Andrew Cuomo Could Beat Trump If He Can Win Over the Left First

[brooklynite]

Politico

When he at last became the second Cuomo to serve as governor of New York, by the standards of the state, he was barely a Democrat. It was in the depths of the Tea Party’s counter-revolt against Obama’s presidency; the state’s economic outlook was disastrous and Cuomo positioned himself firmly as a man of the center. He capped property taxes and let a tax on millionaires expire. He gathered a bunch of friends in the real estate industry to run an outside spending campaign on behalf of his agenda, rallied for charter schools, slashed pensions and the state workforce. If Spitzer had come to Albany as a crusader, cleaning out the ethically compromised and ridding the state of the Republicans who could slow his agenda, Cuomo signaled from the start that he was willing to work with the powers that be, so long as their powers didn’t get in his way. In 2011, when a group of moderate Democrats announced they were leaving their party’s conference in the state Senate to form an alliance with the Republicans, Cuomo signaled his tacit approval, in part because it meant that his veto pen wasn’t the only thing keeping restive downstate liberals from having the run of the state. He undercut liberal stalwarts like Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, trying to incorporate parts of their offices’ responsibilities into his own, and leaking gossipy and embarrassing details about them to the press.

In the era of Occupy Wall Street, such machinations made Cuomo Democratic Public Enemy Number One. On MSNBC, Chris Hayes called Cuomo’s power play against a Democratic Senate, “a remarkable cynical display.” “Andrew Cuomo, Fake Democrat,” blared Salon. Over at Daily Kos, Markos Moulitsas delivered the death blow, comparing Cuomo to—gasp!—Joe Lieberman. In an era in which moderates were supposed to find no safe harbor save for a couple of hideouts in the Mountain West, Cuomo remained defiantly in the middle, practically delighting in how much he could troll his lefty detractors.

But in 2014, something changed: A little-known, poorly funded Constitutional law professor named Zephyr Teachout ran against Cuomo in the Democratic primary and captured a third of the vote, proof that not only was a restive progressivism already brewing in the pre-Trump, pre-Bernie era, but that the party’s liberals didn’t care much for their governor. Cuomo responded by swinging abruptly to the left. Since then, even with the state Senate’s hybrid Democratic-Republican coalition still in place, Cuomo has passed a $15 minimum wage, implemented a robust paid family leave program, raised the age of criminal responsibility to 18, rushed through a plan to make tuition free at the state’s public colleges and universities, and banned fracking.

Progressives see a cynical exercise in box-checking. Cuomo’s advisors see someone moving at the pace of the people he was elected to represent, and point out that liberals are naïve if they think the conservative forces, even in this blue state, from financial titans to the vast stretches of the Rust Belt upstate, can be steamrolled. Cuomo, they say, was a progressive presiding over a broke and broken state for his first term, and still managed to legalize same-sex marriage, pass some of the strictest gun laws in the nation and embark on an infrastructure rebuilding project unseen since the days of Robert Moses. The most jaded Albany observers see a competitor constantly trying own the game. “We know we are all just pieces on a chessboard to Andrew. He views purely from a standpoint of what he can get from us,” said one longtime capitol political operative, who like most of them has known Cuomo for decades. “The standing joke among a lot of us is that we hope we aren’t just pawns at this point—that we’re at least rooks or knights in his game.”

[Tatiana]

1. I will say, I'm glad to see Cuomo's pivot to the left.

For a while, he was becoming an embarrassment to his father's legacy. But he has been impressive of late and has strongly defended progressive values, such as a livable wage and free college tuition for those financially-challenged students wanting to obtain their degree. The liberals in the party pushed Cuomo there. Yes, he may be box-checking as long as the people push him to do so.

Zephyr Teachout deserves some accolades for pushing Cuomo, as well.

[Renew Deal]

2. I think people will generally find Gillibrand much more appealing.