DEFEND DE BLASIO NOW
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2013 AT 5:25PM
Bill de Blasio at a news conference in 1988 to announce a $150,000 shipment of supplies to Nicaragua and to deride the United States’ financing of the contra rebellion. (Photo: Marquette University Archives)A full-page of revelations in the New York Times that Bill De Blasio was an active organizer in the Central American solidarity movement and before that, an outspoken opponent of nuclear power in high school, should hugely excite the progressive base in New York politics after a long period of Republican rule. De Blasio didn't leave his radical youth behind either; in the present day, he is a leading critic of stop-and-frisk and the massive economic inequalities dramatized by Occupy Wall Street.Instead of turning moderate New Yorkers against him, the new revelations may actually help De Blasio's mayoral campaign, for example by winning votes in Latino precincts and awakening a Left which often derides electoral politics. (That is, if De Blasio doesn't suddenly renounce his past in an attempt to assuage the center. He shows little sign of doing so at the moment.)
A background in solidarity with the Sandinistas doesn't make for a conventional political resume. In fact there are few veterans of radical movements in mainstream politics. Unlike Europe and