“It was sweet to be connected to family,’' he said of his brief reprieve from politics. Then on Monday, May 16, after lunch with a friend in Greenwich Village - you don’t get to linger over a meal when you are governing eight million people - he arrived home to find emails about the newly created district, and he knew what he would do next. But none of this called to him for the long term. de Blasio has spent the past five months since he left office living the creative-class Brooklynite fantasy - renovating a townhouse, writing, delivering commentary on “Morning Joe.” He thought about teaching. On the way home from our breakfast, a few miles away but still within the territory he would represent, I ran into a neighbor in Brooklyn Heights who delivered a more measured appraisal than the one I witnessed two hours earlier at the diner, an evaluation that included the prospect that she would “almost vote for a Republican over Bill de Blasio.” Almost nowhere was that distaste felt more viscerally than in brownstone Brooklyn, which, in addition to much of downtown Manhattan, makes up a large swath of the newly outlined 10th District, lending a kind of masochism to his current effort. His defining imperiousness bred distaste across constituencies. de Blasio’s major initiatives - universal prekindergarten, paid sick leave - the hallmark of his mayoralty was his talent for alienating people who were inclined to like him and largely agreed with his policymaking. While a journalist and a political candidate sitting down to egg-white omelets is not ordinarily noteworthy, the previous version of Bill de Blasio, the one we last checked in with at the end of the year when he was polling behind even the disgraced Andrew Cuomo, was as likely to offer himself to the press as Anna Wintour would be to mow your lawn.ĭespite the success of Mr. Subsequent texts included exclamation points. We could meet in person - in fact that was his preference - and we could share a meal. Could we talk about his latest political gambit? “Sure,” he quickly wrote back, when I got in touch. Bill de Blasio 2.0 is a rapid-response politician, a man seemingly engaged in self-reflection and comfortable with regret. The person I was seeing was lighthearted and amiable. de Blasio faces: He seems to have little understanding of how he is perceived, even in a neighborhood he knows intimately, where he once served on the local school board and the City Council. The moment all too perfectly distilled the problem that Mr. de Blasio, informing him that he was “the worst mayor New York has ever had.” It seemed as if he was about to voice admiration or maybe ask for a photo. Not too long into our conversation, a guy who appeared to be in his 30s, wearing a knit cap, walked passed a few feet away and took out his phone to get a picture. We were in a nearly empty diner in Park Slope, where the former mayor has lived since the early 1990s and where theoretically affections for him should run high. A few days after Bill de Blasio announced that he was running for Congress - a comparatively humble ambition when you think about his attempt at the presidency and his flirtation with the idea that he might govern the state of New York - I sat down for breakfast with him, mostly to ask: Why?
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