[Also appearing at the Washington Monthly]
On the one hand, Javier Hernandez’s piece on Bill de Blasio in the New York Times appears to be factual. On the other hand, it reads like a real hatchet job. Sometimes, I guess, the truth hurts. Or, at least, the truth has the potential to hurt. Is New York City ready for a mayor who was such an admirer of Nicaragua’s Sandinista party that he raised money for them and subscribed to their newsletter? A mayor who was as likely to quote Karl Marx or Bob Marley as he was to quote FDR?
Bill de Blasio studied Latin America at Columbia University, and when he graduated he took a job paying $12,000/yr at the Quixote Center in Maryland.
The center, founded by Catholic leaders, officially did not take sides in the Nicaraguan dispute, though much of its aid went to help families sympathetic to the Sandinistas. And its work was intensely political. One of the center’s leaders once likened American efforts in Nicaragua to a “policy of terrorism,” and its harshest critics accused it of hewing to a Marxist agenda. In the mid-1980s, the Treasury Department investigated whether the center had helped smuggle guns, but the claim was never substantiated, and the group’s leaders said the inquiry was politically motivated.
I’m beginning to better understand why the bankers are terrified of a de Blasio mayorship. The Times article is only going to add to their sense of dread. Mr. Hernandez helpfully reminds us that “the Sandinistas…received weapons from the Soviet Union and supplies from Cuba” and that American leaders feared that their revolution would spread to the rest of Latin America. Hernandez repeats the allegation that the Sandanistas’ supporters were more interested in undermining President Reagan’s presidency than they were in helping the poor and notes they were often called “Communists, traitors, radicals.”
From the first paragraph, you can tell the piece isn’t overly interested in being nice to Mr. de Blasio. Mr. Hernandez calls him a “scruffy young man” who “was tall and sometimes goofy, known for his ability to mimic a goose’s honk.” Later on, he notes that “his colleagues likened him to “Big Bird with a beard””. These details are probably unnecessary, and they aren’t balanced out with any positive anecdotes. Mr. Hernandez makes sure to tell us that Mr. de Blasio and his wife honeymooned in Cuba, despite a State Department travel ban. The article describes de Blasio as being part of a “ragtag team of peace activists, Democrats, Marxists and anarchists.”
Even the end of the article strikes a nasty note. In 1990, Mr. de Blasio took a job as a low-level aide in Mayor David Dinkins’ administration.
Over time, he became more focused on his city job, and using the tools of government to effect change. The answering machine messages stopped changing. He no longer attended meetings about Nicaragua.
His friends in the solidarity movement were puzzled. At a meeting early in 1992, Mr. de Blasio was marked absent. A member scribbled a note next to his name: “Must be running for office.”
For those of us old enough to remember the Cold War, this article is filled with charged words: Soviets, Cubans, communists, liberation theology, Sandanistas, Contras, radicals, Marxists, Karl Marx, anarchists, peace activists, social democrats…
For those too young to be stung by such language, they are reminded that in 1991 de Blasio “spoke of a need to understand and build alliances with Islam, predicting it would soon be a dominant force in politics.”
For a while, it seemed like the Gray Lady had a crush on Bill de Blasio. With this piece today, I think we can agree that the bloom is off the rose.
I don’t think the country, or the New York City electorate, is ready to re-litigate America’s Cold War policies in Latin America. When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union subsequently collapsed, we forgot about the rigorous debate we were having. Poppy Bush pardoned the worst Iran-Contra offenders on Christmas Eve in 1992, and we haven’t looked back.
But, for those of us who lived through the last decade of the Cold War, seeing New York shift from Mayor Bloomberg to Mayor de Blasio is enough to give us whiplash.
Wow, if the Times piece is supposed to make me think bad about him, it did the opposite. He spoke well of the Sandanistas? Called for building bridges with Islam in the 1990’s? I am all the more excited about his candidacy.
Maybe this guy is the one who I initially thought Barack Obama was at his core.
Quite a number of then-young people well enough to the right of me to be considered liberals (or progressives, in the parlance of our times) thought well of the Sandinistas, or at least well of the Sandinistas in contrast to the counter-revolutionaries (Contras) that Raygun was supporting. Just perusing the article, I suspect that Wikipedia is going to get quite a lot of traffic. Whether or not this hit piece has much impact is debatable. Now, if the NYT can tar him with some sort of a sex scandal, then they may be able to swing the election toward the safely corporatist candidate the GOP has no doubt served up.
The GOP’s corporatist candidate comes to us from Rudolf Giuliani via a detour at the hated MTA, and his name is hard to spell, though brief (Lhota). Besides, we’re New Yorkers, and Dante is a celebrity. I think we’ll be fine.
That is certainly what I’ve been thinking and hoping. De Blasio will make a wonderful change of pace for NYC after the Giuliani and Bloomberg years.
Smells of desperation. And anti-Castro Cuban revenge.
If this is motivated by Democrats, they deserve to become irrelevant.
The one winner if de Blasio loses is the NYPD and its impunity. Even beyond the effects on bankers.
NY is a Democratic town, and De Blasio has a big majority. I don’t think this stuff is going to make much of a dent. It’s ancient history. People support him for real, practical reasons. Including the “outer boroughs” swing vote.
It’ll be something like Bill Ayers with Obama, except even less so, because we’re talking about New York City.
It’s too late to be motivated by Democrats.
If it’s “motivated” in that sense, it’s by the increasingly cranky Bloomberg, who must have thought he would continue to run things like a retired emperor in Heian Japan.
In public, please take care to say that the NYPD is a winner if DeBlasio wins and carries out some reform of the department. They don’t need to be hated as they are today, and they need to be paid better, but they have to reform, and I believe there are many beat cops as opposed to muckamucks who will tell you the same.
I heard he fought off the Bay of Pigs invasion single-handedly. Good thing (for BdB) no one reads the paper any more.
Well, keep in mind that the flip side of the elite reich winger’s love of St. Ronald Reagan is their deep hatred for the 1960s anti-establishment movements that Reagan opposed. This is why they loathed the Clinton’s so deeply in the 1990s and funded all the anti-Clinton propaganda campaigns – to them the Clintons were the embodiement of the 1960s. Anti-war, pro-equal rights for women and minorities, pro-sexual freedom, pro-freedom of speech and thought, pro-recreational drugs, pro-equality. The elite reich wingers (as opposed to the rank-and-file wingnuts) mentally associate all of those things with Soviet communism, in a very tightly-coupled way, and they still obsess about Soviet communism and probably always will.
This is why they thought that the Bill Ayers thing would kill Obama’s presidential campaign – because to them having any association whatsoever with the 1960s anti-establishment movement (even if it was years after the 1960s) – is by far the worst political scandal possible.
Of course, no one outside the reich wing cared about Bill Ayers, and no one outside the reich wing is going to care about de Blasio and the Sandinistas. Boo’s right – this is why de Blasio scares the elite – to them this is the equivalent of 95% marginal tax rates and 100% inheritance taxes. And of course the rank-and-file wingnuts will follow along as they are told, but most of them really won’t understand the association – it’s like Palin’s continual repeating the line “pallin’ around with terrorists” – she knew it was a big deal but she didn’t really get why.
Of course, being a supporter of the Sandinistas back then was a good thing. Of course they were getting support from the Soviets and Cuba – they’d replaced the plantation owner’s puppet government and the US was waging a proxy war against them on the plantation owner’s behalf – there was no option.
Reagan called the contras “freedom fighters”. As the great Carlin pointed out, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire what do freedom fighters fight?
Yes, the Cold War in the Third World was one self-fulfilling prophecy after another.
In Mississippi, America’s most revolutionary mayor
There are some things that national Democrats need to understand. What has been happening in Detroit, Pontiac, Benton Harbor hurts. What has been happening in Chicago hurts even more.
People are getting tired of getting sold out and it might split some key Democratic constituencies in the future. When Democrats lose the black and Hispanic working class, they lose their demographic majority.
You know, Sandinista! was recorded in New York City. You can make of that what you will.
A friend I’ve known for 30 years, dating to our time together in DC, worked for Quixote Center for several years in the ’80s. The notion that a peace group (which is what Quixote was) would do anything but oppose Reagan’s illegal funding of the Contra war is preposterous to anyone who lived in that era – as is the notion that the Sandanistas had any agenda broader than trying to get their own country recovered from the massive damage inflicted by decades of the US-supported dictatorship of two generations of Somozas. Marxism had nothing to do with the opposition of ’80s activists to US policy there.
I happened recently to read Salman Rushdie’s memoir of his time in Nicaragua during that era, “The Jaguar Smile.” It’s a good snapshot of what the Sandanistas were about – both the good points and the flaws – and it underscores just how far the Reagan-fueled hysteria over them was from the reality on the ground.
What a hack job. Fortunately nobody gives a shit about “Communism” and the Cold War and the Sandinista anymore except the usual dimmies that make up the teabagger base, and the boring, irrelevant old Cubans who lost their Mafia-derived wealth and power after the revolution. I’d bet some money that Hernandez is one of the latter. Everything about the story from the idiot headline: “A Mayoral Hopeful Now, de Blasio Was Once a Young Leftist”, as if there’s some contradiction there, to the use of a single old photo designed to show a “scruffy young man”, which it doesn’t. The painfully reluctant attempts to appear balanced only reveal Hernandez’s teabaggerish obsessions.
Fortunately de Blasio is a very smart guy who understands how politics works. He’s not going to try and send support to “Communists” from NYC. Hopefully he’ll reign in the NYPD and tell some truths about Wall Street. To folks like me, all Hernandez’s propaganda efforts did was get me excited about a Dem candidate — an occurrence that was starting to look impossible. I hope he uses his office to demonstrate the power of his ideas, gain national credibility, and become a leader of the effective lefty movement America so desperately needs. So thanks, Mr. Hernandez, for making my day. And, I’d bet, the day of millions of New Yorkers.
To put this in perspective, the Times LEAD EDITORIAL in the same issue was DEFENDING de Blasio from these very same innuendoes.
Make of that what you will. Could it be that the NY Times does not have a totally monolithic editorial policy? (snark)
It’s called “Don’t Fear the Squeegee Man”, if you can get behind the Times firewall or find a print copy.
Except this piece wasn’t op-ed. It was presented as a news story. It’s not so much the unarguable bias as the sleazy misleading in a news story that the NYT should be profoundly ashamed of.
This sounds like someone re-watched House of Cards and decided it was reality. Hoo boy.
I liked him before and now I REALLY like him.
Hell, in New York even the Republicans are Communists. Just look at what Theodore Roosevelt said:
Definitely a hatchet job. Check out this from Hernandez’s twitter account:
“The attacks continue on @deBlasioNYC Nicaragua work. @AdolfoCarrion says “scene right out of Animal Farm”…”trying to redistribute wealth””
He had been reporting mostly from the Thompson campaign, beforehand. Thompson Winning Friends in the Bronx.
Yes, but De Blasio already beat Thompson in the primary. Thompson conceded a couple of says ago. even Clinton says he backs De Clasio. This has got to be coming from the Republicans.