Bill de Blasio delivers first 100 days speech
Mayor Bill de Blasio marked his first 100 days in office with an impassioned recounting of his populist values meant to re-energize his grassroots base and place his agenda within the framework of New York City’s activist history.
De Blasio, the first Democratic mayor of the nation’s largest city in a generation, delivered his address Thursday at Manhattan’s Cooper Union, the same site where Abraham Lincoln gave an 1860 speech that became a launching pad for his presidential campaign. De Blasio did not shrink from the stage, connecting Lincoln and liberal heroes ranging from Robert F. Kennedy to the activists who began the gay rights movement at the Stonewall Inn, to his mission to fight the city’s inequality gap.
“We weren’t sent to City Hall to change New York’s character, you sent us here to restore New York’s proud legacy as the progressive city,” de Blasio said. “We have to remember that the best and the brightest are born in every neighborhood, in every zip code. And what marks a just society is that it allows them all to reach their potential.”