Cuomo the Younger Makes the Move.
"I understand we are in a difficult time, even a frightening time..." Andrew Cuomo now begins his run for the White House with a smart move to emphasize his vigor and vigilance on the watchtower of the battlespace of the economy. All politics is local politics -- about money. Cuomo is the right candidate in the right state, the son of a governor, the father of Kennedys, a veteran of his father's campaign wins and losses, a veteran of the Clinton administration's housing conduct -- in all, as experienced and well-travelled a public servant and professional pol as can be found in the nation. Cuomo's Party loss to the forgettable and Wall Street-compromised political actor in 2006 is a credit to him -- because pols are stronger for having lost and come back. Even POTUS Obama became a better actor after he lost to Bobby Rush in 2000.
White House 2016.
The plan is to secure Albany; transform the antique cronyism of New York State; romance and also distance the editorial pages of the NYT, WSJ, and the all-useful talk radio (Cuomo prospers as anathema to the burlesque talkers); and focus on a sharper and more regulated Wall Street of bankers and their co-dependents (such as state pension funds and union pension funds) and storm the Democratic convention of 2016 (in New York City) to secure the nomination for the White House. Credible, informed, sophisticated, timely, historically anchored. Cuomo does not need an economic downturn from the present in order to gain attention -- as did his legendary predecessor at Albany, FDR. You will recall that FDR's road to the White House was rocky and meandering. After spending a decade as a reformer and iconoclast from agrarian Dutchess County, despite the fact that he dwelled and prospered as a Harvard in Manhattan, FDR gained the Democratic nomination in 1920 to be VP candidate to the sad-sack Ohio Governor James M. Cox, and then spent a lost few years as a polio victim in supreme denial. The win of the governorship left open by the presidential ambitions of Al "The Happy Warrior" Smith made FDR a fresh, troubled face ("The Happy Patrician.") The Crash and mishandling of the recovery by Smoot-Hawley and Hoover made FDR the once and future heir of the Democrats in 1932. The rest is legend. Cuomo has the makings of a similar run, with the caveat that the economic collapse is at the start of his climb, followed by years of torpor and retrenching. Only a Democrat can cure the Democratic curse of municipal unions and the delusion-heaped welfare state, and the long, unauditied run of deficit-financed empire-building. Cuomo the Unhappy Warrior? POTUS Obama needs a re-election, and the GOP needs to fail in its Inquisition in Congress, and the US has to avoid the fate of the Europeans (torpor, fatalism, arrogance, pomposity, bad plumbing).
Ah, the son of the sfacime, Il supremo and facia brutto. Bob Grant will be on fire I am sure.
>”Only a Democrat can cure the Democratic curse of municipal unions and the delusion-heaped welfare state and the long, unaudited run of deficit-financed empire building.”
True. But is Cuomo a Democrat? Or is he a socialist; or worse? Socialists and Democrats have become indistinguishable. There must be some Democrats left. But they are under siege, afraid to speak out lest they be denounced as Bushies, Republicans, Reaganites, Conservatives or, worse yet, Tea Partiers. It won’t be until the next time hell freezes over when voters will trust any Democrat again. The rank and file understands very well what has happened. In this way they’re already way ahead of the pols, Republicans and Democrats alike.
The financial mess the states find themselves in is just one of a multitude of arabesque representations of the battles in a war we are losing. It is not due to incompetence, greed, ignorance or dearth of political will. It’s by design.
To be fair, this war started way before Barack Hussein Obama was elected to the highest office in the land. Republicans have failed to grasp the salient fact that their traditional opponent (the Democrat Party) has long been dead and has now assumed the spirit and drive of America’s enemies. Republicans, in the interest of bipartisanship, have been compromising their principles by half all along. Now, with Obama safely ensconced in office all the wraps have come off. We have reached the point where it is obvious to all who will see that Barack has been assigned the job of driving the lifeless corpse of America to the cemetery for burial.
I do not believe that it can be stopped. If Andrew Cuomo is elected to any office higher than dog catcher with the assumption that he will fix things, we would have to also assume that he would act like a conservative Republican. Not likely.
"Only a Democrat can cure the Democratic curse of municipal unions and the delusion-heaped welfare state and the long, unauditied run of deficit-financed empire building."
Until Reagan broke the code ("Let them pay for their own damn programs!"), those buggers had been winning election after election in the era when they would lavish welfare programs on the electorate and reap their undying affection and votes while the Republicans suffered in the Mohave Desert of public disapproval when they suggested the programs had to be paid for and only way to do that was to raise taxes.
One take-away from the last 80 years: The Dems will never make the tough decisions or take the tough actions. The only enemy they recognize is Republicans; the only war they recognize is for majority control of Congress.
Lefty Democrats never got rid of Welfare, it took republicans and Bill Clinton to rein it in. SEIU is too powerful to fight.
Operative word being "Republicans." Without the Gingrich revolution, Clinton would never have done jack. He abandoned all his centrist talk with the appointment of his transition team. The game plan from Carville & Co. was to suck up to Congress and turn the entire agenda over to them because they had to secure the base. They were a plurality government; they knew they weren't going to get the Republicans who voted for Bush Sn.; they were unlikely to get the Perot defecit rebels. So they embraced the delusional agenda of the worst of the left-wing crackpots in Congress who by then were quite senior. Sound familiar? Look at those hoary holdovers from the Civil Rights Wars and the VietNam war and Watergate now flaking off as they see their majority evaporate in Nov '10. This has been a disasterous replay of Clinton's first two years in office, made far worse by two wars, a world-wide economic crisis, the blythe inexperience of the titular head, and the fact that so many congressional districts are landslide districts: there is no middle ground to steady the worst impulses of this crowd.
Andrew Cuomo has the right credentials: Queens boy, Fordham and Albany Law, sire to Kennedys. Influential Father and friend to the Clintons. Announced right before the Salute to Israel parade.
Divorced, unlike his father he avoids the abortion issue.
New York is broke, the massive Nelson Rockefeller Beauracracy and hundreds of state agencies (quasi independant State Corporations) issue debt in the name of the state and typically lose money. State medicaid/medicare is corrupt and spends more than California, Texas and Florida Combined!
New York State has a huge State University system, and only one of the four major research centers has an accredited business school. But they produce a lot of Sociology and Lesbian studies majors!
Upstate New York is poor rust belt territory, would be above Mississippi if a separate state, barely. Brutal lake-effect winters. Cheap Hydro and Natural gas will be a boon to energy starved parts of America, Close trading relationship with Canada.
Downstate is basically NYC and suburbs, Financial Services are still in the doldrums, consolidation in the industry has reduced jobs on wall street. Publishing and media can't make the Internet pay. Tourism is doing well, they even have their own lanes on the Sidewalks.
Splitting up "too big to fail" financial firms will be good for NYC, more jobs.
The only way Cuomo can aspire to 1600 is to dramatically cut waste, lower taxes and make NYS a business friendly state. Bureaucracy and entrenched forces will fight him. A Democrat Chris Christie comes to mind.
Cuomo is unpredictable. The hammering on Wall Street and the banks is all logical electioneering and good for him. Confronting the municipal unions will be his manliness test -- like Labour backing down the coal-miners in the 1960s. Never happened. NYC is lazy, fat, shot through with stealth slums, led by a municipal union gan that doesn't care who the mayor is, just takes everything and then more. Managing NY State is a fine demonstration of managing the Federal creature. Cuomo may be another in the long line of PArty hacks. I think he looks like a hack. But he knows what we know, and has to calculate how much grief he can take in order to qualify for the Party presidential nomination. He has Potomac Fever, you can see it in his face. He has dreams to top the sad-sack Kennedys. It is a legend worth challenging. The odds are long against him.
Nice summary. Hillary Clinton comes to mind. And all those promises she made after her vaunted upstate 'listening tour'. And, yeah, she'd never even consider leaving the state until after she’d fixed it. New York State still pays more out to the Feds than it gets back. And what is she working on now? Handing out money to Hamas and Hezbollah - those poor folks over there in the Middle East who really, really deserve it. Remember her lesbian kisses for Arafat's trophy wife, Suha, who’s currently living high on the hog somewhere in Europe?
Now they're already saying that what Cuomo really, really wants is to be president. He's got the pedigree, they say. He, like Hillary, is the smartest personage who ever lived. In fact, we’re told, we have the smartest people ever created running our government. So why is everything so screwed up?
Obviously, ‘smart’ isn’t the answer. Maybe it’s ‘sucker’ (as in ‘us’). Maybe it’s using New York like Kleenex to get at the really big bucks jackpot.
http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/
Peter, I'm not a Democrat, far from it. George Pataki came into Albany proclaiming reform, budgets and deficits ballooned during his administration. Andrew will have a herculean effort ahead of him.
"Cuomo may be another in the long line of PArty hacks. I think he looks like a hack."
CW on Harry Truman was the same, and proved to be wrong. I simply don't expect anything constructive of anyone who wears the Democrat label. The team has become too fond of creating enormous swathes of impotent citizens dependent on government to save them, completely devoid of initiative unless they are organizing to demand more free money from Washington.