Maya Wiley kicks off a potentially historic campaign for NYC mayor
Maya Wiley, former top lawyer to Mayor de Blasio turned national political commentator, officially kicked off her campaign for mayor on Thursday.
The civil rights attorney sought to both distance herself from her unpopular ex-boss and strike a personal note while making her case to become the city’s first woman mayor.
“There will be some who say, ‘She doesn’t sound like past mayors. She doesn’t look like past mayors. She doesn’t think like past mayors.’ And I say, yes. And that’s the point,” Wiley, who is Black, said in a speech outside the Brooklyn Museum.
She went on to make a series of zingers at de Blasio, for whom she served as chief legal adviser from 2014 to 2016.
“If I am mayor, you will never have to wonder who’s in charge,” said Wiley, 56. "You will never have to question ... whether the mayor even wants the job.
“You will never have to wonder whether I’m in Iowa,” she added, mocking de Blasio’s ill-fated 2019 presidential run that took him to the Buckeye State.
Notwithstanding the shots at Hizzoner, Wiley has called on de Blasio veterans including ex-senior adviser Jon Paul Lupo to work on her campaign. Ex-de Blasio aide Alison Hirsh was also seen at Wiley’s campaign kickoff.
Speaking to one of the defining issues of the time, she promised to fight “structural racism” and criticized de Blasio for keeping the NYPD budget mostly intact while cutting funds for affordable housing and services like garbage collection.
She also took credit for getting Daniel Pantaleo kicked off the NYPD, noting she recommended charges against him when she chaired the Civilian Complaint Review Board, a post she held from 2016 to 2017.
The 2014 death of Staten Island man Eric Garner after Pantaleo placed him in a chokehold helped spark the Black Lives Matter movement, which roared back to life around the country following the death of another unarmed Black man, George Floyd, in the spring.
Activists fumed over how long it took to fire Pantaleo, and Wiley said Thursday that would have happened much sooner had she been mayor at the time.
Along with calls for police reform, the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout will present huge challenges for Wiley and the other mayoral candidates, which include city Comptroller Scott Stringer and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams.
Wiley shared a childhood experience of grief to show she commiserates with families of the nearly 24,000 New Yorkers who have died of the virus.
Describing her father’s drowning death when she was just 9 years old, she said New Yorkers must "grasp hands like my brother and I did, fight our way back together even with the tears streaming down our faces.
“We fought our way back after Sept. 11, after Hurricane Sandy, and we will fight our way back again!” Wiley added.
Assemblyman Michael Blake (D-Bronx), state Sen, Mike Gianaris (D-Queens), Councilman Steve Levin (D-Brooklyn) and Councilwoman Helen Rosenthal (D-Manhattan) endorsed Wiley, who’s recently stepped down as a commentator for MSNBC and NBC.
A crowd of about a few dozen watched the speech by the Brooklyn Museum’s outdoor performance space.
The audience included Shams DaBaron, who met Wiley when she visited the Lucerne Hotel on the Upper West Side as city officials went back on forth on relocating homeless New Yorkers there.
“She cared for the vulnerable and the voiceless,” he said, who is himself homeless. “It touched me and moved me so I’m here to support her.”
