Andrew Cuomo thinks pols are either talkers or doers -- guess which he thinks he is

The New Yorker caption for this picture is: "At close range, the Governor is a formidable presence. His speech comes in aggressive, self-confident bursts, especially when he's sizing up the state of political play, and he is relentless." I thought this was kind of funny, because just looking at the picture, I thought of some tacky horror-movie villain.

by Ken

It's about as old an argument as there is in the field of government: compromising to get stuff done vs. holding out for getting the right thing(s) done. Of course it's kind of a fake dichotomy. I think most people understand that at points in the political process, it's necessary to make compromises, and you can't just talk about "getting stuff done" without facing up to hard questions about what stuff needs to be done, and how much bad stuff you can allow to get done in order to get better stuff done.

Nevertheless, I think NYS Gov. Andrew Cuomo has made no secret of the fact that he's a "getting stuff done" kind of guy. And as much as he revered his late father, onetime three-term Gov. Mario Cuomo, and as intimately involved as he was in his father's political career, which after all blossomed pretty late for a pol, as an offshoot of his law practice and community involvement, Andrew's idea of being governor is by no means the same as his father's.

You see --


ANDREW'S MODEL FOR POLITICAL "DOING"
ISN'T HIS FATHER -- IT'S BILL CLINTON

Over the last several months, it turns out, The New Yorker's esteemed legal correspondent, Jeffrey Toobin, has been working on a profile of Andrew, which appears now in the February 16 issue, as "The Albany Chronicles: How Andrew Cuomo gets his way."

It is, as you would expect of a New Yorker profile, a very long piece. And I don't propose to get very far or deep into it. But at the start, we get some pretty sharp defining of political terms. And I thought it would be interesting just to isolate some of this.

Starting with Andrew's view of himself as a pol vs. his father.

Mario Cuomo defined his three terms as governor with oratory; Andrew Cuomo has sought to build his reputation in a different way. He made clear that his primary inspiration when it came to dealing with legislators was Bill Clinton, not his father. During Clinton’s second term, Cuomo served in his Cabinet, as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. “I was watching, and they were impeaching the guy, and he was still there every day, asking them how they were doing, trying to make deals,” Cuomo recalled, his voice bearing the hard consonants of Queens, where he grew up. “My job is to get to yes,” he said. “If I don’t make a deal, I get nothing done. If I get nothing done, I am a failure. If the objective is to make a nice speech, it means nothing.”

IN CASE YOU HAVEN'T GOTTEN THE POINT,
ANDREW BELIEVES IN DOING, NOT TALKING

Interestingly, Andrew thinks of Barack Obama as a talker, not a doer!

For better and for worse, Cuomo views his work as a series of transactions. He disdains rhetoric; he prizes results. He has had several accomplishments in his first four years. Against heavy odds, he pushed through a marriage-equality bill in the Legislature; he banned fracking; he tightened the state’s gun-control laws; he closed thirteen prisons; he started construction on the first major bridge in the state in fifty years, a replacement for the Tappan Zee, across the Hudson; and he passed four balanced budgets in a row, all on time. Deeds, not words—that might as well be the motto of Cuomo’s administration. In nearly every speech, and in many conversations, Cuomo dismisses the importance of political talk. As if adopting a typical voter’s view of President Obama, Cuomo told me, “Beautiful rhetoric, beautiful vision—I’m sold on the vision—and what happens? There was no product. There was no actualization of the vision. Now I’m more disillusioned than I was when we started. You brought me up with that beautiful language, and you got me excited and I thought it was possible and then it wasn’t.”

LET'S LOOK, FOR EXAMPLE, AT THE CORRUPTION
INQUIRY ANDREW STARTED, THEN SHUT DOWN

Jeffrey T provides us with background:

In the summer of 2013, Cuomo created what became known as the Moreland Commission, a bipartisan group of leading citizens, who were to spend up to eighteen months investigating public corruption in the state. The commission’s inquiries focussed in particular on whether the outside business activities of state legislators should be subject to tighter regulation. By early 2014, [Assembly Speaker Sheldon[ Silver and his colleagues had come to loathe the commission, and went to court to thwart its inquiries. Around the same time, Cuomo was seeking to pass his annual budget, and he hoped to do that on schedule. So, just nine months after Cuomo created the commission, he abruptly shut it down. Silver passed Cuomo’s budget; Cuomo rid Silver of the meddlesome commission.

ANDREW TELLS JEFFREY THAT HE
THINKS HE GOT THE THING JUST RIGHT

On the day after [Assembly Speaker Sheldon] Silver’s arrest, I met with Cuomo in his New York City office, on Third Avenue. I asked him about the widespread contention that the charges against Silver showed that Cuomo should have let the Moreland investigation run its course.

“They’re exactly wrong,” Cuomo said. “What happened on the Moreland Commission is they subpoenaed the outside info of the Senate and the Assembly, in a fairly aggressive way. The Senate and the Assembly join together, the Republicans and the Democrats, in a motion to quash the subpoenas. And they are successful in the lower court. And we’re stuck for, like, four months.”

Closing down Moreland, in Cuomo’s view, broke the logjam. After the shutdown, the Legislature passed modest ethics reform, which increased penalties for bribery and established a pilot program for public financing in the next state comptroller’s race. Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney in Manhattan, demanded the Moreland files and used them to make the case against Silver and, perhaps, others. “We get the legislation I wanted in the first place,” Cuomo told me. “Moreland takes the same cases and the same subpoenas and hands them to local D.A.s and to Preet.” Cuomo disclaims any responsibility for Silver’s possible misdeeds. “If Anthony Weiner shows his private parts, do you blame Obama? These are criminal acts of individual legislators. What would you have me do?”

AND YET ON THE OTHER HAND --

Each step in Cuomo’s analysis makes a kind of tactical sense. But he shut down the investigation even though the Legislature failed to make significant political reforms. Bharara and the other prosecutors obtained the commission’s files only because Bharara publicly expressed his outrage at Cuomo’s action. * Cuomo’s explanation ignored the symbolism: How could there ever be a legitimate reason, in a state long beset with corruption in its Legislature, for the governor to short-circuit his own marquee attempt to clean it up?

I DON'T MEAN TO COME TO ANY GRAND CONCLUSION

I just thought these very old issues of governance are framed pretty interestingly here.

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"We must get the American public to look past the glitter, beyond the showmanship to the reality, the hard substance of things" (Mario Cuomo, 1984)

We saw and heard a snatch of Mario Cuomo's 1984 Democratic National Convention keynote speech earlier this evening. This clip is still only 7:48's worth, but that's 7:48 of what remains one of the great American orations. You can find a complete transcript here.

"The outpouring of praise for Cuomo speaks to a purposeful and centered life that didn't need the Oval Office or jurist's robes to be revered."
-- Jonathan Capehart, in a washingtonpost.com PostPartisan post, "In praise of Mario Cuomo"

by Ken

"On behalf of the great Empire State and the whole family of New York," then-NYS Gov. Mario Cuomo began that July night in San Francisco,

let me thank you for the great privilege of being able to address this convention. Please allow me to skip the stories and the poetry and the temptation to deal in nice but vague rhetoric. Let me instead use this valuable opportunity to deal immediately with the questions that should determine this election and that we all know are vital to the American people.

"I remember exactly where I was when I understood I was a Democrat," the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart writes in a piece called "In praise of Mario Cuomo." "I was sitting in my then-step-grandmother’s television room in Wildwood, N.J., watching New York Gov. Mario Cuomo deliver the keynote address at the 1984 Democratic convention in San Francisco."

He listened for nearly 40 minutes, Jonathan says, as "the unabashed liberal delivered a stirring rebuke of the policies of Republican President Ronald Reagan while spelling out the ideals of his party." And he quotes a couple of memorable chunks:

In fact, Mr. President, this is a nation-- Mr. President you ought to know that this nation is more a “Tale of Two Cities” than it is just a “Shining City on a Hill.”

Maybe, maybe, Mr. President, if you visited some more places; maybe if you went to Appalachia where some people still live in sheds; maybe if you went to Lackawanna where thousands of unemployed steel workers wonder why we subsidized foreign steel. Maybe-- Maybe, Mr. President, if you stopped in at a shelter in Chicago and spoke to the homeless there; maybe, Mr. President, if you asked a woman who had been denied the help she needed to feed her children because you said you needed the money for a tax break for a millionaire or for a missile we couldn’t afford to use.

We Democrats believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact, and we have more than once. Ever since Franklin Roosevelt lifted himself from his wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees-- wagon train after wagon train-- to new frontiers of education, housing, peace; the whole family aboard, constantly reaching out to extend and enlarge that family; lifting them up into the wagon on the way; blacks and Hispanics, and people of every ethnic group, and native Americans-- all those struggling to build their families and claim some small share of America. For nearly 50 years we carried them all to new levels of comfort, and security, and dignity, even affluence. And remember this, some of us in this room today are here only because this nation had that kind of confidence. And it would be wrong to forget that.

And Jonathan takes it one perhaps dangerous step farther. "Cuomo's 'we believe' oration on who Democrats were then," he says, "is still who Democrats are today." Alas, Jonathan, that's some Democrats -- only some. This is the depressing reality we live with here at DWT every day. The rest, well, they're either living obliviously and fearfully in Mr. Reagan's Shining City or at least pretending they do. Maybe a Democrat could get away with saying some of the things Mario Cuomo' said in that 1984 keynote at a DNC today, but it wouldn't likely be a keynote. It would be slipped in somewhere, secure in the knowledge that no one would be paying attention.

Jonathan concludes his remembrance:

Cuomo would not rise higher than governor. Not only did he forgo a presidential run, he also withdrew from consideration in 1993 for a Supreme Court seat many thought for sure President Bill Clinton would offer and he would accept. But the outpouring of praise for Cuomo speaks to a purposeful and centered life that didn’t need the Oval Office or jurist’s robes to be revered.

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Mario Cuomo (1932-2015)

by Ken

Some of these passings are really hard, and this is a really hard one. Because Mario Cuomo was a politician and a genuinely decent human being. He respected people and understood the role government had to play in improving their lives. There aren't a lot of pols, especially not those who rise to a station like three-term governor of New York State, who by example can make a person feel better about the human race.

Of course Mario (it just seems like he'd want us to think of him as Mario) was also incredibly smart and hard-working. And for all of that, his record as governor was hardly a whirlwind of accomplishment. Which for me goes to show the limits of what one decent, smart, hard-working person can do surrounded by, well, other kinds of people.


Yes, Mario did old-style retail politics. Here he is campaigning for a fourth term as governor in 1994, that famous Republican landslide year. He lost to a giant slab of useless protoplasm called George Pataki, 45.4 percent to 48.8.

Here's some of what the NYT's Adam Nagourney has to say in his obit (whose headline refers to its subject as "liberal beacon"):

Mario Cuomo led New York during a turbulent time, 1983 through 1994. His ambitions for an activist government were thwarted by recession. He found himself struggling with the State Legislature not over what the government should do but over what programs should be cut, and what taxes should be raised, simply to balance the budget.

Still, no matter the problems he found in Albany, Mr. Cuomo burst beyond the state’s boundaries to personify the liberal wing of his national party and become a source of unending fascination and, ultimately, frustration for Democrats, whose leaders twice pressed him to run for president, in 1988 and 1992, to no avail.

In an era when liberal thought was increasingly discredited, Mr. Cuomo, a man of large intellect and often unrestrained personality, celebrated it, challenging Ronald Reagan at the height of his presidency with an expansive and affirmative view of government and a message of compassion, tinged by the Roman Catholicism that was central to Mr. Cuomo’s identity.

A man of contradictions who enjoyed Socratic arguments with himself, Mr. Cuomo seemed to disdain politics even as he embraced it. “What an ugly business this is,” he liked to say. Yet he reveled in it, proving himself an uncommonly skilled politician and sometimes a ruthless one.

He was a tenacious debater and a spellbinding speaker at a time when political oratory seemed to be shrinking to the size of the television set. Delivering the keynote address at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, he eclipsed his party’s nominee, former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, seizing on Reagan’s description of America as “a shining city on a hill” to portray the president as unaware of impoverished Americans. “Mr. President,” he said, “you ought to know that this nation is more a ‘tale of two cities’ than it is just a ‘shining city on a hill.’ ”

At this remove, looking back on Mario's career, what astonishes me most is how many people back in the day wanted him to run for president, meaning that they thought he could actually win. Just now I'm having a terribly hard time wrapping my head around the idea of a serious national candidate who looks and sounds like him. I guess Bernie Sanders comes to mind, and much as I wish it were otherwise, I don't have a much easier time envisioning Bernie as a serious national candidate.

Certainly Mario's son Andrew could never be it. Andrew was intimately involved in all of his father's campaigns, and as I understand it functioned as a sort of his father's chief political operative. The son certainly learned a whole lot about the nitty-gritty of politics, but if he ever had any of his father's spirit, which I really wonder about, he learned to subordinate it to that nitty-gritty -- that politics isn't about the needs of the powerless but about the desires of the powerful.

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