Fog hovered over Jamaica Bay that morning, November 12, as dozens of grieving families gathered for the memorial service in Rockaway Park, along the water in a far precinct of Queens. They had come to mark the 13th anniversary of the crash of American Airlines Flight 587, a flight headed to the Dominican Republic that instead ended up in flames in Far Rockaway, killing 260 people on board, as well as 5 on the ground.

Mayor Bill de Blasio was scheduled to arrive at 9:05, 11 minutes before a uniformed officer was to ring a silver bell noting the exact time of the crash. But at 9:05 there was no sign of the mayor, who was on a police launch en route. For several minutes family members stared in disbelief, some shaking their heads; the previous mayor, Michael Bloomberg, had always come early and taken his time speaking with them. When 9:16 came with still no sign of the mayor, the police officer with the bell stood motionless, unsure what to do.

Finally one of the mourners, Miriam Estrella, stepped to the podium. “I’m sorry, everyone,” she said. “Sorry our mayor’s not here.” The officer rang the bell. Nine minutes later de Blasio arrived, strode to the podium, and made a speech that did little to calm the furious families.

The mayor’s staff blamed the fog. But confronted by reporters later that day, de Blasio admitted he simply hadn’t gotten out of bed in time. “I had a very rough night, woke up sluggish, and I should have gotten myself moving quicker,” he explained. “I just woke up in the middle of the night, couldn’t get back to sleep, and felt really sluggish and off-kilter this morning.”

It wasn’t the first—or the last—time de Blasio was late for an official function. In December he showed up two hours late to a murdered police officer’s wake, arriving as it ended. During Saint Patrick’s Day festivities he achieved the trifecta of being late for three events in a row: a celebratory breakfast and reception at Gracie Mansion—“his own house,” The New York Times noted in italics; a Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which Cardinal Timothy Dolan started without him (“Mayor de Blasio, we’re happy you’re here,” Dolan said when the mayor finally arrived); and a parade in the Rockaways, which the mayor missed half of. The crowd booed when he arrived. A few chanted, “Worst mayor ever.” “I’m not hired by the people to go to parades,” de Blasio said grumpily afterward.

Chronic tardiness is just one of the complaints New Yorkers have voiced about their mayor of not quite 21 months. On the Upper West Side the gripes are about potholes; on the Upper East Side, uncollected garbage; in Greenwich Village the talk is of abandoned storefronts occupied by the homeless. After 20 years of plunging crime rates, crime is again part of the New York conversation. After de Blasio criticized “stop-and-frisk”—detaining and searching people without probable cause—the N.Y.P.D. rose in open revolt against him last winter when two officers were murdered. At the funerals the policemen turned their backs on the mayor en masse.

Bill de Blasio is unlike any New York mayor in recent memory, a staunch progressive, a crusader against income inequality and for affordable housing, a man who has as little use for Park Avenue elites as they do for him. In terms of the national political scene, that makes him a far more significant figure on the left than any New York mayor in years. In fact, if you believe that the popularity of politicians such as Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders represents a new “progressive moment’’ in American politics, it’s de Blasio who is the one who bears watching. He is the only progressive governing anything of note, and while mayor of New York has historically been a dead-end job for those seeking higher office, it’s clear his ambitions aren’t confined to the city limits.