As The Saying Goes, I’d Rather Be Raising My Profile In DC Than The Mayor Of New York

Bill’s bold progressive vision:

For Mayor Bill de Blasio, on a daylong tour of Washington on Wednesday, no topic seemed too big to tackle. “I think,” the mayor mused during a morning appearance here, “the American dream has ceased to function for a lot of families.”

Eleven months into his term as New York City’s mayor, Mr. de Blasio has no dearth of headaches at home: bumpy poll numbers, the departure of a key aide under a cloud of personal problems, and a tendency toward tardiness that led him to miss the most important moment of a memorial service last week for victims of a plane crash.

But the mayor on display here on Wednesday looked unruffled by his recent troubles — and undeterred in his efforts to raise his national profile as a lodestar of the left.

Lying For Nothing Particularly Good, More Like A Teenager Late For Class

The story that keeps getting worse:

Mayor Bill de Blasio turned up 30 minutes late for an NYPD boat waiting to take him from Gracie Mansion to the Rockaways for last week’s solemn ceremony to remember the victims of Flight 587, DNAinfo New York has learned.

The mayor was scheduled to embark at 8:05 a.m. Wednesday and the boat had been in place for half-an-hour before that, sources said. But he didn’t get to the boat until 8:35 a.m.

De Blasio’s press aides initially blamed the delay on “heavy fog,” which they said made the normally 35-minute trip take 50 minutes.

But sources said the fog had virtually no impact on the trip.

“The fog played a minimal, if any, role,” a law enforcement source said.

A New, Improved Smear, With Bonus Faux Outrage

After he’s done being “repulsed” maybe the mayor can also explain who or what is actually being “smeared,” versus simply reported on, and not because she’s an “adviser” but rather because she’s in the high profile position of getting paid $170,000 to be the chief of staff to his wife, hardly a typical “public servant”:

We’ve seen this — we saw this in the 1950s, we’ve seen this throughout the history of this country. If someone wants to smear people, and use that for political purposes, there’s a pretty easy playbook for doing it. It’s repulsive, but it’s become quite common. The idea is that for those of us who have a sense of mission, we’re not going to let it stop us. So, character assassination happens every day in public life. What’s sad is when it goes beyond the boundaries of the public servant, and starts to be something that could include anyone they ever met — any family member, anyone they’re romantically involved with, their children.

Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of

Because the best way to take an embarrassing story and make it an embarrassing story that stretches out over several news cycles is to have your staff ask memorial organizers to postpone time:

“Rude.” “Disrespectful.” “Insulting.”

Those were words used by various voters to describe Mayor Bill de Blasio’s tardiness at Wednesday’s memorial ceremony for Flight 587.

On Thursday night, one of the victims’ family members told CBS2’s Marcia Kramer a new one — chutzpah.

“They asked us to delay the moment of silence to wait until the mayor got there,” [a family member] said.

It was an explosive charge about the mayor’s failure to show up on time for a memorial service commemorating the 13th anniversary of the crash of the American Airlines flight.

[The family member], who lost five family members in the crash, refused. She rang the bell starting the moment of silence at precisely 9:16 a.m., the exact moment of the crash.

“They kept telling us, ‘Wait, he’s coming. He’s coming,’ and I said, no, we’re not waiting. We’re not going to wait for him for a moment of silence. It happened at a certain time. That’s the time that we have to toll the bells,” [the family member] said.

In Other Words, What You Say On Your Boss’s Voicemail When You Call Out Sick

Somehow when he fesses up, it ends up sounding even worse:

A chronically tardy Mayor de Blasio infuriated the loved ones of American Airlines Flight 587 victims by arriving 20 minutes late for a memorial ceremony on Wednesday — and blaming it on a bad night’s sleep.

“I had a very rough night and woke up sluggish. And I should have gotten myself moving quicker,” he told reporters in the afternoon. “Just woke up in the middle of the night, couldn’t get back to sleep and felt really sluggish and off-kilter this morning.”

And the kicker (at 1:25):

“Mayor Bloomberg never would have done this. Mayor Bloomberg was always here on time.”

Hopefully he wasn’t up late gloating over how he essentially won a glorified primary back in 2013, because that really is a bad look . . .