Mayor de Blasio today marks his 100th day in office by doing what he likes to do most — talk about himself.
The 100-day landmark has been used since FDR took office in 1933 and aggressively used his first 14 weeks to tackle a dispirited nation mired in the Depression.
Certainly the mayor can say he’s governed pretty much as he promised during last year’s campaign: heavy on the ideology and short on the day-to-day management that is the essence of running any big city. Fact is, in contrast with FDR, the biggest “crisis” of Bill de Blasio’s first 100 days has been the city’s snow removal.
On Wednesday, the day before his 100 Days speech, de Blasio spoke to the folks at the National Action Network. There he hailed Al Sharpton as a “blessing” and invoked loaded civil-rights language to accuse the NYPD under Mike Bloomberg and Ray Kelly of having given the city “separate and unequal” policing during their tenure.
Clearly, Mayor de Blasio is taking a leaf from Barack Obama’s political playbook. When all else fails, make a speech. That may have made sense back in 2008, when Obama was wowing huge crowds in Berlin and exciting young Americans with his talk of hope and change.
It makes much less sense today, when President Obama’s signature achievement — ObamaCare — is more unpopular than ever and his foreign policy is in flames from Damascus to Kiev.
The point is, the whole 100 days thing is not about Bill de Blasio’s record as mayor of New York. It’s about how he really sees himself: as National Spokesman for Progressivism. And somehow we doubt this is going to help get the snow cleared.