On Friday, May 31, I biked past the Park Slope YMCA in Brooklyn at exactly 10:41 AM (I checked my watch). Waiting outside were members of the police detail that accompanies New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and two black official SUVs. I asked the security team if the Mayor was inside. I got a smile and a brief laugh, which I took as a yes.
Mayor Bill gets driven to his favorite Brooklyn gym for a light “workout” almost every day, a 45 minute eleven-mile drive from the mayor’s official residence in northern Manhattan. According to the New York Post, definitely not a pro-de Blasio publication, Mayor Bill “routinely sets aside three hours a day so he can work out in his old Brooklyn neighborhood — including a full hour to change his clothes.” The Friday workouts usually start at 9 AM, which explains why he was still there when I biked by. The Post also reported that “Hizzoner” often manages to squeeze in time, post-workout, for coffee and snack at a local patisserie (French Bakery). Most working New Yorkers are on the job by 10:41 in the morning, but apparently not the “Half-Day” Mayor.
The “Half-Day” Mayor does not even work every day. In December the New York Times reported that de Blasio had not met with his administration’s commissioner in charge of Emergency Management in two and a half years. But Esposito should not feel slighted. De Blasio rarely met with any of the city’s Commissioners. In 2017, “Big Bill,” the Mayor is 6 foot 5 inches, averaged nine days a month at City Hall and just four of the first 39 Fridays in 2018. I tried to discovered de Blasio’s schedule online on city websites, but it is not posted.
While “Half-Day” de Blasio was campaigning in Iowa, a Quinnipiac University poll showed that three-fourths of New York City’s registered voters don’t think Mayor Bill de Blasio should run for President. Forty-seven percent aid it would be bad for the city. The pollsters did not ask how many people hoped he would never come back.
While the Half-Day Mayor goes light on the job and runs for President, New York City's mass transit system, bridges, tunnels and roads, and affordable housing are in deplorable condition and for many children the public school system is failing. Bill de Blasio thinks of himself as a “progressive” Democratic Party Presidential candidate. I wonder if his campaign slogan should be “Not as nasty as Trump, but almost as disconnected from reality.”
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