Once Alienated, and Now a Force in Her Husband’s Bid for Mayor

Chirlane McCray on Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn, with her husband, Bill de Blasio, before casting her vote on Primary Day.

She was the seventh-grader too frightened to stand in front of the room because her white classmates would mock her, contorting their mouths to make their lips look big. She was the smoldering teenager who took to writing poems every day to wrestle with her isolation and anger. She was the eldest daughter of one of the only black families in Longmeadow, Mass., who arrived home to see their new house scrawled with racist graffiti.

“I had never had a deep sense of belonging anywhere,” recalled Chirlane McCray, whose husband, Bill de Blasio, is now the front-runner to become the next mayor of New York. “I always felt I was an outsider.”

Now, this onetime student of powerlessness, a woman whose early identity was profoundly shaped by feelings of alienation — because of her race, her gender and her evolving sexuality — is emerging as the ultimate insider: a mastermind behind the biggest political upset of the year and a sought-after voice as the city re-evaluates what it most wants from its first family.

New York has begun to digest the jarring contrasts that Mr. de Blasio, an avowedly activist, tax-the-rich liberal, would provide should he capture City Hall after 12 years of rule by a data-driven billionaire.

Less understood is the role his wife, a 58-year-old poet, has played in molding his political vision and propelling his ascent toward the mayor’s office.

As much as anyone on his staff, Ms. McCray has built and guided her husband’s campaign, thoroughly erasing the line between spouse and strategist.

Political meetings are planned around her schedule. She sits in on job interviews for top advisers. She edits all key speeches (aides are known to e-mail drafts straight to her).

Her encounters with city life directly influenced Mr. de Blasio’s approach in the campaign. Ms. McCray was horrified when St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village was razed to make way for luxury condominiums: 30 years ago, despite the fact that she had no health insurance, doctors there kept her alive after an acute asthma attack. So at her urging, the closing of city hospitals became a central theme of her husband’s candidacy.

Together, Mr. de Blasio and Ms. McCray are as much a package deal as Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, a reality etched into the campaign hierarchy affixed to a wall of the de Blasio political headquarters. It lists “Bill/Chirlane” above a sprawling team of aides.

In an interview, Ms. McCray embraced the model of the Clintons’ working partnership, saying that the former secretary of state is the first lady she most admires. She acknowledges feeling so passionately in 2002 about which way her husband would vote on the next City Council speaker she threatened to divorce him if he backed the wrong candidate.

He sided with his wife.

(The candidate Ms. McCray opposed later went to prison. “He was a slimeball,” she said.)

Asked if she had ever considered playing a less assertive role in the mayoral race, Ms. McCray physically balked, leaning in from across the table at a Brooklyn diner.

“No, no,” she said. “It’s not who I am. It’s not who Bill and I have been as a couple, either.”

She added, “We’ve always been partners in the campaigns and any major thing we have taken on.”

They are, in their relationship, their politics and, above all, their lifestyle, a striking departure from the city’s reigning pair, Michael R. Bloomberg and Diana L. Taylor, his longtime girlfriend.

Ms. Taylor, a banker, rarely campaigned with the mayor and kept a studied distance from City Hall, adopting the role of his glamorous sidekick on the city’s charity circuit, often seen but seldom heard.

“We are very different people from him and Diana,” Ms. McCray said.

She does little to disguise her deep distaste for the Bloomberg era, when, by her lights, the ranks of the poor surged to unconscionable levels (“that’s not sustainable” she said), gentrification brought a commoditized sameness to once quirky neighborhoods (“we are losing our communities,” she worries) and New York City venerated its swelling class of ultrarich.

“I mean, our leader was a billionaire; I think that contributed to it,” she said. 

Source: NYTIMES