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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDe Blasio Exposed as Crypto-Commie: NY Times Profile
Some local bloggers are pissed at what they see as some kind of modern day McCarthyism by NYT. But actually the story makes him look good. At least to me it does.
Imagine: a chance to put someone with a genuine progressive pedigree in a position of real power. After years of having to choose between MBA's, Wall Street clowns, lawyers, lawyers and more lawyers, and assorted hacks and flunkies ( Did I leave anyone out? Hope not.) this guy could be a friggin' breath of fresh air.
By JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ
Published: September 22, 2013
He was tall and sometimes goofy, known for his ability to mimic a gooses honk. He spoke in long, meandering paragraphs, musing on Franklin D. Roosevelt, Karl Marx and Bob Marley. He took painstaking notes on encounters with farmers, doctors and revolutionary fighters.
Bill de Blasio, then 26, went to Nicaragua to help distribute food and medicine in the middle of a war between left and right. But he returned with something else entirely: a vision of the possibilities of an unfettered leftist government.
As he seeks to become the next mayor of New York City, Mr. de Blasio, the citys public advocate, has spoken only occasionally about his time as a fresh-faced idealist who opposed foreign wars, missile defense systems and apartheid in the late 1980s and early 1990s. References to his early activism have been omitted from his campaign Web site.
But a review of hundreds of pages of records and more than two dozen interviews suggest his time as a young activist was more influential in shaping his ideology than previously known, and far more political than typical humanitarian work.
Mr. de Blasio, who studied Latin American politics at Columbia and was conversational in Spanish, grew to be an admirer of Nicaraguas ruling Sandinista party, thrusting himself into one of the most polarizing issues in American politics at the time. The Reagan administration denounced the Sandinistas as tyrannical and Communist, while their liberal backers argued that after years of dictatorship, they were building a free society with broad access to education, land and health care.
Today, Mr. de Blasio is critical of the Sandinistas crackdown on dissenters, but said he learned from his time trying to help the Central American country.
My work was based on trying to create a more fair and inclusive world, he said in a recent interview. I have an activists desire to improve peoples lives.
Mr. de Blasio became an ardent supporter of the Nicaraguan revolutionaries. He helped raise funds for the Sandinistas in New York and subscribed to the partys newspaper, Barricada, or Barricade. When he was asked at a meeting in 1990 about his goals for society, he said he was an advocate of democratic socialism.
Now, Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, describes himself as a progressive. He has campaigned for mayor as a liberal firebrand who would set out to reduce inequality in the city by offering more help to poor families and asking wealthy residents to pay more in taxes. He said that seeing the efforts of the Sandinistas up close strengthened his view that government should protect and enhance the lives of the poor.
It was very affecting for me, Mr. de Blasio said of his work with Nicaraguans, in a recent interview. They were in their own humble way, in this small country, trying to figure out what would work better.
mas aqui: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/nyregion/a-mayoral-hopeful-now-de-blasio-was-once-a-young-leftist.html?pagewanted=all
gopiscrap
(23,767 posts)doing their damnedest to derail his candidacy!
Warpy
(111,437 posts)New Yorkers are especially well acquainted with fascism's jackboot and will likely support anyone who promises real change for someone other than plutocrats.
Enrique
(27,461 posts)and it's a significant part of his background and I see nothing wrong with reporting it. Did those bloggers have specific complaints about the story or are they objecting to the fact that it was written at all?
Kudos to Obama for endorsing him despite his leftist past. I bet some of his advisers advised against it but that's just speculation.
Smarmie Doofus
(14,498 posts)Cha
(298,018 posts)wanted.
TreasonousBastard
(43,049 posts)back then, but that he actually got stuff done. Maybe even more of an activist than a certain Chicago guy we know.
There was nothing in the article I saw trashing him, but da trut' is da trut' and he never denied or hid any of that. Nor did the article lie about him or appear snide or spiteful in the article. Besides, I took it more as a puff piece about his acting on his beliefs and saw it nothing of a slam at all.
Granted, some might take all that as warning us about some Commie trying to take over NY, but I think the rational part of the city admires a guy who gets his hands dirty doing what he believes.
And, ummm, a lot of people probably forgot by now why we were supposed to hate the Sandinistas.
frazzled
(18,402 posts)I don't see why people seem to think it's some kind of smear piece. It's part of his biography, and like all candidates running for political office, their biographies are part of what people should have access to. The New York Times is doing it's job here. The story does nothing more than show he was a passionate person, and that while he's changed his political beliefs and strategies over the years, his passions have not.
He's like a lot of people of my generation who supported the Sandinistas at the time; and like a lot who came not to support them later. So what. (This includes a friend who spent 10 years there, and then returned later to document the original villagers they'd worked with and seen, and found them disillusioned and no better off.) Times change.
He's going to be mayor. (New Yorkers are not going to vote for the other guy.) Nobody cares about what he did 20 years ago. But they have a right to know what he did 20 years ago.
MisterP
(23,730 posts)and targeting teachers, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, agronomists, electric engineers, and random women and children for death (and castration, and rape, and uterus-slicing) and burned oil tanks, airports, and fields, so as to make life unbearable for the Nicaraguan people as punishment for daring to overthrow a blood-soaked tyrant who killed his own people (and US cameramen) and sold donated blood after an earthquake
hrmjustin
(71,265 posts)Remember there are a lot of Rudy's people who thought they were going to get back into government and now it looks like that will not happen.
Samantha
(9,314 posts)When I was 26, I was a Republican.
Sam