Lead-ing from behind

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emocratic Party politicos interviewed by Politico couldn’t quite pinpoint what so badly bothered them about Mayor de Blasio as he hurtled like a comet through Iowa earlier this month preaching a leftward lurch for the nation.

We’ll help them out: New York City’s mayor has proven himself pitifully incapable of nailing down key basics to deliver on his progressive preaching back home — and it is taking a cruel toll on the poor and powerless he proposes to help.

Worse, he refuses to acknowledge the grievous effects of his New York City Housing Authority’s ineptitude on kids who are counting on him.

In the city’s public housing projects, the very epitome of government aid to the needy, children by the thousands live at risk of lead paint exposure, and not only because NYCHA illegally stopped inspecting their apartments. Even when crews found lead paint upon apartments’ vacancy, it sent in untrained and unqualified work teams that left hazards behind.

Now some children in apartments once painted with the toxin are paying a price, with learning disabilities and developmental delays associated with elevated levels of lead in their blood.

NYCHA has the hubris to challenge Department of Health tests that identified lead paint in their apartments. But there’s no covering up the consequence. Government fails. Kids suffer. And de Blasio’s reassurance to NYCHA tenants last month rings worse than hollow: “Thank God there has not been harm done to any child because of the mistakes that have been made.” No — to many a child. Granted, these problems didn’t start with de Blasio. But Mayor Progressive was supposed to be different. It’s been nearly four years since he appointed NYCHA Chair Shola Olatoye and declared, “The buck stops at City Hall from now on when it comes to NYCHA.”

And this: “We see our mutual responsibility as protecting our tenants — protecting them against crime, protecting them against disrepair, ensuring that their homes are livable.”

Words, words and more words — betrayed by bureaucrats beneath him who falsely certified to the federal government that lead inspections took place when they hadn’t.

Even once Olatoye and then de Blasio learned more than two years later of the deception, parents living in apartments lined with lead paint were none the wiser, their kids just as vulnerable to poisoning.

For good reason NYCHA may soon have a federal monitor overseeing its handling of lead paint, on top of one already in charge of getting rid of toxic mold.

They need to address a health crisis that stewed under mayor after mayor within a union-bound bureaucracy dragged down further by congressional underfunding — but only one of those mayors now nominates himself as national savior of the downtrodden.

Who pathologically projects his failures as signatures of nothing less than history-making genius. “So every time someone tries something and it doesn’t work, it invalidates anything else they might do going forward?” he snorted to Politico.

“Tell Thomas Edison that, and Henry Ford, tell Mahatma Gandhi. How many people fell on their faces along the way trying things, experimenting with things, had setbacks?”

He was speaking of his return to Iowa after a non-starter attempt to influence the 2016 Democratic presidential primary. Where he made show of popping a stick of gum in his mouth to show he could walk, and run the city, at the same time.

An ego so focused on making the history books he couldn’t see the damaging legacy that his NYCHA neglect ensures will be documented there.