De Blasio would rather promote campaign than NYC accolades

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s priorities seemed firmly aligned with his on-life-support presidential campaign Tuesday as he skipped two chances to tout his administration’s accomplishments — for an interview with a niche website.

Hizzoner was a no-show at a 1 p.m. Department of Health news conference in Long Island City to announce the end of a historic measles outbreak in Brooklyn that sparked a public health emergency earlier this year.

De Blasio also didn’t attend a noon event at City Hall to introduce the first director of the city’s newly created Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes.

De Blasio’s whereabouts were a mystery until reporter Terrell Starr tweeted photos of himself and the mayor in the Times Square office of The Root, a website focused on “Black News, Opinions, Politics and Culture.”

One photo shows de Blasio admiring the image of former Black Panther and self-professed communist Angela Davis on his interviewer’s T-shirt.

“Just interviewed @BilldeBlasio about his 2020 run. Great interview, but he really loved my Angela Davis shirt!” Starr wrote around 1:45 p.m.

The move echoed the mayor’s disastrous quoting of another Marxist, the late Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, to striking airport workers in Miami in June.

Deborah Lauter, the city’s first OPHC director, admitted she hasn’t met with de Blasio since taking the job last week, but insisted that “everything that’s been communicated to me is the mayor’s taking this extremely seriously.”

The mayor’s decision to forgo city business in favor of his White House bid came just hours after The Post revealed that he spent just seven hours at City Hall during the entire month of May, when he entered the race.

In April, de Blasio held a news conference in Williamsburg to announce the city’s response to the measles outbreak, and he’s publicly introduced three appointees since December, most recently on April 4.

A spokeswoman defended his latest choice of priorities by saying that de Blasio “was deeply involved in the city’s successful strategy for fighting the measles outbreak” and that Lauter’s introduction was “all about creating an opportunity” for reporters to meet her and ask questions.

Credit: Source link

The post De Blasio would rather promote campaign than NYC accolades appeared first on Fox USA Live.

from WordPress https://ift.tt/2MUlm2P