De Blasio blasts Cuomo, accusing governor of thwarting his goals out of 'revenge'

[rangerrebew]

De Blasio blasts Cuomo, accusing governor of thwarting his goals out of 'revenge'

BY  Erin Durkin     /
 
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS CITY HALL BUREAU /
 
Published: Tuesday, June 30, 2015, 3:13 PM
 
 / Updated: Tuesday, June 30, 2015, 10:35 PM
 

Mayor de Blasio lit up Gov. Cuomo with accusations, claiming the governor deliberately thwarts his Albany agenda out of political pique and revenge — and hurting New Yorkers in the process.
Photo Illustration by Isaac Lopez/New York Daily News

Mayor de Blasio lit up Gov. Cuomo with accusations, claiming the governor deliberately thwarts his Albany agenda out of political pique and revenge — and hurting New Yorkers in the process.


Mayor de Blasio lit Gov. Cuomo up Tuesday with a double-barreled blast of political payback.

In stunningly frank language, the mayor accused the governor of deliberately thwarting his Albany agenda out of political pique and revenge — and hurting New Yorkers in the process.

Hours before leaving on a vacation out West, de Blasio called reporters into his office and spoke calmly in a calculated decision to take off the gloves and reveal the “frenemies” were really enemies.

Greenman: De Blasio outright blasting Cuomo is a big risk for New York City

He described his relationship with Cuomo as a series of painful letdowns. “I have been disappointed at every turn,” de Blasio said.


'I have been disappointed at every turn,' Mayor de Blasio said Tuesday of working with the governor.
Richard Harbus/for New York Daily News

'I have been disappointed at every turn,' Mayor de Blasio said Tuesday of working with the governor.


And he didn’t sugarcoat what he really thinks of the governor — saying Cuomo plays dishonest “political games” and carries out “revenge” and “payback” for any “perceived slight.”

Earlier, in an interview he recorded with NY1, he said: “What we’ve often seen is if someone disagrees with him openly, some kind of revenge or vendetta follows.”

He avoided the loaded word “vendetta” in his later comments, but said: “I’m not going to be surprised if these statements lead to some attempts at revenge.”
 


De Blasio officials had grown convinced trying to make nice with Cuomo wouldn’t work, and decided a show of strength was the only thing the governor would respond to, aides said.
 

De Blasio officials had grown convinced trying to make nice with Cuomo wouldn’t work, and decided a show of strength was the only thing the governor would respond to, aides said.


He added: “And we’ll just call them right out, because we’re just not going to play that way. We’re not going to accept that as anything like acceptable government practice.”

The mayor said Cuomo has gone after him many times — including when the state suddenly stepped up inspections and sought to cut off funding of city homeless shelters in May. “That was clearly politically motivated. And that was revenge for some perceived slight,” he said, also labeling sudden moves to demand more MTA funding and yanking money for NYCHA roof repairs acts of revenge.

De Blasio placed blame squarely on the governor for his most stinging defeat this month in Albany — an extension of mayoral control of schools for only one year.

"That was the governor’s architecture,” he said, rejecting arguments that Senate Republicans were responsible.
 
 
“What happened here was a very important substantive issue was turned into a political football in a way that even Albany should be embarrassed of,” he said.

De Blasio called the mayoral control battle a prime example of Cuomo’s “disingenuous” approach to government.

There is a kind of dealmaking and horse trading that he engages in that I think often obscures the truth. It gets so convoluted, I’m not sure he and the people around him remember where they began,” he said.

“It keeps playing out in ways that I think sometimes are about dealmaking, sometimes about revenge,” he said. “But it’s not about policy. It’s not about substance. It’s certainly not about the millions of people affected.”


De Blasio said Cuomo has gone after him many times — including when the state suddenly stepped up inspections and sought to cut off funding of city homeless shelters in May.
Jeff Bachner/for New York Daily News

De Blasio said Cuomo has gone after him many times — including when the state suddenly stepped up inspections and sought to cut off funding of city homeless shelters in May.


Cuomo spokeswoman Melissa DeRosa shot back with a jab at the mayor’s trip — and at his political acumen.

“For those new to the process, it takes coalition building and compromise to get things done in government. We wish the mayor well on his vacation,” she said.

De Blasio blasted Cuomo’s efforts to kill his overhaul of a massive tax break for housing developers — even though he ultimately got most of the affordable housing mandates he wanted in the 421-a program.

iterally within days the governor was doing all he could to undermine the plan,” he said. “Why would anyone publicly trash that plan if it wasn’t about politics and game playing and maneuvers?


The mayor formerly called Gov. Cuomo his friend.
matthew roberts for new york daily news

The mayor formerly called Gov. Cuomo his friend.


De Blasio and Cuomo, who worked together in the 1990s when Cuomo was secretary of the Housing and Urban Development department, have bumped heads repeatedly since the left-leaning mayor took office. Yet they’ve maintained that they’re personal friends. The mayor said a long series of frustrations finally moved him to strike back.

“It’s just a very clear pattern and it’s a pattern that’s undermining our ability to serve the people of this city, and that’s why it has to be discussed,” he said.

De Blasio officials had grown convinced trying to make nice with Cuomo wouldn’t work, and decided a show of strength was the only thing the governor would respond to, aides said.

Some observers relished watching the long-simmering conflict burst into open hostility.

“Cuomo + de Blasio are going to the mattresses. Since we can’t have MMA at the Garden, this match-up will be a sellout,” de Blasio’s 2013 mayoral race opponent, Joe Lhota, said on Twitter.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/de-blasio-accuses-cuomo-political-revenge-article-1.2276709

[mountaineer]

Calling Wilhelm DeBlasio "left leaning" is like calling Chris Christie "a little less than emaciated."

As for their squabble, John Podhoretz writes in the NY Post:

Has Bill de Blasio gone bonkers?

The mayor chose to give voice to the rage he and his people have felt over the past month because they think Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s budget and policy negotiations with the state Legislature were designed to disempower de Blasio.

Which is certainly true.

De Blasio wanted to be given control over the city’s schools for the balance of his term; he got it for only a year. He didn’t want new charter schools; he got 25 more shoved down his throat.

Then there was affordable housing. On this matter, America’s most unambiguously “progressive” politician was astonished to find himself outflanked on his left by Cuomo, who claimed de Blasio was pushing policies that favored rich landlords and builders.

It was a hilarious piece of jujitsu by Cuomo — in part because you just know he was giggling and rubbing his hands together with glee as he was saying it, so tickled was he to get de Blasio’s goat in this manner.

So de Blasio has a lot to complain about when it comes to Cuomo, and dare I say there’s even something refreshing about a politician opening a mouth (as my grandmother would have said) the way the mayor did about how Cuomo’s people were badmouthing him last week.

“Some unnamed sources well-placed in the Cuomo administration had a few things to say,” the mayor declared. “I’m here in front of you on record saying what I believe. And what I believe here is the governor worked . . . to inhibit the agenda that New York City put forward.”

Refreshing — but nuts.

The mayor told NY1’s Errol Louis yesterday he’s been “disappointed at every turn” by Cuomo.

“What I found was he engaged in his own sense of strategies, his own political machinations, and what we’ve often seen is if someone disagrees with him openly, some kind of revenge or vendetta follows,” de Blasio said of the governor, a fellow Democrat.

Well, that should make working with Cuomo easier in the months and years to come.

What de Blasio has done here is openly acknowledge he stinks as a politician.

That’s what one must take away from his complete failure to get his agenda a serious hearing during the political negotiations in Albany. And it’s what his utter incapacity to find common ground with Cuomo means. The mayor of New York City needs the governor on his side, at least some of the time, and that means courting and flattering and doing whatever’s necessary.

One doesn’t usually associate the word “diplomatic” with Rudy Giuliani, but during his first year in office, in 1994, Giuliani was so desperate to maintain good relations with the state’s governor — a man named Mario Cuomo, father to the present occupant of the mansion — that he actually endorsed Cuomo instead of his fellow Republican, George Pataki.

Pataki won, and while he and Rudy certainly never much liked or trusted each other after that, the mayor did try to calm the waters and manage a working relationship.

Not so de Blasio. If he didn’t have a ruthless, take-no-prisoners enemy in Albany before, he sure has one now.

What’s more, de Blasio is lucky today he changed his last name from Wilhelm and took his mother’s maiden name instead, because without that “o” at the end of his new one, he’d be dealing with accusations that he basically called Cuomo a mafioso. The use of the word “vendetta” was . . . perhaps a bit much.

De Blasio may have a political strategy in his head. He knows he’ll likely go before the New York City electorate in 2017 without much to claim for himself — and possibly with various quality-of-life metrics looking worse than when he took office in 2014.

So he might be trying out a line of argument according to which he stood alone against everybody — Republicans, landlords, carriage-horse drivers, bankers, cops (sometimes) and Cuomo — to serve the interests of forgotten and mistreated New Yorkers. And if he lost, well, he went down fighting.

It’s not much of a case; better to say you got something done than that you were impotent, outplayed and outmuscled. But it may be all de Blasio’s got.

[GourmetDan]

 
When Liberal behavior ends up FUBAR, it's always somebody else's fault.

Cause, in their minds, everything they do is unicorns and rainbows...

[PzLdr]

Looks like Bolshie Bill is off his meds...

[rb224315]

Look, everyone!  A catfight between 2 Northeastern Liberals.  *yawn*

[GourmetDan]

Look, everyone!  A catfight between 2 Northeastern Liberals.  *yawn*

                   

[Rivergirl]

Just love it.  de blabbio, coomo, hitlery...........just perfect together.

[mountaineer]

 

[olde north church]

I'll be crude.  Just another farting contest between two assholes.

[mountaineer]

Add another a-hole to the mix.

De Blasio camp knew no one could stand his Sharpton love-fest
By Yoav Gonen
NY Post
July 3, 2015 | 10:46pm

City Hall was warned of grass-roots complaints last year that Mayor de Blasio was spending too much time hobnobbing with the Rev. Al Sharpton and ignoring the “little people,” internal e-mails obtained by The Post reveal.

Kirsten Foy, a former top aide in de Blasio’s Public Advocate’s Office and now Brooklyn rep to Sharpton’s National Action Network, flagged for City Hall as “must read” complaints that Crown Heights activist James Caldwell made in a community paper.

“FYI Caldwell’s comments are reflective of increased murmurings,” Foy cautioned in an e-mail last summer to City Hall Director of Intergovernmental Relations Emma Wolfe, former Sharpton and then-City Hall aide Rachel Noerdlinger and others.

“We are not yet at a critical mass of detractors, but there is a slow steady erosion of progressive euphoria,” added Foy.

Caldwell, president of the 77th Precinct Community Council, had been quoted in the Our Time newspaper chiding City Hall and 1 Police Plaza for ignoring his community’s needs.

“With de Blasio, the rookie mayor is coming out. He’s not touching the little people in the community. He feels since he’s friends with Al Sharpton and the big wheels of David Dinkins that they don’t have to reach out to us,” Caldwell was quoted as saying in a July 5 story. “The de Blasio administration would rather just deal with the name-brand clergy.”

Reached by phone Friday, Caldwell stood by his comments and asserted that nothing had changed over the past year.

“They’ve been out of touch with us, with the local community — and they are still,” the 64-year-old Army veteran told The Post. “If we don’t take action ourselves, we certainly won’t get any help from City Hall. It just ain’t going to happen.”

Caldwell said he’s been seeking more resources for jobs and other initiatives for black youth in the neighborhood.

De Blasio spokeswoman Karen Hinton responded, “The mayor understands how important it is to remain connected with people at the grass-roots level directly in neighborhoods, and this administration prides itself on having a robust outreach and engagement strategy with communities across the city.”