The Democratic Primaries Might Be Anyone's Game To Lose, Except For Bill De Blasio

Bill De Blasio tries to find someone, somewhere, who wants to vote for him.

- David Freedlander

By the time the mayor of New York City arrives at the Williams Chapel AME Church in Orangeburg, South Carolina, for the second official trip of his nascent presidential run, most of the raucous New York press corps is staying home. Only a single reporter from NY1 and his camerawoman stand outside, amid a trio of retired NYPD officers who live in South Carolina and carry signs saying mayor de blasio is no friend of labor and we don’t give a darn how bill de blasio did it up north.

Inside, de Blasio receives an endorsement, his first, from the Orangeburg mayor and lays out his case for why he, the 24th Democrat and eighth white straight man in a row to declare a run for president, deserves their vote, having brought paid sick leave, higher wages, and universal prekindergarten to New York. “And when we put forward a nominee who has actually done things for working people,” he says, “working people are going to believe again!” He gets the kind of enthusiastic reception you’d never see at home, where he remains dogged by questions big and small: from violating ethics rules at his nonprofit; to his gym routine; to missing a 9/11 memorial commemoration; to rooting for the Red Sox; to his absence from City Hall; to the way he eats pizza.

Afterward, in the church basement, the mayor holds a press conference with just three reporters present; an aide pointedly ignores the one from New York to call on one with the Times and Democrat, a 7,000-circulation local newspaper, who asks the mayor to expound on the virtues of visiting South Carolina.

De Blasio would avoid the city press corps entirely if he could. The relations between them are way past repair, with reporters in New York finding him selfrighteous, smug, with an inflated sense of his own importance, and he finding them in thrall to their corporate masters, in search of political gossip and cheap jokes about groundhogs.