Does it get any worse for a presidential candidate when his own hometown populist newspaper calls for his booting, in the main for being a shiftless, lazy bum?

That's effectively New York Mayor Bill de Blasio's story, based on his non-service to New York City during a big blackout, according to today's editorial in the New York Post. It begins this way:

The lights went out on Broadway Saturday night, and Bill de Blasio was a thousand miles away in Iowa. It was the moment that perfectly captured his distracted, ego-driven failure of a mayoralty.

Bill de Blasio does not care about New York City. He does not care about its people. He does not care about how it’s run. He does not care about you or your taxes, creating jobs or improving lives. All Bill de Blasio cares about is Bill de Blasio.

And so, for the good of the city, Gov. Andrew Cuomo needs to remove the mayor from office.

It's bad because the argument against the avowed socialist is made not because of de Blasio's favored socialism's failures (which are abundant enough in New York) but for the New Yorkiest of reasons - that the guy is lazy and doesn't do his job.

The city over the weekend endured one of its famous blackouts - the kind of which legends are made. When these things happen - and they happen about once a decade or two, a global spotlight is cast on the city, wondering if the city will descend into mayhem - or some kind of love-in. Both have happened in the past, and with nobody entirely sure why, we know the reason why the world watches.

Was de Blasio there? Nope, at a time when the city needed him, he was someplace else, campaigning for president in Iowa, where apparently nobody wants him anyway. He had his priorities and New York was not one of them. In Iowa sports something like a 1% voting-for rate. One can only imagine what it might be over in New York, because instead of tending to business in New York, he was out vanity-campaigning, to no one's interest but his own.

The Post cites his lousy performance as mayor of New York overall, questioning if he really wants to be there at all. There's his failure to improve New York's schools, his alienation of New York City cops - the Post actually could have focused a bit more on that because it was such a doozy with officers driven to turn their backs to him. But it's just that de Blasio has so many incompetences, and so many that have happened ever since, that the editorial probably didn't have enough room. Not only is de Blasio incompetent, he's corrupt and mired in a lot of money and crony scandals, and the Post delivered its haymakers.

In short, de Blasio's a miserable failure, brazenly seeking to fail upward as president, fooling only himself his prospects for that one.

It's a most satisfying editorial. De Blasio comes off as a stale can of socialism that's long-ago reached his sell-by date, an ego-driven maniac who can bring himself to show up for work, a clown in the Democrats' car who's got to go. Read the whole thing here.

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter from public domain sources.