Mayor de Blasio, Hillary Clinton's one-time Senate race campaign manager, said Sunday he wants to know her vision for America before deciding whether to endorse her for president.
De Blasio told "Meet The Press" he wants to hear clear, bold ideas from Clinton, who launched her long-anticipated campaign for president Sunday shortly after the show aired.
De Blasio, a fellow Democrat who successfully managed Clinton's campaign when she first ran for Senate in 2000, said she has a progressive history of working on behalf of families, including when she took on health insurance companies in the 1990s.
The mayor said he wants to hear Clinton say she's ready to tax the wealthy and raise wages and benefits for the bulk of the population that has fallen back economically over the last quarter century.
"Progressives are demanding from all of our candidates an actual vision on economic change," de Blasio said. "The income and equality crisis in this country is out of control."
He said it was not necessary for Clinton to immediately announce her vision for the country's future, as long as she does so as soon as possible.
The mayor said enough has changed since Clinton last ran for president in 2008 that she can introduce a new approach for the country.
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De Blasio cited the perceptions that families have lost ground economically and people can no longer assume that the next generation will be better off than the last as examples of changes that Clinton can capitalize on for a solid campaign foundation.
"There's a lot of new material," he said. "There're a lot of new issues to address, and an opportunity to present a new vision."
Gov. Cuomo, a Democrat, has endorsed Clinton. Republican Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino, who failed in his bid for New York City mayor last year, said he wished her the best in the primary and that it would be "great to see a Westchester resident as a standard bearer in 2018."
