New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is fresh off a winning reelection bid and clearly has things on his mind which range far beyond the problems plaguing the Big Apple. One of the latest trends among Democrats is to dump on Bill Clinton and express their disappointment in the fact that he didn’t resign from the presidency when he was hit with his own sex scandal back in the 90s. New York politicians in particular are jumping on that bandwagon and de Blasio didn’t want to be left behind. So now, twenty years after it might have actually done any good, he’s tossing the Clintons under the bus. (Politico)

Mayor Bill de Blasio followed Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s lead on Monday, agreeing that former President Bill Clinton should have resigned the presidency during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

“I don’t think you can rework history. I think if it happened today — if any president did that today — they would have to resign,” de Blasio told reporters during an unrelated press conference in Queens.

Gillibrand, a potential presidential candidate in 2020 and once a close ally of the Clintons, shocked national Democrats last week during an appearance on a New York Times podcast, when she conceded that Clinton resigning would have been “the appropriate response.”

One appropriate response to such a story might be to ask, who cares? He’s the Mayor of New York. It’s not as if he’s setting national policy or anything, right? That may be true in November of 2017, but Bill has his eyes on grander things by all accounts. Do you suppose that taking such a progressive (though pointless by now) stance has anything to do with raising his profile nationally?

For a clue about that we need look no further than the Mayor’s travel schedule. Isn’t it odd that someone tending to the affairs of an east coast city is managing to make time to go to Iowa? (Des Moines Register)

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio will headline a political fundraiser in Iowa next month, a visit sure to stoke 2020 speculation for one of the country’s most prominent liberal officeholders.

De Blasio, who was elected to a second term as mayor earlier this year, will be the featured guest for Progress Iowa’s “holiday party” fundraiser Dec. 19 at the Temple for the Performing Arts in Des Moines.

Bill de Blasio actually promised not to run for president during a candidate’s forum over the summer, pledging to finish out his term as mayor if given another chance. But that was then and this is now. Who could possibly blame him for backtracking on a campaign promise if he really feels that the nation is crying out for his leadership?

New York is once again becoming a hotbed of activity for the Democrats. There are four elected offices in the Empire State which have any significant reach on the national level. Those are the Governor, the Mayor of New York City and our two senators. At this point, one of the senators (Schumer) is the Senate Minority Leader and seems content to stay there. The other three are all currently viewed as being in the mix for either a POTUS bid or a VP slot.

Kirsten Gillibrand has repeatedly expressed a lack of interest in the top job, but Newsweek was raising the possibility again as recently as this weekend. (There’s been plenty of chatter about her being on a ticket with Kamala Harris for an all women-power bid.) Governor Andrew Cuomo has never made any secret of his desire to occupy the Oval Office, partly to avenge the perceived slight of his father never becoming President when he was in power. And now we have Bill de Blasio.

Any of these three would be something of a gift to Donald Trump, particularly when the opposition research teams got hold of all the corruption investigations which were swirling around both the Governor and the Mayor. (Investigations which mysteriously seemed to evaporate after the President fired Preet Bharara.) Gillibrand would probably have trouble in the Democratic primary race after her opponents dug into her background a bit further. She used to be a very God and guns kind of representative when she served in the House, coming from a decidedly more conservative, upstate district.

But there’s one thing all of them have in common now. They’ve recognized that it’s safe to turn their backs on the Clintons after years of living in either awe or fear of them. That party is over now, and both Bill and Hillary apparnetly need to get used to the view from the underside of the bus.