If former Bronx Borough President Freddy Ferrer is elected mayor of New York City this fall, it will happen without the enthusiastic support of the city’s black political establishment.
This became clear Monday, when Rep. Charles Rangel allowed reporters to tease out of him an endorsement of Republican Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed Far West Side football stadium.
It was a kick in the teeth to Ferrer, the putative front-runner in the derby for the Democratic mayoral nomination and a fellow who has made stadium opposition a campaign centerpiece.
And it also sent an unsubtle message that has little to do with West Side development: To black Democrats, this year’s election is basically about numbers.
As in, “four” vs. “eight” – four being the number of years Bloomberg can legally remain in office, and eight being the number of years the city’s African-American Comptroller William Thompson likely will have to wait to run for mayor if another Democrat beats Bloomberg this November.
Then there are the number of construction contracts that the New York Jets have reserved for black-owned companies if the stadium project is approved and, derivatively, the number of African-American construction workers who stand to be hired to help build it.
(That last number will be respectably large; Charlie Rangel is a past master of patronage politics, and both Mayor Mike and the Jets have a huge interest in keeping him happy.)
There is yet another number of significance to this discussion: “one” – as in the number of African-American candidates in the mayoral contest, and the number of former racial flame-throwers-turned-aspiring-kingmakers with no obvious interest in anything other than a Bloomberg win this fall.
The former would be Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, a long-shot for the Democratic nomination and the only black in the contest after Brooklyn’s Charles Barron withdrew.
And the latter would be the irrepressible Rev. Al Sharpton, recently returned from his Jesse Jackson-lite run for the White House and determined to be a player – if not the player – in New York’s ethnic politics.
Sharpton appears well-positioned to take title to the power-brokerage run for so long by Rangel – now approaching his 75th birthday, and said increasingly to be talking of retirement.
Both men doubtless would go all out for Fields, should she catch some traction.
But this seems unlikely; Fields is largely unknown outside of Manhattan. (Besides, she’s a vocal stadium opponent; Rangel’s diss of pro-project Democrats applies to her, too, and suggests how slight he believes her chances really are.)
Meanwhile, the Bloomberg administration has significantly improved City Hall’s ties to the black community (don’t believe a word of Ferrer’s black church/Sunday parking-meter nonsense, by the way), and Comptroller Thompson seems quite happy to wait four years for his shot at the mayoralty.
He’d have to be crazy to run against a billionaire incumbent with a point to prove – and Billy Thompson is anything but crazy.
Meanwhile, here’s one more number to ponder.
How many black politicians in New York City are willing to turn over the engines of government to Freddy Ferrer’s Hispanic-heavy Bronx machine for at least eight years – and quite possibly longer?
Approximately zero.
Bottom line: If Ferrer thinks he’ll be carried into office by a coalition of disaffected ethnic groups, he better think again.
It doesn’t add up.
E-mail: mcmanus@nypost.com