Bill de Blasio

Based on Wikipedia: Bill de Blasio

The Mayor Who Changed His Name Three Times

Before he became the mayor of America's largest city, before he championed universal pre-kindergarten, before he stood at the center of New York's debates about policing and inequality, Bill de Blasio was born Warren Wilhelm Junior.

He wouldn't keep that name for long.

The story of de Blasio is, in many ways, a story about reinvention. Born in Manhattan in 1961 to parents who drove from Connecticut specifically so their son could enter the world in New York, de Blasio would grow up mostly in Cambridge, Massachusetts, become a supporter of Nicaraguan socialists in his twenties, manage campaigns for political heavyweights like Charles Rangel and Hillary Clinton, and eventually rise to lead a city of over eight million people. Along the way, he would change his name twice—first to Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm in 1983, then simply to Bill de Blasio in 2001—each change a deliberate step away from his father and toward his Italian mother's family.

A Family Shaped by War and Suspicion

The de Blasio family tree reads like a twentieth-century American saga, complete with world wars, government service, and Cold War paranoia.

His mother, Maria de Blasio, attended Smith College and worked for the United States Office of War Information during World War Two. She later wrote a book called "The Other Italy," documenting the Italian resistance movement. His father, Warren Wilhelm, graduated from Yale and worked as a contributing editor at Time magazine before enlisting in the Army in 1942.

The elder Wilhelm's war left permanent marks. During the Battle of Okinawa—an 82-day nightmare that remains one of the bloodiest conflicts in the Pacific theater—a grenade exploded beneath his left foot. Surgeons amputated his leg below the knee. He came home with a Purple Heart and married Maria in 1945.

But peace proved more difficult than war. During the 1950s, at the height of what Americans call the Red Scare, both Maria and Warren faced accusations of having a "sympathetic interest in Communism." The family relocated to Connecticut, where Warren worked as chief international economist for Texaco while Maria handled public relations at the Italian consulate.

Here's a detail that seems pulled from a spy novel: de Blasio's paternal uncle, Donald George Wilhelm Junior, worked for the Central Intelligence Agency in Iran. He ghostwrote the memoir of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi—the last Shah of Iran, whose overthrow in 1979 would reshape Middle Eastern politics for generations.

A Childhood Fractured

When de Blasio was five, the family moved again, this time to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father had accepted a position at Arthur D. Little, a management consulting firm. But the marriage was crumbling.

"My mother and father broke up very early on in the time I came along," de Blasio later explained. "I was brought up by my mother's family—that's the bottom line—the de Blasio family."

Those words carry weight. When someone changes their name not once but twice to honor their mother's side of the family and to reflect "alienation from his father," you understand something profound about the wounds that shaped them.

The alienation would never heal. When de Blasio was eighteen, his father committed suicide while suffering from incurable lung cancer. Whatever reconciliation might have been possible ended in 1979, the same year de Blasio graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School.

His high school classmates knew him as "Senator Provolone"—a nickname that combined his involvement in student government with an affectionate nod to his Italian heritage. Whether they sensed future political ambitions in the young man, we can only guess.

Nicaragua and the Making of a Radical

After earning a bachelor's degree from New York University in metropolitan studies and a master's from Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, de Blasio made a choice that would follow him throughout his political career.

In 1987, he went to work for the Quixote Center in Maryland as a political organizer. The following year, he traveled to Nicaragua for ten days to distribute food and medicine during the Nicaraguan Revolution.

This wasn't neutral humanitarian work. De Blasio was an "ardent supporter" of the Sandinista National Liberation Front—a socialist government that the Reagan administration actively opposed and worked to undermine through the infamous Iran-Contra affair. The Sandinistas had overthrown the Somoza dictatorship in 1979 and were attempting to build a socialist state while fighting American-backed Contra rebels.

Back in New York, de Blasio continued his advocacy. He joined the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York, attending meetings and raising funds for the Sandinista political party. In 1990, when asked about his goals for society, he described himself as an advocate for democratic socialism.

These weren't youthful indiscretions quickly abandoned. This was a worldview, a set of commitments that would inform his politics for decades—even as he later navigated the more centrist waters required to win city-wide office in New York.

Learning the Machine

De Blasio's entry into practical New York politics came in 1989, when he volunteered as a coordinator for David Dinkins' mayoral campaign. Dinkins would become the first African American mayor of New York City, and de Blasio watched from inside the operation how a successful insurgent campaign works.

After Dinkins won, de Blasio stayed on as an aide in City Hall. He was learning the mechanics of governing a city that's really more like a collection of cities—five boroughs, each with populations larger than most American cities, each with distinct identities and competing interests.

In 1994, Congressman Charles Rangel tapped de Blasio to manage his reelection campaign. Rangel, one of the founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus and a fixture of Harlem politics, represented a very different kind of Democratic machine than the reform movements de Blasio had supported. But de Blasio was adding skills to his toolkit.

Three years later, the Clinton administration appointed him regional director for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, covering New York and New Jersey. As the highest-ranking Housing and Urban Development official in the region, de Blasio led outreach efforts to residents living in substandard housing—work that connected him to the grinding daily realities facing low-income New Yorkers.

In 2000, he managed another campaign: Hillary Clinton's first successful run for the United States Senate. Whatever you think of Clinton's politics, winning a Senate seat in New York as an Arkansas transplant (critics called her a "carpetbagger") required formidable campaign skills. De Blasio helped deliver that victory.

From Brooklyn to City Hall

De Blasio's first run for office came in 2001, when he sought a seat on the New York City Council representing the 39th district. This slice of Brooklyn includes neighborhoods whose names evoke very different worlds: Borough Park, with its large Orthodox Jewish community; Park Slope, increasingly home to affluent professionals and young families; Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill, with their Italian-American roots; and working-class Kensington.

He won a crowded primary with just 32 percent of the vote—enough in a fragmented field. In the general election, he crushed his Republican opponent 71 to 17 percent. The margins only grew in subsequent elections: 72 percent in 2003, 83 percent in 2005.

On the Council, de Blasio built a progressive record. He passed legislation preventing landlords from discriminating against tenants holding federal housing subsidy vouchers. He helped enact the Gender-Based Discrimination Protection Law, shielding transgender New Yorkers from discrimination. He pushed through the Domestic Partnership Recognition Law, ensuring same-sex couples in legal partnerships could access the same benefits as heterosexual couples—this was years before marriage equality became the law of the land.

But the Council is a stepping stone, not a destination. In 2009, de Blasio ran for Public Advocate—an unusual office that functions as a sort of official critic of city government, empowered to investigate agencies and advocate for constituents but wielding limited formal power.

The Public Advocate Years

The New York Times endorsed de Blasio for Public Advocate, praising his work on public schools and noting something crucial: "he has shown that he can work well with Mayor Bloomberg when it makes sense to do so while vehemently and eloquently opposing him when justified."

This ability to pick fights strategically—to collaborate where possible and attack where necessary—would become a de Blasio trademark.

He won the primary with 33 percent, then crushed his opponent in the general election 78 to 18 percent. On January 1, 2010, de Blasio became New York City's third Public Advocate, and he immediately used his inauguration speech to criticize the Bloomberg administration's homelessness and education policies.

The Public Advocate has a megaphone but not much else. De Blasio used it effectively. When the New York City Housing Authority announced it would cut Section 8 vouchers for low-income residents after discovering it couldn't pay for thousands of vouchers already issued, de Blasio opposed the cuts publicly.

His most attention-grabbing initiative was the "NYC's Worst Landlords Watchlist"—an online database tracking landlords who failed to repair dangerous living conditions. "We want these landlords to feel like they're being watched," de Blasio told the New York Daily News. "We need to shine a light on these folks to shame them into action."

It was a classic progressive move: using transparency and public pressure rather than new regulations to change behavior. The list drew widespread media coverage and highlighted hundreds of negligent landlords across the city.

Fighting Bloomberg on Education

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire media mogul turned politician, had made education reform a centerpiece of his administration. He championed charter schools, emphasized standardized testing, and brought in corporate-style management approaches. De Blasio positioned himself as the voice of parents and teachers who felt steamrolled by these reforms.

When Bloomberg nominated Cathie Black—a magazine executive with no background in education—to be Schools Chancellor, de Blasio demanded she participate in public forums and criticized her for sending her own children to private schools. It was a pointed attack: if you don't trust public schools with your own kids, why should we trust you to run them?

He opposed proposals to eliminate free MetroCards for students, arguing that transportation costs would devastate school attendance. He fought budget cuts to childcare services. He challenged the practice of "co-location," where multiple schools share a single building, releasing a study showing that community input was routinely ignored.

In June 2011, when Bloomberg proposed laying off more than 4,600 teachers to balance the city's budget, de Blasio organized parents and communities in opposition, staging what he called a "last-minute call-a-thon." Bloomberg backed down and found savings elsewhere.

These weren't just policy fights. De Blasio was building a coalition and establishing himself as Bloomberg's most visible progressive critic—precisely the positioning he would need for his next campaign.

A Tale of Two Cities

On January 27, 2013, de Blasio announced his candidacy for mayor. He entered a crowded Democratic primary that included City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, former Congressman Anthony Weiner, and former Comptroller Bill Thompson.

Early polls put de Blasio in fourth or fifth place. Weiner, despite his resignation from Congress following a sexting scandal, initially led the field after entering the race in April. Quinn, who would have been the first female and first openly gay mayor of New York, had the political establishment's backing.

De Blasio found his message in inequality.

New York City under Bloomberg had boomed economically, but the benefits flowed overwhelmingly to those at the top. Luxury towers sprouted across Manhattan while public housing crumbled. Wall Street bonuses soared while teachers lost their jobs. The city felt increasingly like two separate places—one for the wealthy and one for everyone else.

De Blasio called it "a tale of two cities," borrowing Charles Dickens' phrase to frame an election around the gap between rich and poor. He proposed raising taxes on residents earning more than $500,000 annually to fund universal pre-kindergarten and expanded after-school programs. He promised to invest $150 million annually in the City University of New York system.

He took positions that seemed politically risky. He opposed charter schools, arguing their funding drained resources from traditional public schools. He called for ending rent-free space for the city's 183 charter schools and placing a moratorium on co-locating charter schools in public school buildings.

Most significantly, he positioned himself as the candidate who would end "stop and frisk."

The Politics of Stop and Frisk

Under the Bloomberg administration, New York police had dramatically expanded a practice called "stop and frisk," in which officers could stop, question, and search people on the street based on "reasonable suspicion." In 2011, police made over 685,000 such stops.

The racial disparity was staggering. Despite making up roughly 25 percent of the city's population, Black New Yorkers accounted for over half of all stops. Latino residents faced similar disproportionate targeting. A federal judge would eventually rule the practice unconstitutional as implemented, finding it violated the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches and the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection.

De Blasio's opposition to stop and frisk was unequivocal. And then his campaign did something that crystallized the issue in a way policy papers never could.

The Ad That Won the Race

In August 2013, the de Blasio campaign released a television advertisement featuring his then-fifteen-year-old son, Dante. The ad was simple: a teenager with a striking afro talking about his father's plans to "really break from the Bloomberg years."

Dante de Blasio is the child of Bill de Blasio and Chirlane McCray, an African American woman who is a writer and activist. Dante's presence in the ad spoke volumes without ever explicitly mentioning race. Here was a Black teenager talking about stop and frisk in a city where Black teenagers were routinely stopped and searched. Here was a mayoral candidate whose own son could be affected by the policies he was campaigning against.

Time magazine would later call it "The Ad That Won the New York Mayor's Race," noting that after it aired, "de Blasio built a steady lead that he never relinquished."

By mid-August, de Blasio had emerged as the front-runner. A Quinnipiac poll released a week before the primary showed him at 43 percent. When the votes were counted on September 11, he had cleared 40 percent—just barely enough to avoid a runoff. His nearest competitor, Bill Thompson, conceded five days later.

Exit polls confirmed what the campaign had intuited: opposition to stop and frisk was the issue that most helped de Blasio.

Governing the Ungovernable City

Bill de Blasio took office on January 1, 2014, becoming the first Democratic mayor of New York City in twenty years. The challenges were immediate and immense.

His signature first-term achievement was universal pre-kindergarten. Within his first year, de Blasio launched a free pre-K program for every four-year-old in the city—a program that would eventually serve more than 70,000 children annually. It remains one of the largest expansions of early childhood education in American history.

He implemented new de-escalation training for police officers and reduced prosecutions for cannabis possession—steps that, while modest, signaled a different approach to criminal justice. He ended the post-September 11th surveillance program that had monitored Muslim residents, a program that civil liberties advocates had long condemned as both unconstitutional and counterproductive.

His administration launched ThriveNYC, a mental health initiative spearheaded by his wife, Chirlane McCray. The program aimed to improve access to mental health services, though it would face criticism for its high cost and difficulty measuring outcomes.

De Blasio won reelection in 2017 by a wide margin, but his second term proved more difficult. Relations with the New York Police Department remained tense—at one point, officers literally turned their backs on the mayor at a fallen officer's funeral. Critics accused him of mismanaging homelessness, and investigations into his fundraising practices, while never resulting in charges, damaged his reputation.

The National Stage and Its Limits

In 2019, de Blasio announced a run for the Democratic presidential nomination. It went poorly.

His poll numbers never rose above low single digits. He failed to qualify for the third round of primary debates. On September 20, 2019, less than four months after announcing his candidacy, he suspended his campaign.

The failure was instructive. De Blasio's progressive message—which had broken through so effectively in New York in 2013—was now just one voice in a crowded progressive chorus that included Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. His accomplishments as mayor, while real, hadn't generated national enthusiasm. And his liabilities—a perceived arrogance, awkward campaign moments, the lingering scandals—proved more damaging on the national stage than in New York.

Term-limited out of office, de Blasio left City Hall on January 1, 2022, succeeded by Eric Adams. In 2022, he briefly ran for Congress in a newly redrawn district before withdrawing from the race.

The Progressive Mayor in Retrospect

How should we understand Bill de Blasio's political career?

He was, in many ways, exactly what he presented himself as: a progressive who believed that government should actively work to reduce inequality, that police power needed checking, that universal programs like pre-K could improve lives. His record includes real achievements—universal pre-K most prominently, but also the reduction in stop-and-frisk practices and the expansion of affordable housing.

He was also a politician who frustrated allies and antagonized potential partners. His feuds with Governor Andrew Cuomo were legendary, damaging his ability to accomplish things that required state cooperation. His management style drew criticism from both supporters and opponents.

Perhaps most importantly, he demonstrated both the possibilities and the limits of progressive urban governance. A mayor can expand pre-K and reduce aggressive policing. A mayor cannot single-handedly address the economic forces that drive inequality, cannot overcome a housing market shaped by global capital, cannot transform a police culture shaped by decades of different priorities.

The young man who traveled to Nicaragua to support the Sandinistas, who described himself as a democratic socialist in 1990, ended up running a city that is, whatever its other characteristics, the capital of global capitalism. That tension—between transformative aspirations and incremental achievements—defined his tenure.

Bill de Blasio, born Warren Wilhelm Junior, changed his name to honor his mother's family and to escape his father's shadow. Whether he succeeded in creating a New York that matched his vision is a question his city is still answering.