By IVAN MORROBEL
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s former lead attorney, Maya Wiley, officially launched her mayoral candidacy before a crowd in Brooklyn on Thursday.
Wiley, a former legal analyst for MSNBC, is a first-time candidate for office seeking to perform the delicate dance of succeeding her former leader while contrasting her style and substance of progressivism with his.
“Electing the same kinds of people,” she said at her mask-wearing outdoor public appearance, “bringing the same old broken promises over and over again, and expecting things will be different, that’s the risk we can’t afford right now.”
Wiley first toyed with the idea of a run for mayor of New York City when she stepped down recently as an analyst for MSNBC and filed documents to run in the 2021 election.
Although Brooklyn is seeing Covid-19 spread at an alarming rate in certain neighborhoods, Wiley held the press conference in front of the Brooklyn Museum, along with a live stream of the event on Facebook. She also made stops in other boroughs.
“If I’m mayor, I will be talking to faith leaders right now about what is happening in the community and how we solve it together to ensure that public health is number one,” she said.
The Democratic candidate also alluded to the sky-high rent that New Yorkers had to pay while being unemployed and distressed because of the coronavirus, all the while de Blasio failed to execute a rent freeze.
“This is a city in which we must create more affordable housing,” she said, echoing some of the same themes that de Blasio sounded seven years ago. “Middle class needs it. Low-income communities need it, and we need it in every single community of this city,”
Wiley’s record is somewhat tarred by her having acted as de Blasio’s lawyer as he was embroiled in a fund-raising brouhaha two years ago and now presenting herself as a reformer.
The 56-year-old candidate would be the first woman to become mayor of the city if victorious.
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