With just over two weeks before Election Day, and leading by more than 40 percent in the polls, you might think New York City mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio would be more relaxed.
Instead, he surprised many during Tuesday’s debate – the first to be televised – by aggressively taking on his opponent, Republican Joe Lhota. De Blasio was just as spirited the day after, blasting a brand new ad from Lhota that depicts New York as a city on the brink of lawlessness, poised to go over if de Blasio is elected.
TheGrio sat down with de Blasio to discuss Lhota’s ad, his debate performance, plans for the city and his vision for effective policing after Stop and Frisk.
theGrio: How do you think you did in Tuesday’s debate? What did you hope to convey and do you think you pulled it off?
Bill de Blasio: My sense of mission was to go in and starkly illustrate the differences, the sharp and substantial philosophical differences in our visions for the future of the city. Beyond the narrow sort of tactical dynamics of an election, this is a guy I really disagree with. I don’t like a lot of his pedigree and really disagree with the direction he wants to go in. And don’t think he’s being honest with people about the depths of his Republican ideology. I felt it was a serious matter to draw that out and argue it.
Some people said I seemed unusually aggressive for someone who is doing well in the polls. I don’t see it that way. First of all, I’m aggressive by nature. Second of all, there was a real discussion to be had.
And the new ad is just disgusting, inappropriate and divisive. It’s made worse by the fact that he didn’t say those things during the debate. Here’s your mainstream media there, here’s the TV audience and here I am. They asked him repeatedly, “what do you think of [de Blasio] on public safety and he offered some vague disagreements. Then the next day, from the safety of TV advertising, he throws out an absolute disgusting, divisive, alarmist ad.
Do you think voters will see it that way?
Yes, people are smart. They will, I think, find the ad repellent and be reminded of …I’ve used the Willie Horton analogy because I think it’s a worthy analogy. It’s the same mindset. Look at the images. Look at the coding that’s going on. I think it’ll backfire because it doesn’t represent the values of New Yorkers.
What are the challenges for your campaign when it comes to breaking through the noise and actually getting your message to everyday voters?
We’ve said from the beginning that I knew where I was, I knew what I believed in and was comfortable in my own skin. We were just going to portray our values consistently and in the consistency would be the ability to break through. You could call that a lot of things. You could call that a belief structure, message discipline, repetition. You could call that a lot of things and there’s truth in all of it, but I think what was most compelling was that I offered a critique of the status quo and an actual vision of where we could go, and was unapologetic about it, and I think that’s what helped it break through.
Now, when it comes to your plan for of making the city fairer and more affordable, walk our readers through how that’s actually made possible.
Well it’s a series of pieces that all complement each other in my view. The affordable housing plan is 200,000 units over the next 10 years, which is going to be a game changer. You’re talking about a huge amount of job creation in construction and in building maintenance thereafter. Then there’s the paid sick leave plan, where hundreds of thousands of people would get the additional benefit of having paid sick leave and not losing a week’s pay because they got sick when, you know, a huge percentage of this city is one paycheck away from something really bad. Then we plan to provide full-day pre-K for every child, after school for every middle school child.
For struggling parents, a lot of parents who are working multiple jobs to try and make ends meet, having a guarantee of full-day pre-K for your child and having a guarantee of after school programs for your middle school kid, is huge. These are real, fundamental improvements in people’s lives and they’re going to add up in a way that will be meaningful. It will take time, but really it’s a holistic effort to address so many of the challenges that people face and so many of the inequalities we’re facing.
And all that is afforded by raising taxes on the city’s more wealthy residents?
Well, it depends on the piece. The pre-K and after school program is a tax plan. The paid sick days plan is basically a regulatory action. Similar efforts have been successful in San Francisco, Seattle, DC, Philadelphia recently, the state of Connecticut. There are plenty of examples of why this is a plan that works. The affordable housing plan is based on using existing public value that we provide constantly, in re-zonings for example, opening up development opportunities that didn’t exist before, that are either going to be given away cheap or are going to be given away as part of a tougher bargain where we get a lot more affordability back. I’m suggesting the latter. The only piece that’s about taxes is the early childhood and after school programs.
And I’m sure you know that even with the recent ruling around stop-and-frisk, that public safety and fair policing are still very big issues in the minds of many voters. Could you describe for me what constitutionally sound, effective policing would look like in a de Blasio administration?
I think you’ve got police leaders around the country now who more and more believe in the notion of community policing and developing a deep bond and partnership between police and community. What I say is, we’re going to do that while maintaining all of the physical attributes of the NYPD: the 34,000 plus cops, the 1,000 who are on anti-terrorism duty, the very effective technology that’s being used more and more, and then the strategic innovations like gang intervention.
We have the best managerial system for fighting crime anywhere in the country and the template for many departments around the country-the CompStat system. We have all those tools, but we don’t have the right relationship between police and community. We achieve that by changing the leadership dynamics in the force, and saying to precinct commanders use stop and frisk only in a constitutional manner, only when warranted…I think that is going to allow us to stay safe, but also respect people’s constitutional rights. I don’t think there’s any contradiction there. I always say the nature of the United States of America is to strike that balance, but it hasn’t been struck in recent years in New York City and it has to be.
Well, before stop-and-frisk was given a name, the city had issues with police harassment. Is the problem that officers don’t understand what actually constitutes a reasonable stop?
What we need is to make very clear that there’s gonna be a governing philosophy, a way of training our police, a way of leading our police that is about respect for the constitution and about protecting law and order simultaneously. I think that will manifest new confidence that stops are being done for a specific reason, and not for broad brush reasons-not for profiling reasons. I think that immediately as that starts to play out, communities will have more confidence that strategies are wise and necessary.
Stop-and-frisk took the form of quota system. It was never called that, it was de facto but it’s quite real and the federal trial brought that out quite vividly with some of the evidence. A lot of cops I’ve talked to, always off record, are troubled that they’ve had to live under a quota system that has not allowed them to do the serious policing they were trained to do, and has poisoned their relationship with communities.
The stops became a thing unto themselves and 90% of the folks stopped were innocent. That’s police statistics that say that. And there’s really powerful statistical evidence here. The beginning of the Bloomberg administration, in year one, there were 100,000 stops. In the second year, 150,000 stops and crime going down. Now fast-forward to 2011, 700,000 stops. If crime is going down at 100-150,000, why did it have to go up to 700,000 stops?
Then from 2011 to 2012, because of all the public pressure, we see reduction in the use of stop and frisk by 20 percent. It wasn’t enough, but still something begins. Even with a 20 percent decline in the use of stop-and-frisk, there’s a 30 percent decline in violent crime. There’s been this classic debate on public safety, in which a lot of perspective was not provided. There’s a lot of misinformation out there. The simple statistic that stop-and-frisk went down 20 percent and violent crime went down 30 percent should’ve been a centerpiece of the debate in the city, but I’m not shocked that it wasn’t.
Do you think that all the attention on your family has overshadowed your message?
No, I have a lot of faith in voters. I’ve spent a lot of time in this work – a part of why I think Lhota’s ad is going to backfire immensely. Voters are literally getting smarter with every passing year from just the sheer volume of information available.
Our first ad was one part about family-very powerfully about family. That was a value and an idea that we really wanted to speak to because it’s very much my worldview. I think people responded to Dante for a lot of reasons. They saw him as someone who epitomized the folks who are being affected by stop-and-frisk, but also I think people heard a strong, confident young man and it was admirable – just generally admirable.
Some people dwelled on Dante, Dante’s voice and Dante’s hair. That’s fine, but the ad really had some of the impact it had because of its sharp, clear set of ideas of where we need to go. I think people were listening to the ideas. Of course people like him or they liked his hair or the feeling of family, but the ad wouldn’t have worked without the ideas.
Going into Election Day, do you have any concerns regarding turnout? What are you doing to ensure your voters actually show up to the polls?
I’m a Democrat; I always have concerns about turnout. What we found worked in the primary, we think will work again in the general — a heavy, heavy volunteer presence. I’m extraordinarily proud of our team…I think we’re-we found something that works and we’ve deepened it quite a bit since then. Our volunteer numbers are immensely larger than they were for the primary. We’ve gotten a huge number of issue organizations, labor organizations, others that have joined us. I think it really is about a huge grass roots apparatus, churning away with urgency.
Certainly everything that I say, everything the campaign says suggests urgency with not a hint of complacency. We don’t feel any complacency and that was obviously another thing I felt in the debate. I very much wanted to show how urgently I felt about the issues of the day and how deeply contested this election is in terms of the ideas and the issues. I wanted to communicate that sense of urgency.
Finally, which former New York City mayor do you admire the most, from who would you borrow in your administration?
Far and away LaGuardia. I really grew up on my mother’s side of the family. That’s where the family gatherings were and at the family gatherings it felt like there were two more people at the table who weren’t members of the family: Franklin Roosevelt and Fiorello LaGuardia. They were talked about so often and so reverently. This was a family that went through the Depression and was deeply affected by it They didn’t just feel that these two leaders were trying to address their challenges, they knew they were addressing them because they saw the results.
LaGuardia was an incredible figure not just because he had the compassion. He had the right kind of energy, leadership, and the ability to inspire people. He was also a unifier before it was in vogue. He was so far ahead of his time in trying to embrace and support every kind of community that was making up New York City then, and also he had a profound skill for using the tools of government in ways that hadn’t been done before. New York City during the Depression was so far back on its heels and he constantly innovated new approaches and used whatever he had, whatever wasn’t nailed down to try and help people. That created a sense of hope and possibility and that’s why there’s still reverence for him to this day.
Follow Donovan X. Ramsey at @iDXR