“Friends And Allies Literally Roll Their Eyes When They Hear The New York City Mayor Is Trying To Go National Again”

“What’s Bill de Blasio’s Problem?”:

De Blasio chalks up the fizzling of his progressive agenda to being overtaken by the Bernie Sanders campaign, which launched at a much smaller event on the other side of the Capitol two weeks earlier in the spring 2015, but became a phenomenon while focusing on many of the same issues, only with much wider support.

De Blasio bristles when presented with this failure, arguing that it’s “banal and simplistic” to expect him to fail at taking his message national now. “I want to talk to anyone who thinks that and tell them they need to start thinking more. I mean, give me a break. So every time someone tries something and it doesn’t work, it invalidates anything else they might do going forward? Tell Thomas Edison that, and Henry Ford, tell Mahatma Gandhi. How many people fell on their faces along the way trying things, experimenting with things, had setbacks? There’s no leader who hasn’t had setbacks.”

[. . .]

As long as they’re talking off the record, many Democratic leaders and operatives will trash de Blasio. They think he’s smug. Annoying. In it for himself without any follow-through. The rap on de Blasio is that he likes to make a lot of noise but doesn’t like to do a lot of work, that he has an oversize sense of his own importance.

It’s often visceral. One mayor, pondering why so many national Democrats don’t like de Blasio, took a long pause and could only summon, “I don’t know.”