De Blasio Very Skillfully Ties Lhota To The Tea Party

Last night I posed that I thought de Blasio should attack Joe Lhota for his temperament rather than his past allegiance to Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley Jr., saying that many New Yorkers may not care about Conservative icons from the past and what Lhota's allegiance to them says about his candidacy.

But de Blasio managed to hit Lhota over this yesterday very skillfully:

In a blistering broadside at an unrelated Brooklyn press conference today, Mr. de Blasio told Politicker that Mr. Lhota has to embrace everyone from Mitt Romney to Barry Goldwater, whom Mr. Lhota professed an affinity for in college.


“First of all, it’s 2013 and the Republican Party has evolved, thanks to Mr. Lhota’s friend Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and others over the last two decades, it’s evolved into a very right-wing party nationally and in many ways in this state,” Mr. de Blasio said when asked about his efforts to link Mr. Lhota, a self-professed social liberal, to the Tea Party. ”So you can’t be a Republican bystander. You can’t say, you know, ‘Oh I’m an innocent liberal Republican and all those other things happened. Too bad.’”

“If you’re a member of the Republican Party you’re buying into the whole idea and it has not been pretty to watch what the Republican Party has done to this country and what it is doing this very day through the Tea Party members of Congress who have literally shut down our government against the will of the people,” Mr. de Blasio continued.

“So I think, you know, you break it, you own it. If he chooses to be an ideological Republican and he does not deny he’s an ideological Republican, then he has to account for the whole package,” he said.
Mr. de Blasio then moved to compare Mr. Lhota to failed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who had positioned himself as a moderate.

“I would remind you,” Mr. de Blasio said, “that a lot of people tried to suggest that Mitt Romney was a different kind of Republican. And yet, when the time came, he made very clear how much he wanted the conservative Republican and bent over backwards to achieve that support. I think Mr. Lhota did a similar thing when he met with the Tea Party in Staten Island a few months ago.”

“I’m very proud to be a Democrat and I think there’s a stark contrast right there,” the public advocate confidently concluded.

That was well done - he hits Lhota for the Ghosts of Conservatives Past past, then links him to the Tea Partiers and wingnuts of today.

I was wrong when I said de Blasio shouldn't spend time trying to link Lhota to Goldwater, Buckley et. al.

De Blasio managed to skewer Lhota in about three minutes doing just that.

That didn't take much time at all.

I guess that's why de Blasio is Democratic nominee - he knows what the hell he is doing.