Bill de Blasio's Nightmare

Leftists were touting the elections of far-left socialist mayors in 2013, especially Bill de Blasio in New York.

Things aren't looking so great now, though.

At Politico, "De Blasio’s nightmare":

Bill de Blasio, like his progressive political idol Barack Obama, is finding out that you can’t do the New Politics if you don’t pay attention to the old politics.

In Obama’s case, it was a failure to recognize the threat posed to him by Republicans who didn’t buy into his calls for a post-partisan partnership with Congress. For New York’s ambitious liberal mayor, it was an inability to keep long-simmering tensions with the city’s traditionally powerful police department from boiling over in the last few days.

Just over a year after sailing into office with 72 percent of the vote on a message of transformational change, de Blasio found his mayoralty subsumed by a torrent of anger, unleashed by the murder of two police officers in Brooklyn Sunday by a troubled gunman who said he was killing “pigs” to avenge the deaths of two men by cops in Staten Island and Ferguson, Missouri. By Monday, de Blasio was lashing out at the press corps that covers him, trying to paper over public divisions with his own police commissioner and coping with what friends described as the emotional blow of facing public rejection by many in the nation’s biggest police force. “He’s pretty badly shaken,” one told us.

That a civic tragedy would so quickly devolve into a full-blown political crisis for the new mayor was testament to the vehemence of anti-de Blasio elements in the police union – and the mayor’s mistaken belief that his 2013 victory gave him the right to shred an old Gotham political playbook that dictated a mayor show deference to the NYPD.

You can’t be big-city mayor and alienate the cops – and that’s just as true now as it was under three-term New York City Mayor Ed Koch, or even a century ago.

“Koch was loved by the cops and always told all his successors that you must have the support of the cops, that the cops can be your best friend. If Koch were alive today that’s what he would tell Bill de Blasio,” said George Arzt, former press secretary to Koch, whose election in 1977 election greatly improved City Hall-police relations.

De Blasio “needs to press reset in his relationship with the cops,” Arzt said.

Good luck with that. The bad blood between the NYPD and de Blasio is nothing new – it dates back to an election campaign centered on de Blasio’s withering criticism of the Bloomberg administration’s stop-and-frisk policy, and his close alliance with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has organized scores of protests targeting cops over their behavior toward urban blacks.

According to a former de Blasio aide, during the general election campaign in 2013, de Blasio’s team was even convinced that members of his police detail were eavesdropping on his private conversations in his city-assigned car. Things got so bad that de Blasio, according to the staffer, would step into the street to make sure he was out of earshot of plainclothes officers...

Man, that's harsh --- and it's Politico, a left wing rag!

More.