Picture: Kent Nishimura/Getty Pictures
By shouldering his means into the mayoral main, Andrew Cuomo is betting that what New York voters need at Metropolis Corridor is deep authorities expertise, competent execution, and a mayor prepared and keen to do battle with the Trump White Home. His entry exams the political axiom that elections are concerning the future reasonably than the previous.
“I feel it modifications every thing and nothing on the similar time,” Laura Tamman, a professor of political science at Tempo College, informed me. “All the people who’re at present operating have assumed he’ll get within the race; a few of them have taken him on straight already. However on the similar time, I feel he’s going to carry a spotlight and an power to the race that we haven’t seen but, as a result of New Yorkers know who he’s, and so they’re going to answer his candidacy.”
Cuomo’s practically 12 years as governor — to not point out 4 years as HUD Secretary and 4 as state lawyer normal — enable him to precisely declare to have much more expertise than any of his rivals. However that additionally saddles Cuomo with greater than a decade’s value of price range selections and half-forgotten tasks, insurance policies, political fights, and private habits that his opponents are already attacking.
“He spent years treating New York Metropolis like his private punching bag,” stated candidate for mayor Scott Stringer, the ex-comptroller, on social media. “Slashing MTA funding and wrecking the subway whereas funneling cash to upstate ski resorts, and making an attempt to chop billions in funding for public faculty youngsters and Medicaid for metropolis residents.”
Upstate ski resorts? Outdoors of chambers of commerce within the Catskills and Lake George, solely a handful of presidency insiders do not forget that 5 years in the past, Cuomo championed tax breaks for upstate lodges that put in renewable energy-powered lifts, snowmaking gear, and different equipment. However a much more severe chapter of Cuomo’s historical past is the barrage of sexual-misconduct and hostile-workplace accusations that compelled him from workplace in 2021, and have been backed up by findings from State lawyer Normal Letitia James and the Justice Division underneath President Biden.
Inside hours of Cuomo’s video saying his candidacy, the Working Households Occasion launched a video, “Girls Deserve Higher,” that options well-known ladies activists reciting misconduct allegations and calling Cuomo “a bully and an abuser.” These voices are usually not prone to go away. Ditto for individuals who criticize Cuomo’s dealing with of insurance policies and data concerning nursing residence deaths on the top of COVID and the $5 million advance he bought for a e book concerning the disaster that will have violated moral guidelines by together with work accomplished by public staff.
On the flip facet of the coin, Cuomo’s sizable lead over his rivals in current polls relies partially on a report of accomplishments, together with these memorable each day briefings in the course of the COVID disaster, the profitable combat to legalize same-sex marriage in 2014, and the completion of long-stalled public works tasks, together with the Moynihan Prepare Corridor at Penn Station, the enlargement of the Second Avenue Subway, the rebuilding of an expanded Kosciusko Bridge (the town’s first new bridge in 55 years) and the creation of a brand new terminal at LaGuardia Airport.
Cuomo is betting {that a} important mass of voters will bear in mind and reward his good deeds. “Once I put on my marriage ceremony ring and put it on each morning, the thought goes via my head that I wouldn’t be capable to put on it have been it not for Andrew Cuomo,” political marketing consultant Jon Reinish informed me. “Not simply folks in New York, however for tens of millions of individuals throughout the nation, that reminiscence goes to return again, and it’s a extremely large deal.”
Cuomo’s candidacy places a highlight on the central query of each municipal election yr in New York: what are the primary issues within the metropolis that the majority urgently want fixing? For the final half century, every new mayor has been employed to repair a particular disaster that was precipitated, ignored or bequeathed by his predecessor.
Right here’s how the shorthand, admittedly oversimplified, model of historical past goes: Ed Koch beat a crowded subject in 1977 by promising price range austerity within the wake of the town’s near-bankruptcy; David Dinkins unseated Koch in 1989 by proposing a relaxed, much less divisive method to group relations within the wake of high-profile instances just like the Central Park 5 debacle; and Rudy Giuliani beat Dinkins in 1993 by vowing to crack down on crime after New York hit an all-time excessive of greater than 2,000 homicides in a single yr.
Mike Bloomberg, elected mayor lower than 90 days after the 9/11 terrorist assault, gained when the town wanted a businesslike method to reviving the native financial system and rebuilding Decrease Manhattan; left-leaning activist Invoice de Blasio’s 2013 marketing campaign was based mostly on the argument that Bloomberg had constructed a affluent metropolis however uncared for the wants of working households. And ex-cop Eric Adams was elected when the town’s emergence from COVID was accompanied by a spike in violent crime that he vowed to reverse.
Cuomo’s principle is that the primary municipal disaster this election yr is that Adams — affected by huge high-level turnover and resignations — has turned out to be an ineffective chief who is simply too compromised as a prison defendant to show the independence and forcefulness required to cope with President Trump.
The ex-governor has a case to make, however it gained’t be simple.
“Each chief govt could have some accomplishments together with Cuomo,” Sal Albanese, a former metropolis councilman who made his personal run for mayor in 1997, informed me on social media, describing Cuomo as “a political mechanic with a ton of political baggage.” I’m undecided Cuomo himself would dispute that description. A picture involves thoughts of the ex-governor carrying a weathered, battered valise full of an extended checklist of allies, enemies, and difficult choices, slowly ascending the staircase into Metropolis Corridor.
