Bill de Blasio, like his progressive political idol Barack Obama, is finding out that you can’t do the New Politics if you don’t pay attention to the old politics.

In Obama’s case, it was a failure to recognize the threat posed to him by Republicans who didn’t buy into his calls for a post-partisan partnership with Congress. For New York’s ambitious liberal mayor, it was an inability to keep long-simmering tensions with the city’s traditionally powerful police department from boiling over in the past few days.


Just over a year after sailing into office with 72 percent of the vote on a message of transformational change, de Blasio found his mayoralty subsumed by a torrent of anger, unleashed by the murder of two police officers in Brooklyn Saturday by a troubled gunman who said he was killing “pigs” to avenge the deaths of two men by cops in Staten Island and Ferguson, Missouri. By Monday, de Blasio was lashing out at the press corps that covers him, trying to paper over public divisions with his own police commissioner and coping with what friends described as the emotional blow of facing public rejection by many in the nation’s biggest police force. “He’s pretty badly shaken” by the murders, one told us.

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That a civic tragedy would so quickly devolve into a full-blown political crisis for the new mayor was testament to the vehemence of anti-de Blasio elements in the police union — and the mayor’s mistaken belief that his 2013 victory gave him the right to shred an old Gotham political playbook that dictated a mayor show deference to the New York Police Department.

You can’t be big-city mayor and alienate the cops — and that’s just as true now as it was under three-term New York City Mayor Ed Koch, or even a century ago.

“Koch was loved by the cops and always told all his successors that you must have the support of the cops, that the cops can be your best friend. If Koch were alive today that’s what he would tell Bill de Blasio,” said George Arzt, former press secretary to Koch, whose election in 1977 election greatly improved City Hall-police relations.

De Blasio “needs to press reset in his relationship with the cops,” Arzt said.

Good luck with that. The bad blood between the NYPD and de Blasio is nothing new — it dates back to an election campaign centered on de Blasio’s withering criticism of the Bloomberg administration’s stop-and-frisk policy, and his close alliance with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has organized scores of protests targeting cops over their behavior toward urban blacks.

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According to a former de Blasio aide, during the general election campaign in 2013 de Blasio’s team was even convinced that members of his police detail were eavesdropping on his private conversations in his city-assigned car. Things got so bad that de Blasio, according to the staffer, would step into the street to make sure he was out of earshot of plainclothes officers.

The low-boil contempt for de Blasio, which has been building for months, erupted publicly on Saturday when dozens of cops turned their backs on the mayor as he arrived at the Brooklyn hospital where the bodies of officers Wenjian Liu, 32, and Rafael Ramos, 40, had been taken.

In a sign of the growing strain, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton told the “Today” show on Monday morning that the murder of the officers was the “direct spinoff” of protests against police violence — and added that police-community tensions were the highest since the 1970s. That infuriated de Blasio allies. An emotional de Blasio appeared later in the day at a Police Athletic League event, seeming jarred by the turn of events. His message, however, was now the same as Bratton’s: Protests could wait until after the funerals for the two men had passed.

City Hall officials seemed genuinely surprised by the ferocity of the backlash. They said de Blasio wasn’t concerned with the optics and that he’s trying to calm the waters, even if it means allowing police union leaders to lambaste him in public.

“In these situations, the loudest voices are on the most extreme ends of both sides,” De Blasio senior adviser Peter Ragone said. “And what we’re trying to do right now … responsible actors are trying to avoid having the loudest voices [overtake the others].”

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De Blasio allies often point out that he is governing at a time of transition in the city, the first new mayor elected since the population shifted to a majority of Hispanics, blacks and Asians. The police department has seen demographic changes as well, although its top union leaders — a set of hard-edged members who have long been quote machines for the city’s voracious media — have basically remained the same. The unions, whose leaders have long criticized city mayors, are currently in a contract dispute with City Hall.

David Axelrod, Obama’s longtime adviser whose former business partner, John Del Cecato, is a de Blasio adviser, said that de Blasio’s dilemma isn’t unique — it’s a burden borne by any progressive who wants to speak truth to power while wielding it. “My sense is that he sincerely appreciates both the hard job the police do and the gulf that exists today, and is trying to close that breach,” Axelrod said. “And he has to weather the storm and speak hard truths to police and the community and, over time, the public will appreciate his role as a rational voice, trying to heal the city and move forward.”

It’s a point of pride for the de Blasio administration that the city never erupted in violence amid protests after a Staten Island man named Eric Garner, who was black, died after an apparent chokehold from a police officer trying to arrest him on suspicion of selling loose cigarettes. The move by Staten Island officers to approach Garner was in keeping with the same controversial broken-windows anti-crime strategy that Bratton first employed as Rudy Giuliani’s police commissioner.

People close to de Blasio also said he supported the Garner protesters not because he backed their position but because he wanted to avoid antagonizing them in the wake of the grand jury decision not to indict the officer who killed Garner. Above all, one source said, de Blasio wanted to avoid provoking riots akin to the unrest in Ferguson after a white cop shot an unarmed black man whom he later said had attacked him.

But de Blasio’s unpopularity with the historically white-dominated NYPD parallels his increasing struggles with white New Yorkers, who now disapprove of him by a nearly two-to-one margin in public polling. When confronted with similar polling numbers over the past year, de Blasio allies have repeatedly said that the mayor retains the strong backing of nonwhite New Yorkers and the Democratic base — and claimed the mayor’s private polling showed a much more modest racial disparity.

( Also on POLITICO: Barack Obama: "No justification" for killing of NYC police officers)

The blue rage isn’t rooted in any one statement de Blasio has made against cops — in fact, he has been universally supportive of the rank-and-file in his public utterances. But in his past roles as a public official, he’s often sided with the victims of police brutality, and he recently told an interviewer that he has told Dante, his teenage mixed-race son, not to reach for a cellphone around officers because it might put him in danger as a “a young man of color.” He took the unusual step — unimaginable under the mayoralties of Giuliani or Michael Bloomberg — of inviting Sharpton to City Hall, seating him opposite Bratton at a table where the activist proceeded to strongly denounce the police. (“If Dante wasn’t your son, he’d be a candidate for a chokehold. And we got to deal with that reality,” Sharpton said to de Blasio as Bratton looked on.) Last week, de Blasio privately met with organizers of the Garner protests, another moment that antagonized police.

But the action that turned off cops most of all was his defense of City Hall staffer Rachel Noerdlinger, a longtime Sharpton aide whose son and boyfriend posted anti-police messages on their Facebook accounts. The boyfriend allegedly tried to drive a cop off the road in Edgewater, New Jersey, and later pleaded to a lesser offense, according to the New York Post. The mayor stood behind Noerdlinger for weeks until her son was arrested for trespassing — and even then he didn’t fire her. When she left her job, City Hall officials said she was on leave.

“His words and his deeds don’t match,” said veteran cop reporter Leonard Levitt, who runs NYPD Confidential, a website fed by tips from inside the department and widely read by the rank and file. “You had Noerdlinger’s son calling cops ‘pigs’ and de Blasio doesn’t think that’s inappropriate? What message are you sending? De Blasio says it’s just the union guys who are angry. It’s not. It’s everybody. I’ve been covering this for 25 years and I have never seen anything like it. … The mayor doesn’t have a clue.”

Axelrod, who recently visited with de Blasio in City Hall, said the mayor isn’t clueless — just trying to walk a fine line. “Any mayor has to appreciate the incredible burden on police departments and the courage of men and women who put themselves into potentially dangerous situations each day to keep communities safe,” he said. “By the same token, there’s an obvious breach between the police and communities of color, not just in New York, but most urban areas, that is bad for both police and the folks they’re sworn to serve and protect.”

De Blasio allies often point out that the city has changed since the days of Giuliani. Blacks and Hispanics are now in the majority. The so-called Giuliani Democrats have largely passed away or moved. The same coalition that elected Obama also swept de Blasio to an outright win in the 2013 primary, helping him avoid a runoff.

Yet like Obama, de Blasio sometimes seems hampered by his inability — or unwillingness — to master the stagecraft of his own mayoralty, which requires Kochian force rather than Obamaian reason. Bloomberg — as stiff a politician as was ever elected to run the city — took office when the pit at ground zero still spewed smoke and realized quickly that the ceremonial parts of being mayor mattered, as much as he hated them. De Blasio, by contrast, has struggled with those aspects of the job — routinely showing up late for events, including a recent commemoration for the victims of a plane crash in Far Rockaway, where he missed his window to speak.

De Blasio was clearly pained and jarred by the police executions Saturday, but he left the indignation to Bratton. The angriest moment de Blasio has mustered since the weekend was on Monday, and it was directed at the press.

“What are you guys going to do?” he asked, his voice rising, as he accused reporters of amplifying the few bad actors among the protesters. “Are you going to keep dividing us?”

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