At the DNC, woe is de Blasio

It’s not easy to feel sorry for Bill de Blasio.

The embattled New York City mayor is bogged in a political quagmire of his own creation – the latest of which is his administration’s reported cover-up of the mishandling of a deed restriction on a Manhattan nursing home – and he has a knack for putting out brush fires with a can of kerosene, turning one-day stories into weeklong headaches.

But watching de Blasio give a decidedly non-primetime speech at the Democratic National Convention at the Wells Fargo Center on Wednesday, speaking to a sparse crowd that would make the hapless 76ers chuckle, was almost too cruel a fate for a politician who once fancied himself as a national standard-bearer for progressivism.

Alas, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have seized that mantle, and their coveted speaking slots at the convention affirmed their stature within the Democratic Party. To say de Blasio was on the undercard of Wednesday’s speakers would be too kind. The mayor ostensibly opened for three actresses (Star Jones, Sigourney Weaver and Angela Bassett), a congressman from Arizona (Ruben Gallego), a lieutenant (!) governor (Gavin Newsom of California), and three mayors from cities with a combined population smaller than de Blasio’s home borough of Brooklyn (Karen Weaver, Mike Duggan and Kasim Reed from Flint, Detroit and Atlanta, respectively).

The one thing the mayor had going for him was a horde of hometown media in the building covering the speech, the kind of free coverage that make his mayoral counterparts across the country salivate. Had de Blasio delivered a soaring paean to his former boss, Hillary Clinton, perhaps he resurrects his national profile and maybe the New York media even put down their pitchforks for a day or two.

Unfortunately, oratory has never been de Blasio’s strong suit, and his convention speech did not break the mold. His delivery lacked magnetism and he appeared not entirely comfortable at the lectern. His Donald Trump zingers came off as a pale imitation of Warren’s attack dog speech the night before. De Blasio’s speechwriters gave him some good lines – “He's degraded women to make himself look big while showing the little man he really is,” – but too often he sounded like a struggling comedian who couldn’t quite land the punch line. As expert orators like President Obama showed on Wednesday, pace and timing are as important rhetorical gifts as poignant prose.

Style points aside, de Blasio’s speech failed to make a convincing case for Clinton, and served more as a reminder that this is the same mayor who for so long was hesitant to endorse her – constantly prodding her through the media to display a progressive “vision” for the country before he gave public support.

So it was somewhat amusing to hear de Blasio open his speech by casting Clinton as a public servant who has made great sacrifice, forgoing a lucrative salary in the private sector to work in the Children’s Defense Fund. Never mind the fact that Clinton’s government salaries have not exactly left her wanting – she made $169,300 in her final year in office as a senator and $186,000 as secretary of state. The median national income? $51,939.

Ironically, the best populist argument for Clinton came from de Blasio’s predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire independent who famously ran for mayor as a Republican, openly supported a Republican president (George W. Bush in 2004) and, once upon a time, tried laughably to convince everyone that New York would turn red – a tired argument made by Empire State elephants every election cycle that never comes true.

The fact that Bloomberg the imperfect messenger was given a terrific speaking slot – just after Vice President Joe Biden and ahead of Tim Kaine, the vice presidential nominee – had to sting de Blasio, but he more or less delivered. Bloomberg may not have given the kind of liberal rallying cry that is red meat to the DNC crowd, but he made a direct appeal to the independent voters watching from home who are still on the fence. He spoke of Clinton not as the fervent liberal activist she has so often been miscast by supporters during this campaign, but as a level-headed problem solver – a Bloombergian technocrat.

But Bloomberg also eviscerated Trump in a manner more blunt and cutting than any of the low-hanging fruit that Democrats often seize on. At a time when the American public is keenly aware of the impact that money has on our political system, there is something almost perverse about a billionaire mogul (albeit a truly self-made one) talking smack about a fellow billionaire mogul on national television, but it worked. So much of Trump’s appeal lies in his mythology as a successful businessman, so hearing Bloomberg describe his business plan as, “a disaster in the making” was a brutally effective putdown.

Still, I couldn’t help but feel bad for de Blasio as I watched Bloomberg. So much of his early promise as mayor was built on this image of a politician with truly liberal roots. For a time in the early days of his first year in City Hall, it seemed like every policy idea he floated had a national bent – he was early on pushing a minimum wage hike before it became a national movement; he advocated for paid family leave, now a pillar of the Democratic platform; and his signature policy achievement, universal pre-K, has been largely successful at a time when early childhood education is increasingly seen as a worthwhile investment.

In an alternate reality, devoid of corruption investigations, campaign finance workarounds, and a governor with a ravenous appetite for political torture, perhaps it’s de Blasio following Biden, or taking Warren’s spot the night before. Instead, the mayor of the biggest city in the United States ceded the national stage to the man he replaced. Humble pie always has a bitter taste.