On “Meet the Press” April 12, de Blasio said of Clinton, “she is one of the most qualified people to ever run for this office, but we need to see the substance.”
De Blasio points out that since the 2008 financial crisis, the wealthiest 1 percent have gobbled up 95 percent of the additional earnings created in the recovery. For the rest, wealth and wages have remained stagnant or worse. Fairness and social cohesion require government to improve conditions for the middle class and poor, he says.
‘National Convener’
He’s pushed the theme since he won the mayoral election in 2013 by 49 percentage points -- the biggest margin ever for a non-incumbent. Weeks before taking office, he announced that the job included his acting as “a national convener” for “a progressive urban agenda” that mirrors what he’s pushed in New York: universal all-day pre-kindergarten, housing subsidies to prevent homelessness, increasing the minimum wage, sick pay and scholarship aid to attend the city’s public universities.
U.K. Trip
De Blasio has since taken his message to the U.K., where he addressed a Labour Party conference in September, and to frequent meetings with mayors in Boston and Washington to seek money for mass transportation, infrastructure maintenance and fewer restrictions on immigration.
It was a coincidence that put de Blasio and Clinton in Iowa the same week. He said he’s planned the trip to Des Moines for months. Iowa will hold caucuses for the 2016 presidential election on Feb. 1.
At a Dairy Queen stand in east Des Moines, Sherri Harper, 42, who is unemployed, ordered a vanilla crunch cone and said she’s never heard de Blasio, yet she wasn’t surprised the mayor of New York would be in town.
“There’s always politicians coming to Iowa,” she said.
The mayor also addressed students at the University of Nebraska on Wednesday night. He told them he came from a city where an apartment recently sold for “a jaw-dropping $100 million” and another rented for $500,000 a month.