Our mayor-elect traveled to the White House on Friday, and he was on a mission: to join with President Obama to promote the progressive vision.
We’ll leave aside for a moment the elephant in the room here, which is that the meeting Bill de Blasio hails as a new opportunity for progressivism took place at a time when the signature achievement of modern progressivism — ObamaCare — has become a synonym for overreach, inefficiency and broken promises.
That doesn’t seem to deter Bill. As he made clear before he left, he was eager to join the president and more than a dozen other mayors in the Roosevelt Room because it struck him as an opportunity to thump for the progressive future. At a press conference Thursday, he put it this way: “A lot of the mayors around the country, many progressives among them, are anxious to put their stamp on the national debate and start to move together in a more progressive direction. I think we’re going to have a tremendous ally in the president.”
De Blasio was elected on a clear progressive line, so he understandably sees his landslide victory as a mandate for his vision. But before he takes upon himself the role of national spokesman for the progressive movement, he might want to look back at 2008, when Obama was first elected president. Before Obama had spent one day in office, he was variously hailed as the second coming of Lincoln, FDR or Nelson Mandela. Before his first year in office, he would collect a Nobel Prize.
At its root, so much of Obama’s progressivism is spending: everything from Solyndra and the stimulus to ObamaCare. De Blasio’s progressivism is similar, requiring more money — for affordable housing, universal pre-K, minimum wage, etc.
Given the more liberal City Council he will have, de Blasio will find plenty of support. But if he took away anything from his time with the president Friday, let’s hope it’s the lesson that, in the end, even progressives will be judged by the results they deliver and not just the money they spent.