Bill de Blasio: I'm still not ready to endorse Hillary Clinton

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is standing by his remarks on “Meet the Press” that he is not yet ready to endorse Hillary Clinton for president.

“Everything I said on ‘Meet the Press,’ I had said previously to Secretary Clinton and her team,” De Blasio told reporters on Tuesday, once again running through a list of what he wants to hear her address, namely dealing with income inequality.


“It’s the same things I’ve said publicly: progressive taxation, raising wages and benefits, investment in infrastructure and education, the willingness to tax the wealthy so we have the resources to actually change the dynamic in this country,” the progressive Democratic mayor said.

“I’ve laid it out very, very clearly in a number of settings, including in those conversations,” he said.

De Blasio, who managed Clinton’s successful 2000 Senate campaign, praised Clinton’s “extraordinary” and “profoundly progressive” achievements with the Children’s Defense Fund and fighting for health-care reform in the 1990s.

“She was decades ahead of the curve on that,” he said.

The mayor said it is normal to want to hear more from a candidate who has not been “in the public in this sense for almost eight years.”

“It’s April of 2015,” De Blasio said. “This is an election that’s a year and a half away.”

De Blasio will soon head to Nebraska and Iowa for speeches on closing the wage gap.

“Someone find me something that’s come out of Washington, D.C., in recent years to address income inequality,” he said, according to Newsday. “Good luck with that.”