Eric Adams, off on the right foot

If — and it’s an awfully big if — Eric Adams governs like he’s been talking, New York City will be in good hands going forward, and not a minute too soon. The rubber’s yet to hit the road and I’ve written plenty already about my doubts and concerns about Adams and what Fordham University political science professor and my FAQ.NYC co-host Christina Greer calls his “nervous cop energy.”

But watching Adams since he won the primary and then coasted through the general election, I’m feeling truly optimistic about an incoming mayor for the first time in my adult lifetime — despite the serious challenges ahead for the city.

Take his meeting earlier this month with self-appointed Black Lives Matter leaders, who streamed their conversation on Instagram and then told the press that “If (Adams) thinks that they’re going to go back to the old ways of policing, then we are going to take to the streets again. There will be riots, there will be fire, and there will be bloodshed.”

Adams, who’s vowed to create a new plainclothes anti-gun unit to replace the one Bill de Blasio foolishly shut down, cooly rejected those “silly” threats and, well, stood by his guns before calling on other Democrats to do the same: “National, state and city electeds should stand up and say, ‘We will never allow anyone to make those comments,’ that there will be blood in our streets, because you know where that blood ends up? In the streets of our community.”

Making his late-night debut on the Stephen Colbert show Tuesday, Adams pulled out rolling papers and what looked like a dime bag as the native son gave a sense of how sharp and charming he can be and what the city has missed during 20 years of sour mayors from Massachusetts who almost always seemed unhappy with performing the job when a big part of the job is the performance.

At one point, he told Colbert: “I’m going to tell my police officers I have your back so do your job, but darn it, if you don’t understand the nobility of public protection, you’re getting out of my department.”

Yes, that’s much easier said than done, but that is well said and spot on.

Adams has also been on point in standing up for the gifted and talented programs that de Blasio has assailed — and in blasting the Department of Education, rightly calling it “one of the greatest embarrassments” that a city “spending over $30 billion a year” has “65% of Black and Brown children never reach(ing) proficiency.”

Again, that’s much easier to call out than it is to fix, but calling it out is a necessary starting point — and fighting to improve the whole system is even more essential at a time when public school enrollment is hemorrhaging and the current administration has seemed more concerned with obscuring that fact than changing it.

Adams also co-wrote a letter to de Blasio calling on him to allow the return of propane heaters for outdoor dining this winter, a lifeline that restaurants desperately need and the administration foolishly cut off.

So if Adams wants to channel his inner Andrew Yang and dabble in cryptocurrency boosterism and stunt with late-night hosts, that’s fine by me so long as he has his eye on public safety as the prerequisite to prosperity, as he likes to put it.

There are deadly serious challenges ahead, starting with the possibility of a long, slow recovery for our economy — and one that only gets tougher if Republicans retake Congress next year, as it appears likely they will.

There’s also a very real chance that the Supreme Court is about to knock out New York’s gun-permitting laws, which would present huge new policing and public safety challenges.

And a lot will come down to the tough calls Adams hasn’t made yet, at least publicly, about building the new jails needed to close Rikers, and what to press Albany for next year when he briefly has leverage there with the governor and everyone else running, and whatever happens next with the virus and everything else that can and will come up.

In the face of all that, it’s a good feeling to finally have a mayor who has public poise and some verve, and who seems to understand what the job means in a way that his two predecessors, who were not native New Yorkers, never did. A lot will come down to whom he appoints, and how he lets them work, and to whether or not he learns from his predecessor’s pratfalls — not least how to handle the cockiness that comes with proving the haters wrong by winning an election.

But, for now, he’s talking the talk beautifully, and giving the city some badly needed hope and optimism after some long, dour years.

N. Wilson Enoch

Republicans, who simply have to duck for cover. It is obvious that Democrats of a progressive stripe are different from their moderate colleagues and from Republicans, libertarians and independents, all of whom reject the progressive belief that man can achieve perfection if only the progressive playbook is imposed. As George H.W. Bush said of eating broccoli: Not gonna happen. Paul Bloustein