City faces pounding as Andy takes off gloves

The candidacy of actress Cynthia Nixon for governor explodes the long-simmering feud between Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo into a bitter political firestorm. Hopefully, our city won’t get burned along the way. If New York is lucky, we’ll get healthy competition and a contest of ideas. If we’re unlucky, expect years of dreary infighting and petty power plays that do lasting harm to programs, policies, careers and communities.

From Cuomo’s point of view, Nixon’s challenge — especially her hiring of two top de Blasio campaign aides — represents an open, all-out attack by de Blasio. One person familiar with the governor’s thinking described him as feeling “liberated” that the gloves are off and he can now sic his team on de Blasio and his allies without holding back.

Much of the fight between the two men is personal. As the saying goes, they have history.

In the 1990s, when Cuomo was secretary of housing and urban development, de Blasio was his deputy in the federal department’s New York region. Something apparently didn’t click, because Cuomo rarely misses an opportunity, publicly or privately, to suggest that de Blasio is an incompetent manager.

For his part, de Blasio has slammed the governor as overly political and “transactional,” more interested in gamesmanship than governance.

Both of them are more than a little bit right, which makes the fight even nastier.

Beyond the personal clashes lies an insurrection against Cuomo and the state Democratic establishment by the left-activist base of the Democratic Party — the people, like de Blasio, who consider themselves part of a national movement for social justice.

Expect Nixon to rally the social-justice base around the notion that Cuomo — despite enacting same-sex marriage, universal prekindergarten, free college tuition, tough gun controls and a $15 minimum wage — is somehow not liberal enough.

She has an uphill climb. America elected a TV celebrity with zero government experience as President, and we’ve been reeling ever since. Nixon will need to hit the ground running with deep, detailed knowledge of how government works and why she should be in charge of it.

Cuomo does have his share of shortcomings, including an ethics crisis inside his administration, a record of underfunding the subway system and shortchanging the city on child welfare funds.

But the governor has checked off a significant number of liberal wish-list items over the years. And he can point to the record-high homelessness, crumbling public housing and persistent, unaddressed racial segregation under de Blasio and suggest that New York could use fewer fiery speeches and more competent management.

To the extent that the NixonCuomo battle becomes a proxy war between the governor and the mayor, New York City will suffer. In the best of times, the city sends considerably more tax dollars to Albany than it gets back, and it takes considerable cajoling to persuade even a cooperative governor to send us the billions needed to run our schools, subways and other vital agencies.

When relations turn hostile, the city loses. With rare exceptions, mayors of New York (or of any state, for that matter) do not win important fights against their governors.

Legally speaking, cities — which aren’t even mentioned in the Constitution — are considered wholly subordinate subdivisions of the states. Technically, the governor and Legislature could vote to merge, reorganize or even dissolve New York City.

While that extreme situation is unlikely, the state routinely flexes its superior legal position to dictate everything from the number of speed cameras on our streets to whether our mayor can control the city’s schools.

So the mayor’s war-by-proxy against Cuomo carries significant risk that city requests will get rejected in Albany this year. Beyond that, the Nixon candidacy will be a chance for Democrats to decide whether — and why — New York will be better off under a governor who is significantly further to the left than Andrew Cuomo.