De Blasio Eyed National Travel Just 6 Days Into 1st Term

NEW YORK — Mayor Bill de Blasio was less than a week into his first term before he started plotting treks around the country to spread his progressive message, newly released City Hall emails show.

The Democratic mayor got a request on Jan. 6, 2014 to speak at the Ohio Democratic Party's spring dinner that March. De Blasio expressed some reservations about jetting off to a political battleground state within just a few months of taking office — but his interest was nonetheless piqued.

"This intrigues me, although I'm generally going to be VERY modest, local and travel-adverse this year," the mayor wrote that day to five close advisers, including first lady Chirlane McCray. "But Ohio is the center of the political universe and I love it there."

The Ohio pitch seemed to get de Blasio's wheels turning about other national travel. He floated a trio of other trips he wanted to take in the first half of that year to Chicago, Nebraska and the national U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting.

"I do want to project the progressive message nationally to reinforce my fellow progressives," the mayor wrote.

De Blasio's early ruminations were among thousands of pages of emails between the mayor, city staffers and outside consultants that City Hall released Thursday under the Freedom of Information Law.

NY1 and the New York Post successfully sued to get the records. The mayor's office claimed the correspondence could be kept confidential because the private consultants were "agents of the city," but the courts disagreed.

One of those consultants, John Del Cecato of the firm AKPD Message & Media, also wondered whether traveling to Ohio was wise. "very important state... but i worry a bit about the optics," he wrote.

But Laura Santucci, then de Blasio's chief of staff, seemed to encourage his travel. "Projecting the progressive agenda on national stage is important," she wrote. "We'll map out."

And travel he has. De Blasio has left the state more than half a dozen times this year alone, attending high-profile liberal events such as the Netroots Nation conference in New Orleans and the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco.

Just on Friday he paid a visit to the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, where defended his governmental and political junkets in an on-stage interview. The trips allow him to promote New York's progressive programs elsewhere, he said, citing his universal pre-kindergarten and affordable housing initiatives.

"These are the building blocks of what America’s going to look like in the coming years and I think it’s important to talk about it, and to help people understand what we can do in cities and states around the country," he said.

Some emails released Thursday show more of de Blasio's private disdain for the press. He called one March 2014 article critiquing his administration's relationship with reporters "dick-ish" and referred to a New York Times reporter as a "bad person" in January 2015.

Others show some lighter moments, like the preparations for de Blasio's 2014 appearance on Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show." One document shows proposed answers to jokey questions such as "Can you please defend eating pizza with a fork and knife?" and "Do you hate the Upper East Side?"

Staff also thought de Blasio should be ready to explain the "secret" behind his son Dante's Afro. But the answer remains a mystery — the proposed response to that question was blacked out.

(Lead image: Mayor Bill de Blasio speaks at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco in September 2018. Photo by Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)