blasio is ‘a tale of two naps’: Joe Lhota

Republican Joe Lhota slammed mayoral opponent Bill de Blasio as a snoozing loser on Sunday, blasting the Democrat’s excuse for arriving late to a campaign event as “a tale of two naps.”

“He’s so nonchalantly expects us to say, ‘Well I got woken up at 5 o’clock in the morning, I have the right to sleep.’ You know what? (The) people of New York deserve a lot more than that,” Lhota said.

On the same day that Americans got an extra hour of sleep with the annual end of Daylight Saving Time, Lhota said that “being mayor is a 24-hour day job, you need to be physically prepared for it,” and that de Blasio up to the task.

“The idea that he gets interrupted in the middle of the night, at 5 o’clock in the morning — about the time I get up everyday actually — and he calls it divided sleep? A tale of two naps, that’s what he really meant,” Lhota said.

“Give me a break. If you don’t have the physical wherewithal to be the mayor, you should not be the mayor….This is a job that requires a requires stamina beyond most normal human capacity.”

Speaking at a campaign stop on Coney Island, Lhota noted that “mayors get phone calls at at 3 o’clock in the morning.”

“You need to get suited up, God forbid a police officer was hurt or a firefighter was hurt. You got to go out and you’ve got to deal with that,” he said.

Lhota, who trailed de Blasio by 39 points in the latest Quinnipiac poll, also compared de Blasio to “lackadaisical” ex-Mayor David Dinkins, in whose administration de Blasio served.

“Maybe he remembers how lackadaisical David Dinkins was, and that’s his only experience. I’ve said it over and over again, we’re in for a redux of David Dinkins,” Lhota said.

For his part, Lhota said he’s slept a mere “five and a half to six hours every night ever since I was a little kid.”

“I think it drove my mother crazy because of it. It’s just who I am. For whatever reason, my batteries get recharged relatively quickly,” he said.

Speaking after a campaign appearance in Harlem, de Blasio called Lhota’s criticism of him “laughable” but didn’t elaborate.

On Saturday, de Blasio explained being more than an hour late to a scheduled 11:30 a.m. campaign event by saying he had a “challenging night” and “divided sleep” because “I got a call at 5 in the morning that threw off my sleep cycle.”

He also admitted that “I’m not a morning person” and said that “we should reorient our society to staying up late.”

Additional reporting by Beth DeFalcoÂ