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DES MOINES—The website for the Progressive Agenda Committee that Bill de Blasio launched in 2014 is now just an error message.


The mayors of Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans and Boston all declined or didn’t return several requests seeking comment on him.

Friends and allies literally roll their eyes when they hear the New York City mayor is trying to go national again, and his own aides have become experts in stalling when he asks to do more, or at throwing distractions or making up excuses for why they weren’t able to pull something together. They hate it.

They wish he would stop.

Here’s the paradox of Bill de Blasio: He’s the mayor of the biggest city in America, with now four years of a progressive record and just reelected with 66 percent of the vote, without any significant challenger, despite all the griping New Yorkers have been doing about him since Day One. He’s had major successes on universal pre-kindergarten and expanding affordable housing, while crime has continued to go down—stop-and-frisk, his predecessor’s hated police tactic, is all but gone—and development in New York has continued full swing. He was talking about progressive policy ideas literally decades before they became the Democratic Party mainstream. Between Eric Garcetti, Mitch Landrieu and Pete Buttigieg, it’s become normal to talk seriously about mayors making 2020 runs.

Yet among Democratic insiders, the reaction to putting de Blasio on that list tends to be, at best, an exhausted chuckle. Is he running for president? “No,” he said, simply and quickly. But because he’s Bill de Blasio, he takes pleasure in insisting that asking that question—even as he’s sitting at the Marriott Downtown in Iowa, recording one of several long interviews he did that day—is small-minded to the point of being ridiculous.

No, no. He’s up to something bigger, he says. Obviously.

“There’s a lot of people in the political media and the political class who can only think through the prism of elections and only the very next elections, rather than understanding that social change is made in a variety of fashions. It’s the electoral process. It’s what happens at the local level as well as the national level. It is through issue-organizing,” de Blasio argued on POLITICO’s Off Message podcast, describing his trip as the natural outgrowth of being “a progressive who wants to change things” — and therefore “needs to work with people who are trying to create that change all over the country.”

That was his official explanation for accepting an invitation to headline the recent Progress Iowa holiday party, where he talked about President Donald Trump sparking “the beginning of a progressive era,” but also about “my own personal grass-roots connection to Iowa”—his grandmother, born in Blanchard, Iowa in 1888—and all the “skeptics” and “doubting Thomases” who didn’t think a progressive could run a city.

That he could pull it off in New York City in this moment when progressive politics has been chased out of Washington and most state capitals is proof to de Blasio that he has earned the right to help set the direction of the Democratic Party going forward. He proudly bashes the Clintons, the post-2016 obsession with the loss of white working-class voters and the people who see the Ralph Northam and Doug Jones wins as proof that the party needs moderates to win.

“Part of why we’re in the mess we’re in is because we fell into a trap of triangulation and moderation, lost a lot of our identity and became unappealing to the very people who had been our support base,” he said in the interview.

The problem for de Blasio is that many progressives, Democrats and other mayors say they also don’t want him in this role—which adds up to a sort of national version of the public advocate job he held for four years in New York before becoming mayor. They’re already fed up with his pledge, now that he’s won a second and final term in City Hall, to make Iowa the first of many stops traveling the country to talk about progressive politics and progressive candidates.

“It’s laughable to think that the response to Trump is going to come from a progressive mayor whom progressives don’t rally around and mayors don’t respect,” said one high-placed Democratic operative.

They also don’t believe de Blasio will follow through. Remember that bold, but low-on-answers, “progressive agenda” he put out with a big news conference at the Capitol in Washington in May 2014? Remember the forum he was going to host in Iowa for presidential candidates to prove their progressive credentials? Remember the threats he made against other politicians—most prominently, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, his Tom & Jerry partner in the local media—to exact punishment against people whom he’d judge to have not followed through?

Nothing came of any of them.

De Blasio chalks up the fizzling of his progressive agenda to being overtaken by the Bernie Sanders campaign, which launched at a much smaller event on the other side of the Capitol two weeks earlier in the spring 2015, but became a phenomenon while focusing on many of the same issues, only with much wider support.

De Blasio bristles when presented with this failure, arguing that it’s “banal and simplistic” to expect him to fail at taking his message national now. “I want to talk to anyone who thinks that and tell them they need to start thinking more. I mean, give me a break. So every time someone tries something and it doesn’t work, it invalidates anything else they might do going forward? Tell Thomas Edison that, and Henry Ford, tell Mahatma Gandhi. How many people fell on their faces along the way trying things, experimenting with things, had setbacks? There’s no leader who hasn’t had setbacks.”

Perhaps realizing the folly of comparing himself to such giants of history, de Blasio swiftly corrects himself—he’s a “speck on the universe” compared with those three, just trying to do his part. But ask him about Hillary Clinton, whose 2000 Senate campaign he managed but whose 2016 presidential campaign he was banished from because he slammed her for failing to have a progressive vision, and he’ll jump in with, “But I was right!”

“I was telling them they needed to have a clear progressive populist message, and they had to believe it. If they had, they would have won. I stand by it,” he said.

People everywhere still gush about his predecessor Mike Bloomberg for technocratic policies like the smoking ban he showed could work in New York and is now the law all over the planet, but de Blasio doesn’t get much credit for instituting universal pre-K, despite now 70,000 children in programs he made happen. “It’s very rare that something that’s so transformational in the lives of working-class families gets done, and is so successful out of the gate,” said Heather McGhee, president of Demos, a progressive think tank.

Ask de Blasio why, and you’ll get a very de Blasio answer.

“American culture deifies the wealthy, and he was one of the richest people in the world,” he said of Bloomberg. “I think that’s one part of it. Obviously, he had tremendous resources that he could use for self-promotion, and he did. I have a critique of mainstream media, and I think some of the things I stand for are not in favor when it comes to those who own the mainstream media. So I’m not shocked that some of this news hasn’t traveled.”

But other big-city mayors—like Philadelphia’s Jim Kenney, who’s been pushing his own aggressive progressivism since taking office at the beginning of last year—have been inspired by de Blasio’s example. New York proved it can work, Kenney said, despite the difference in scale (Philadelphia’s current goal is 6,500-7,000 kids in programs, while New York already has 10 times that enrolled). “You have to have the money to do it,” Kenney said. “I’m hoping that if a guy like Bill runs, that he can articulate to the rest of the county that if you want quality education, quality infrastructure, you have to pay for it.”

As long as they’re talking off the record, many Democratic leaders and operatives will trash de Blasio. They think he’s smug. Annoying. In it for himself without any follow-through. The rap on de Blasio is that he likes to make a lot of noise but doesn’t like to do a lot of work, that he has an oversize sense of his own importance.

It’s often visceral. One mayor, pondering why so many national Democrats don’t like de Blasio, took a long pause and could only summon, “I don’t know.”

McGhee, who was one of the signatories on de Blasio’s 2014 Progressive Agenda, said she knows people don’t take the New York mayor seriously, and “it kind of baffles me.”

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“For wonks, his endorsement of, and in some ways passage of, big progressive policy goals gives him more credibility in national progressive circles than in the horse race of who’s going to run,” she offered.

I asked de Blasio directly why it’s so hard to get progressives and mayors to talk about him.

“Oh my God!” he said mockingly. “What is the secret that they’re hiding? I have no idea.”

There was his appearance at the Democratic National Committee elections in Atlanta in February. De Blasio was one of the few elected officials who flew in to campaign, mostly on behalf of Rep. Keith Ellison’s bid to be chair. But while he did make a short speech at a party the night before the ballots were cast, he wasn’t given a speaking role on the day of, without a lot of belief that he could sway delegates. A number of them quietly pointed out that de Blasio spent much of that Saturday off to the side of the convention center hall by himself, checking emails on his phone.

Or the private strategy session the Conference of Mayors held in New Orleans in August to discuss lobbying the federal government. De Blasio held up the discussion at one point with a long speech about how the bipartisan group—most of whom, including the Republicans, hate what the White House is doing on everything from sanctuary cities to health care to tax cuts—should organize to be a “ubiquitous” force opposing the administration, according to notes taken at the time. He floated the idea of cities refusing any infrastructure money as an act of resistance.

“I am not sure that we should engage the Trump administration. I am not sure that we should not,” he said at one point, though he didn’t offer any specific plan. “But we must be ubiquitous. That is our job.”

“Prime Bill de Blasio,” said one of the people in the room. “It’s fair to say that there was eye-rolling. It’s fair to say that there was frustration.”

For a guy who’s 6’5" and who has now been elected twice to what’s often thought of as the second-most prominent job in politics after president, de Blasio can come off small. Confident it would needle him, the police union sent a dozen officers and a truck out to Iowa to stage a symbolic protest, and the transit workers’ union bought an attack ad on the back page of the Des Moines Register the day he arrived. Reporters regularly complain about how he shows up late, all the time—like when he arrived an hour late for the 20 minutes of questions and answers he did with the wider press corps just before heading over to the Progress Iowa party.

And de Blasio keeps poking back, like when he finished the session with reporters insisting that he could juggle being mayor and a national political activist at the same time by turning to his press secretary and saying, “I’m going to do a visual.” Then he pulled a pack of Eclipse gum from his pocket, popped a piece in his mouth, smiled, and made a show of walking out.

Asked whether Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who also worked with him at the Housing and Urban Development Department in the late 1990s under Cuomo, is progressive enough to run for president in 2020, he won’t answer, deflecting by saying, “My job is not to be an arbiter of who’s progressive or who’s not.”

Asked immediately after that whether Cuomo is a progressive, he goes right ahead and arbitrates, citing a 2014 deal he helped broker that had the governor sign on to a set of promises in exchange for support.

“I am troubled that progressives put forward those specific ideas, got agreement and then didn’t see results. But obviously, that will be an important topic as we go forward,” he said.

The night in Des Moines ended by auctioning off the red tie he was wearing to help pay for the event. Iowa House Minority Leader Mark Smith pleaded and pushed for bids, and squeezed out just four, to end at $250. A copy of “Humans of New York” that de Blasio had brought with him went for $350.

Progress Iowa’s executive director called the event a success nonetheless.

“He was a good draw. And we wanted an honest-to-God progressive leader,” he said.

Maybe all the spite toward de Blasio is just New York envy or the way he comes across in public, Kenney said. That’s what it was for him, especially nursing some Philly rivalry. “The biggest thing about Bill that I’m surprised about,” he said, “is that I didn’t think I’d actually like him, and I do.”

For his part, de Blasio is certain he’s onto something bigger than anyone realizes, just like he believes he was two-and-a-half years ago, when a certain Vermont senator stole his thunder.

“I’m also clear the idea was right, because Bernie’s campaign made clear it was right,” he said. “Bigger than I ever knew.”

