AMERICA, MEET BILL DE BLASIO

What the rest of the country should know about New York’s mayor as he runs for president

What a big week for Bill de Blasio! It’s been a Tale of Two Days for the mayor who would be president and who won City Hall with a vow to end our Tale of Two Cities. Start Monday, when:

• The Daily News broke the news that de Blasio had been in the back of his city SUV when a detective drove on the wrong side of the street, sirens blaring, and ran into a truck back in 2015, and that the NYPD had then covered up the crash. • Jeremy Reichberg — whose partner in crime pleaded guilty to and testified about bribing the mayor as the pair dressed up as elves to deliver pricey “gifts” to the wives and kids of top NYPD brass who received free private flights to the Super Bowl with a prostitute on board, and who in turn gave the bribers their own sirens and drivers to get around New York — was sentenced to four years after pleading for mercy in Manhattan federal court as “an adolescent, wanting special attention, feeling that I was entitled to get special attention for my friends who were police officers.” • A former NYPD inspector sued the city over his forced dismissal after he was acquitted of taking the elves’ bribes by a jury that appeared annoyed to see the lowest man on the police totem pole the only one charged while, as his suit puts it, his bosses “who had actually engaged in corrupt activity were allowed to skate,” along with their boss, de Blasio. • In Manhattan Supreme Court, two brothers who’ve received tens of millions in city contracts awarded on this mayor’s watch pleaded guilty to illegally putting money into campaign contributions to candidates including de Blasio. • The low-stakes departmental “trial” of Daniel Pantaleo finally began inside of One Police Plaza, in which the NYPD officer might finally lose his city paycheck, and maybe also some vacation days, nearly five years after his chokehold killed Eric Garner and sparked months of citywide protests and furious debate. De Blasio’s NYPD outrageously managed to delay the proceeding until now — even as Controller Scott Stringer went around City Hall to pay Garner’s family $5.9 million — by falsely claiming its hands were tied until the feds, still yet to act, decide whether or not to charge Pantaleo. We also learned at the trial that Internal Affairs wanted to charge Pantaleo years ago, and that the city’s medical examiner and a top police academy official both believed that he’d used a chokehold. (Incredibly, even if the judge rules Pantaleo should lose his job, the police commissioner can reduce the punishment or toss the decision entirely, as he’s done for other officers, including those who used chokeholds despite the departmental ban on them. And we’ll never officially know if that happens, thanks to the absurd new “interpretation” of a decades-old civil service law the self-declared most transparent administration in history conveniently discovered months after Garner’s death, captured on video, shook the city. • De Blasio himself took a SUV to a de facto pre-announcement presidential campaign rally that was supposed to be held outside of Trump Tower, hyping a bill he hasn’t bothered actually signing yet targeting polluting buildings. Forced into his would-be nemesis’ lobby by rain, the mayor had to shout over a sound system turned up to drown him out along with a carnival of hecklers as he told skeptical reporters this was all city business even as he admitted he didn’t actually know who the worst polluters in the city are (it’s not the Trumps), and ducked a barrage of questions about his car accident that the NYPD had covered up (“the NYPD has done an investigation,” he said, meaninglessly) and that he clearly remembered was no big deal but otherwise just didn’t remember.

*** So all that — along with the release from a halfway house and federal custody Tuesday morning of Anthony Weiner, whose rise and fall in 2013 was a key to de Blasio’s unlikely eleva

tion to City Hall — was the roll-up to Thursday morning, when the mayor took to YouTube to finally officially announce his presidential campaign, making him the 23rd candidate in the Democratic field, one who after five years trying to establish himself on the national stage and as many months of flirting with a presidential run starts off under 1% in the polls and with little local support, with nowhere to go but up, he hopes.

Having shown up the naysayers before — “I have spent a lot of time in dead last in many a poll in many a race” — de Blasio is aiming to get on the crowded debate stage for some of that national TV time. Hey, you never know.

Plus, he’s got a few million reasons to replace his shady local fundraising operation that prosecutors finally forced him to shut down, and nearly as many reasons to want to try and escape the pesky local reporters with long memories who keep stepping on his applause lines and lofty rhetoric with their, you know, reporting.

De Blasio — who saw the blue wave rising in cities long before that was obvious and doesn’t want to be washed away by it now — is betting that no one outside of New York cares about his car crashes or their coverups, or the cover-up of lead-poisoned children in public housing on his watch, or the cover-up of the fundraising hustle the feds flat-out said was exchanging private money for official favors but didn’t charge him because that money went into his political operation rather than his own pockets.

The only way he’s going to be right that no one outside New York cares about this is is if no one outside of New York cares about his run at all.

In his three-minute announcement video, de Blasio introduces himself to America as the big-city mayor running for president because “it’s time we put working people first” as he’s seen riding in the back of a SUV (presumably driving on the right side of the road and definitely not his government vehicle, City Hall says, though later the video shows him in Gracie Mansion).

This SUV doesn’t hit anything as de Blasio gazes out the window at his city, but it still seems like an odd image for a message about fighting for working people. Maybe that’s because the ace crew behind his 2013 win wants nothing to do with his 2020 run, and filmmaker John Del Cecato, who produced the iconic 2013 Dante ad, signed on with Pete Buttigieg Wednesday, hours before de Blasio’s video appeared.

“I’m a New Yorker. I’ve known that Trump’s been a bully for a long time,” de Blasio says as the music turns from uplifting to ominous. “This is not news to me or anyone else here, and I know how to take him on.”

But de Blasio has a lot in common with Trump, tactically speaking. The mayor believes, where almost no one else does, that he’s a worthy presidential contender because of his New York values: That he can get away with things and hit escape velocity because he’s always gotten away so far.

De Blasio announced his run less than a month after the Department of Investigation finally released its heavily redacted account of his money hustle, which Commissioner Mark Peters had completed weeks before de Blasio fired him last year. Sort of like with his car crash, the mayor insisted he didn’t remember his calls hitting up donors with business before the city.

An hour after the video dropped, de Blasio made a rote appearance with wife Chirlane McCray on “Good Morning America,” where he repeated verbatim a few lines from the video, including his new go-to one about how “There’s plenty of money in this country. It’s just in the wrong hands.”

He’d like at least some of that campaign money to end up in his hands, of course. And he’s expecting the irony of his slogan to evaporate as it crosses the Hudson.

“People come up to Bill every day and thank him,” McCray says of her husband in his announcement video, but outside of GMA’s Times Square studio, it was again nothing but protesters, including both off-duty cops blowing whistles and black seniors from East Brooklyn Congregations confronting the mayor about his broken pledge — which he’s since denied making, despite having sealed it with a public handshake on the steps of city hall — for $500 million in senior housing.

We may be used to this here, but America is about to get at least a peek at our tale of two de Blasios.