Unselfconscious Weirdo Won’t Run for New York Governor

BUCK: I think this is good. The worst… Formerly the worst mayor in America — I don’t think there’s anybody else who could take that title from him. I think the single worst mayor in the country is no longer the mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio. He did run for president — highly unsuccessfully — at one point. He is an unselfconscious weirdo, to be sure, but he thinks that he has a political constituency, maybe just not in the state of New York, because Bill de Blasio — from my WOR NYC, folks, we’re all breathing a sigh of relief always Adams, we’ll talk more about that, not so good so far, de Blasio says he’s not actually gonna run for governor here. Play it.

DE BLASIO: We said we were gonna take on inequality! Naysayers said it couldn’t be done. But we proved, together, we could make a big change. Now, I made my fair share of mistakes. I was not good with groundhogs at all. Probably shouldn’t have gone to the gym. (snicker) But you know what? We changed things in this town. We changed policing to make it fairer. We showed you could do big things, Green New Deal, making the city greener and greener for future. So this is the right place for me to share some news with you. No, I am not running for governor of New York State, but I am gonna devote every fiber of my being to fight inequality in the State of New York.

BUCK: Clay, can I just say, this guy, he did change the city. He made everything about it worse. So this is a classic thing you see with a lot of Democrat politicians. No matter how much destruction they have wrought, they think that they did a good job, and they should be in power going forward.

CLAY: Well, here’s the downside, I would say, associated with de Blasio not running ’cause I think you have to put it into context with Letitia James deciding not to run, either. Is Kathy Hochul in such an overwhelmingly popular position and in such a preferred political posture that everybody is terrified of her? And if so, what does it say about New York that Hochul — who I think is worse than Andrew Cuomo in terms of many of her decisions’ certainly does not appear to at least be as smart or politically adroit, whatever you think of Andrew Cuomo. And I think — make no mistake — he was an awful governor. But it seems like everybody’s just getting out of her way and acknowledging that she is going to win the Democratic nomination without even much of a challenge here.

BUCK: I also think that looking into what we’ll be dealing with the de Blasio. The reason why I said I think it’s a good thing is it’s great that he’s not gonna be mayor, and I think it’s good he’s probably not running for governor. But then again, we’re gonna see this guy on MSNBC every five minutes for the next 10 years.

CLAY: (chuckling) I don’t even think he’ll do well there.

BUCK: Oh, they like him on there. He’s actually… He’s a pretty smooth commie. I gotta tell you. He does well with the doctrinaire, limousine lib set. They like this guy, because he’s such a phony and yet so utterly devoted to the con of he cares so much about inequality. It’s a guy who has, you know, was getting all these big rental checks from his properties that he owns during the pandemic while he’s making sure that other people who maybe only have one rental property couldn’t evict the tenants that weren’t paying him. De Blasio is the absolute worst in the Democrat Party in so many ways. What you realize is, they never think they’ve done enough damage, Clay. (laughing) They never think we’ve suffered enough from their bad decisions.

CLAY: Thankfully we’re starting to reverse some of that damage.