Apparently it was that bad.
Via NY Times:
Mayor Bill de Blasio took charge of New York City on Wednesdaywith a forceful Inaugural Address and pledged to begin the head-on attack on “the inequality crisis” as he had promised. He repeated the bullet points from his campaign, but insisted that progressive talking would now give way to progressive governing, without dilution or dithering. “We won’t wait,” Mr. de Blasio said again and again. “We’ll do it now.”
It was an encouraging moment, as the mayor vowed to make New York a better, fairer place for everyone.
Mr. de Blasio’s words carried an indictment: the city had become unjust and unlivable for too many of the poor and working class. But he tempered this complaint, as he should have, with a New Year’s Day call to civic unity and optimism. “We will succeed as One City,” he said.
Too bad the speakers on stage with him didn’t get the unity part, marring the event with backward-looking speeches both graceless and smug. Worst among them, but hardly alone, was the new public advocate, Letitia James, who used her moment for her own head-on attack: on the 12 years of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In doing so, she made a prop of a 12-year-old girl named Dasani, who had to hold the Bible and Ms. James’s hand as Ms. James called for a government “that cares more about a child going hungry than a new stadium or a new tax credit for a luxury development.”
Dasani was profiled in a recent series of articles in The Times illustrating how bad things get for homeless families in the shelter system. Ms. James turned her into Exhibit A of an Inauguration Day prosecution: the People v. Mayor Bloomberg. So did the pastor whose invocation likened New York to a “plantation,” and Harry Belafonte, who strangely laid the problem of America’s crowded prisons at the feet of the former mayor, an utterly bogus claim, while saying Mr. Bloomberg shared responsibility for the nation’s “deeply Dickensian justice system.”