Riding to Utopia…

Who would have anticipated the day when the most moderate elected official in city governm🌳ent would be Scott M. Stringer — the Upper West Side uber-liberal and protégé of left-wing gadfly Rep. Jerrold Nadler of Manhattan?

W𓆉ell,ꦉ yesterday that day arrived. Thank you, term limits.

For it was term limits that powered the sea change e🍃vident on the frosty steps of City Hall yesterday afternoon — perhaps the most wrenching shift in governing philosophies, attitudes and priorities New York has experienced in recent memory.

A new mayor. A new comptroller. A new public advocate. All of the left, and soon to be joined by a fundamentally new City Counci𒅌l 🌌— perhaps to be led by a hard-core activist from East Harlem who thinks Gov. Cuomo, a liberal icon in most quarters, is actually an Albany-based iteration of Republican Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

And not one of them has ever had a 🏅private-sector job of any consequence — or a public-sector one, for that matter. And of them all, only one — Stringer — has been around long enough to have absorbed a sense of the limits of government.

So, folks: Can you spell “bumpy ride?”

A caveat: Inauguration Day is always about rhe♏toric; about refining🐠 and reinforcing campaign promises, about what Mario Cuomo used to call the “poetry of government.”

The heavy lifting — the “prose,” as the former governor put it — is to be found in the dense grey documents of governance: the budgets, the briefing papers, the testimony that agen🐷cy heads and others will deliver at City Council hearings and♎ in Albany.

And, of course, in City Hall whispers, over power-lunch place settings and in eyes-only memos prepared by lobbyists and𒈔 other special-interest representatives as the new administration, and the new City Council, take shape.

But what of yesterday’s rhetoric? There was a lot of it — mundane for the most part, some of it a little🌞 silly and just about every word calculated to crea♒te an effect of one sort or another.

One speaker compared New York City to a “plantation,” about as ahistorical an allusion as can be imagined, but one that speaks to a sense of grievance so p🧔rofound, and so bizarre, that no mayor could ever 𝔉assuage it. But Mayor de Blasio is going to have to try, because it’s widely held.

Comptroller Stringer himself promised to ha⛄rness the power of his office — by implication, the investment influence of the city’s massive pension funds — to solving soci🙈al problems. This puts sets his agenda on a collision course with his fiduciary responsibilities; here comes big trouble, in other words.

And former President♕ Bill Clinton spoke gravely on income inequality — and amusingly. After all, has there ever been a president so intimate with the top of the 1🐠 Percent than the Man from Hope?

Which means that Clinton w🌊ill soon find de Blasio’s hand in his ꧂pocket — if the new mayor has his way, of course.

“Now I know there are those who think that what I said during the campaign was just rhetoric, just ♛‘political talk’ in the interest of getting elected,” said de Blasio Wednesday.

Don’t you believe it, he declared — reiterating his pledge🍨 to seek higher taxes on the 1 Percent, as well as stiffer levies on the cost of doing business in New York through paid-sick-leave mandates and such.

And all of this is will ha♏ppen in service to an over-arching goal, he declared:

“When I said we would take dead aim at the Tale of Two Cities, I meant it. . . We will give life to the hওope of so many in our city. We will succeed as One City. We know this won’t be easy; it will require all that we can muster. And it . . . will be accomplished by all of us — millions of♏ everyday New Yorkers in every corner of our city.”

Utopia on the Hudson? Really?

Well, yester🍌day was Bill de Blasio’s big day — hard-earned and his to enjoy.

Tomorrow, and next week, and next year, is another matter altogether. It should quickly become clear whether he truly believes Utopia is attainable — or whether he’s just spooling out pie-in-the-sky promises to clear the way for the big paydays the special inte🌳rests that elected him are expecting.

Either way, New York’s term-limits tsunami has surrounded him with enablers. If the gospel according to de Blasio works, it’ll be a happy day for the American left. If not — and such nostrums never really have done much to create economic equity — that’s worth ♛knowing, too.

Forward.