Bill de Blasio, who has always preferred politics to policy, is back in his element — and the 2017 mayoral campaign is under way.
How else to interpret his otherwise bewildering decision to rename the city Municipal Building after failed mayor David Dinkins and to strong-arm the city’s cultural institutions into climbing aboard the de Blasio diversity stagecoach?
It’s a pander — the lowest form of politics — but that’s the only arrow de Blasio has in his quiver right now, so nobody should be surprised that he’s using it.
After all, poll after poll shows the mayor underwater with virtually every identifiable voting bloc in the city — except for African-Americans, the group that essentially made him mayor in the first place.
But, say insiders, cracks are beginning to develop in that base — with the mayor perceived as too supportive of Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, and not supportive enough of minority-preference hiring and procurement programs.
Case in point: Longtime de Blasio ally (and teachers union cat’s-paw) Bertha Lewis, of the Black Institute (née ACORN), ripped the mayor on Tuesday for cooking the preference-program books.
“The numbers don’t add up,” said Lewis. ‘“I gotta call bullsh - - when I see it.”
That’s bad news for the mayor.
And it gets worse.
Dinkins was the city’s first African-American mayor, and Rep. Hakeem Jefferies of Brooklyn is making no secret of his desire to become the second — preferably in 2017.
That’s not an unrealistic prospect, and seems to be giving de Blasio the freakies, which in turn helps explain the Municipal Building renaming — an otherwise empty, if harmless, gesture.
After all, if it was OK to rename the Queensboro Bridge after Ed Koch, who didn’t know much about bridges, why not name a government building after David Dinkins — who knew even less about government?
The museum shakedown is more bare-knuckled. As The Post’s Isabel Vincent and Melissa Klein reported Sunday, the administration is telling New York’s cultural institutions to sign on to its hugely intrusive diversity hiring and procurement programs — no doubt, on pain of losing city subsidies.
This is not without risks for de Blasio: There’s a reason rich and well-connected New Yorkers are recruited for the boards of prestigious cultural institutions — self-preservation.
The boards are famously protective of their respective venues — and if the mayor pushes the point too hard, he could end up badly bruised. (The New York Times will gladly accept a dismantlement of the NYPD, but the mayor trifles with MoMA or the Met at his peril.)
But the mayor has good reason to take those risks. He desperately needs African-Americans to see him looking out for their interests — so they’ll be less likely to abandon him in two years’ time, even for an accomplished African-American candidate.
And 2017 could present a propitious moment: Any credible primary challenger could count on strong support from Gov. Andrew Cuomo. And should Hillary Clinton become president, de Blasio can expect major payback for the trouble he caused her campaign this summer.
And Jeffries would be credible under any circumstances.
A 45-year-old second-term congressman from Crown Heights, Jeffries holds a New York University law degree and is a former white-shoe litigator who served a six-year government-and-policy apprenticeship in the state Assembly.
He’s strong on school choice — fully aware that each of the 50,000, mostly black and Hispanic parents with a child on a charter-school waiting list is a potential vote against the stubbornly anti-charter de Blasio.
(The mayor stands to get a loud reminder of his vulnerability on this score today — when thousands of pro-reform, pro-charter protesters march across the Brooklyn Bridge to a City Hall Park rally.)
Plus Jeffries is substantially to de Blasio’s left on NYPD-related matters — maybe a problematic position in a general election but certainly a plus with the mayor’s African-American base.
None of this can be lost on de Blasio, who knows that flagging black support for Dinkins elected Rudy Giuliani in 1993.
So, put on the pander now — avoid a lot of grief two years out.
Asked Monday about the propriety of renaming the Muni Building, de Blasio put on his grumpy face and barked: “We’re honoring someone who did a lot for the city . . . That’s all I have to say on it.”
Not likely. Otherwise, what’s the point?