The year: 1980. At stake: the presidency of NYU’s Weinstein Hall dorm.
“It was a hotly, hotly contested race,” Public Advocate Bill de Blasio recalls of his first campaign. His opponent was thwarting his visibility at every turn, ripping down Mr. de Blasio’s posters in the middle of the night.
A disgusted Mr. de Blasio and his team met for an emergency strategy session. “We decided the only thing to do was to have people awake at all hours to replace the posters immediately,” he explained to The Observer last week.
“Our opponents eventually just stopped because they knew they could not defeat our awesome outreach machinery,” he said with a grin. “It was an early lesson in persistence.”
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