MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO: We will expand the paid sick leave law, because no one should be forced to lose a day's pay, or even a week's pay, simply because illness strikes. And by this time next year, fully 300,000 additional New Yorkers will be protected by that law. We won't wait. We'll do it now. We will require the big developers to build more affordable housing. We will fight to stem the tide of hospital closures. And we'll expand community health centers into neighborhoods in need, so that New Yorkers see our city not as the exclusive domain of the 1 percent, but a place where everyday people can afford to live, work and raise a family. We won't wait. We'll do it now.
AMY GOODMAN: Bill de Blasio on his Inauguration Day in 2014. Of course, he's running again, primary next week. You set the scene with his family, well, not coming in a limousine to City Hall.
JUAN GONZA'LEZ: Right. Well, they actually came by subway from Brooklyn, and they emerged from the City Hall station, just as everyone was gathered around at the inauguration ceremony. And I think it was a clear message being sent, that this was a -- first of all, that it was an outer borough mayor, someone who came from -- not from Manhattan, which is typically where Manhattan mayors -- where New York City mayors come from, but, more importantly, that it was from -- it was a part of a movement. And I think that the reality is that Bill de Blasio, interestingly, has been both a political operative of the Democratic Party now for many years, but has always had close ties to the labor movement, to the grassroots organizations that were fighting around protecting public schools and against charter schools. And it was this movement, really, that helped to propel him into office.
The question is -- and I think it's a fair question -- is that it's a lot easier to criticize government and a lot harder to govern, especially in a progressive direction in a capitalist society. So, the question is -- many critics have raised of de Blasio and of the other mayors that I deal with, because I deal with more than a half-dozen around other -- in Minneapolis, Walsh in Boston, Bill Peduto in Pittsburgh, Murray in Seattle, Gayle McLaughlin's tenure in Richmond, California, Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson, Mississippi. All of these mayors, in one way or another, were trying to implement a vision opposed to the neoliberal policies that have governed American cities now for about 50 years, and opposed to the growth machine policies that have really run our cities for a hundred years. And they were opposed to those in one way or another and have sought to change the way America's cities are governed.
AMY GOODMAN: And before we get to the urban growth machine, that image of de Blasio's family and how important that was in his election and what has meant -- who his family is?
JUAN GONZ????LEZ: Well, yes. Bill de Blasio has got -- has maintained very widespread support in the African-American and Latino community, not so much support in the white community of New York City. In fact, he has minority support in the white community. Yet the African-American and Latino community have remained very loyal to his mayoralty so far. I think it's, one, because of the economic impact of his policies, but also because they see in de Blasio, married to an African-American woman, with biracial children, a living symbol of the diversity of New York City and of a sense of caring about what happens to the poor and to the African Americans and Latinos of the city. So I think that the -- in fact, his son is really credited, really, with being responsible for his sudden surge, with the famous commercial that his son did in August --
AMY GOODMAN: I think we have that commercial.
JUAN GONZA'LEZ: Yeah, it was in August, I think, of 2013.
AMY GOODMAN: Let's go to it.
DANTE DE BLASIO: I want to tell you a little bit about Bill de Blasio. He's the only Democrat with the guts to really break from the Bloomberg years, the only one who will raise taxes on the rich to fund early childhood and after-school programs. He's got the boldest plan to build affordable housing. And he's the only one who will end a stop-and-frisk era that unfairly targets people of color. Bill de Blasio will be a mayor for every New Yorker, no matter where they live or what they look like. And I'd say that even if he weren't my dad.
AMY GOODMAN: It's this young African-American man with an afro. You just see him talking about Bill de Blasio, the candidate; at the end, his white father walking with him down the street.
JUAN GONZA'LEZ: Well, and I think that's what captivated many New Yorkers, because, until that moment, I would say the majority of New Yorkers did not even know that de Blasio had biracial children and was an interracial marriage. And I think that that sort of awakened a lot of people to say, "Hey, I should take another look at this guy." And I think that then, of course, the policies were critical, the policies that directly affected the lives of African Americans and Latinos and working-class New Yorkers.
AMY GOODMAN: And let's go to one of those policies that directly related to his son, this pivotal moment in 2014, when Eric Garner is killed, put in a fatal police chokehold in Staten Island. The officers had confronted Garner for allegedly selling loose cigarettes. Protests erupted over lack of police accountability. Shortly afterward, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said he and his wife Chirlane, who is African-American, fear for the safety of their teenage son, Dante.
MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO: Chirlane and I have had to talk to Dante for years about the dangers he may face. Good young man, law-abiding young man, who never would think to do anything wrong, and yet, because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face, we've had to literally train him, as families have all over this city for decades, in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him. And that painful sense of contradiction that our young people see first, that our police are here to protect us and we honor that, and the same time, there's a history we have to overcome because for so many of our young people there's a fear, and for so many of our families there's a fear.
AMY GOODMAN: That's Mayor de Blasio talking about his own son and talking about the police, Juan.
JUAN GONZA'LEZ: Yes. And he took a lot of heat from all sides of the political spectrum during that period of time, because, as you recall, he had already moved to further dismantle the stop-and-frisk policies of the Bloomberg administration, that were still being battled over in the courts. He settled the Central Park 5 case, jogger case, with multimillion-dollar settlements for those who had been wrongly convicted and jailed for the Central Park jogger case. He had -- he was accepting much more oversight of the police department, outside oversight, that City Council had passed, which the police department was opposed to.
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