WaPo | It isn’t often that the swearing-in of a new mayor of New York draws
national television attention, but then, it isn’t every day that you see
a mayor sworn in by a former president of the United States with a
prospective presidential candidate also on the stage.
So there was plenty of symbolism and more than the usual amount of politics attached to the formal inauguration
of Mayor Bill de Blasio on Wednesday. Issues such as the prospects of
liberalism in an ideologically divided country, the future shape of the
Democratic Party and the political ambitions of Hillary (and Bill)
Clinton all played out in front of New York’s City Hall.
De Blasio, now one of the nation’s most liberal elected officials,
delivered an unabashedly progressive inaugural speech that closely
tracked the themes of his “tale of two cities” campaign. It was the kind
of speech not often heard in national politics since Bill Clinton
redefined the Democratic Party as New Democrats.
The new mayor,
who was the unexpected winner of his party’s primary and then won a
landslide victory in November, sought to disabuse those who thought he
would scale back his liberal ambitions once he faced the challenges of
governing. To the crowd that sat huddled against the cold and to those
watching on cable TV, he said: “Let me be clear: When I said I would
take dead aim at the tale of two cities, I meant it. And we will do it.”
Outgoing
mayor Michael Bloomberg squeezed into a front row that included both
Clintons and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D). De Blasio, who had run
explicitly on a platform of changing course from the Bloomberg years,
briefly thanked the man who has run the city for a dozen years, first as
a Republican and later as an independent.
But that was mostly
perfunctory. For the rest of his address, he promised to push New York
to the left, as quickly and aggressively as his political skills will
allow him. “We are called to put an end to economic and social
inequalities that threaten to unravel the city we love,” he said. “And
so today, we commit to a new, progressive direction in New York.”
It
is that impulse that will make de Blasio, the first Democratic mayor of
the city in two decades, perhaps the nation’s most closely watched
mayor in the coming months.
