WASHINGTON — Mayor Bill de Blasio on Wednesday found himself having to respond to The Post’s coverage of how he has handled issues ranging from his perpetual lateness to his relationship with Al Sharpton.
Interviewer Mike Allen of Politico brought up several Post Page Ones during a wide-ranging discussion with the mayor, who earlier this week blasted the press for reporting on the problems of City Hall aide Rachel Noerdlinger and her family.
“The substantive mistakes that she made were so minor in the scheme of things — parking tickets, etc. — and she was doing good work,” de Blasio said during the forum in the nation’s capital, arguing that the coverage was out of proportion to events.
Noerdlinger — First Lady Chirlane McCray’s chief of staff — is taking an indefinite leave of absence, announced soon after her 17-year-old son was arrested for trespassing in Harlem.
On a related note, Allen asked the mayor how he dealt with claims that he’s too close to Sharpton, who previously employed Noerdlinger.
The Post pointedly raised that same question in an Aug. 1 front page that asked, “Who’s the boss!” after Sharpton rebuked Police Commissioner Bill Bratton at a City Hall meeting on police-community relations.
After Sharpton’s attack, de Blasio said it was “good that we’re thinking together.”
The mayor during Wednesday’s interview described Sharpton as the nation’s top civil rights leader.
“I’m very comfortable with the notion of turning to him, asking him for advice, and thinking of him as someone who should be in the discussion. But that’s it. I’ll make my own choices as with anybody else I turn to for advice or ideas,” de Blasio told Allen.
“So I think it’s overblown.”
The mayor’s lateness — memorialized in a Post front page that depicted him asleep and wearing a nightcap — got him to musing about self-improvement.
“I’m going to continue to work on being a better person,” he said.
He also suggested that New Yorkers don’t care if he’s not on time — even though relatives of Flight 587 victims were furious when he missed a moment of silence at the annual memorial in the Rockaways last week.
“But I also think in the end, the question is not a specific event or a specific schedule, the question is: What are we producing?” de Blasio added.
At one point in the hourlong discussion, the mayor took hold of one of The Post’s Page Ones so he could dismiss it.
The cover story read: “Squeegee men back.”
“It should have said ‘Squeegee man is back, until he was arrested later that same day and then he wasn’t back anymore,’ ” de Blasio said.