Blackout Absence Continues To Bedevil De Blasio

NEW YORK — Mayor Bill de Blasio defended his ability to govern from the campaign trail Monday as a torrent of criticism over his absence during Saturday's blackout stretched into its third day.

The Democratic mayor's delay in returning to the city from his presidential campaign trip to Iowa after the power failure plunged swaths of Manhattan into darkness has given more ammunition to critics who say he's an absentee mayor and allowed Gov. Andrew Cuomo — his political nemesis — to cast himself as a hands-on leader.

Editorials in the New York Post and the New York Daily News hammered de Blasio for putting his political ambitions above the city's on-the-ground needs. The Post even called for the mayor's removal from office and put its piece on its Monday front page with the headline "DE BLASIO MUST GO!"

Since returning to the city Sunday morning, the mayor has insisted that he was in control of the situation from afar. He noted Monday that no one was injured in the five hours that power was out in the Upper West Side and Midtown despite his being in the Midwest.

"When you are a chief executive it doesn’t matter where you are. You are in charge," De Blasio reportedly said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

"Obviously the fire department, the police department, emergency services prepare for things like this," he added, according to Mediaite. "The important thing was to get the right people in the right place."

But the city's tabloid papers noted that de Blasio sits at the bottom of the presidential polls both nationally and in key primary states. Yet he continues to travel "every damn chance he gets, as though the demanding daily grind of overseeing police and schools and public housing and parks and safe streets and all the rest, for which he is paid $258,750 by taxpayers, is well beneath his stratospheric talents," the Daily News's editorial board wrote.

Cuomo was in Manhattan during Saturday's blackout and while he did not criticize de Blasio directly, he did not hesitate to explain the benefits of a chief executive's personal presence during a crisis.

"I get different answers from people than my subordinates might get, and I ask probative follow-up questions that my subordinates might not," the governor said in a Monday interview on the Albany-based WAMC radio station.

Cuomo said he would not exercise his power to remove de Blasio from his job as the Post asked him to, saying it was up to the city's residents to express their opinions about the mayor's performance.

But the Queens-bred governor pledged to be there whenever New Yorkers needed him — drawing an apparent contrast to de Blasio.

"I do govern New York City, right? I'm governor of the state," he said in a Monday interview with Fox 5. "... I have New York City in my veins, and anything New York City needs, I'm there."