Andrew Cuomo can claim “New York state government is working again” and point to polls until the cows come home. But so long as Shelly Silver remains speaker of the Assembly, Cuomo’s governorship will be held hostage by Shelly’s corruption.
Politics will always have its rotten parts. What distinguishes our state is the way Albany’s leadership paints over the rot. In the case of Vito Lopez, this took the form of payoffs approved by the speaker — using your tax dollars — to buy the silence of women who had accused Lopez of sexual harassment. And this was no one-off event: The speaker did exactly the same thing when his chief counsel was accused.
Plainly, Shelly’s feeling vulnerable these days. Yesterday he admitted a “failure on my part.” And he called for a ban on secret sexual-harassment settlements, an independent investigator and mandatory reporting to that investigator of any harassment claims.
That’s all fine, as far as it goes. But when will the governor realize that until he puts public pressure on Shelly to leave, it will be the speaker who writes the Cuomo legacy?
We wonder, for example, about the feminists, who have a strong voice in the national Democratic Party, whose nomination for president the governor desires. Will they have no questions about why Cuomo stood by while the fixer fixed things for Albany’s harassers? Talk about a War on Women.
It wasn’t always this way. On election night 2010, when he won the office his father had occupied for three terms, Andrew Cuomo declared his election signified a new day for New Yorkers “angry” their state government’s storied graft and incompetence had made it a national joke.
The people, he told a cheering crowd, “are frustrated when they look at the dysfunction and degradation in Albany.”
He even had some real successes, notably the property-tax cap he proposed and helped pass into law. Now he’s offered a package of reforms to root out corruption. But no one knows better than he that they will be meaningless so long as Shelly continues in office. The speaker’s present vulnerability is an opportunity for the governor to push to get him out.
Unfortunately, far from putting distance between himself and the speaker, the governor has gone out of his way to protect him. “I don’t see any comparison between what Vito Lopez and what Shelly Silver did,” says the governor. “There is a magnitude of difference.”
Nothing in Albany will change until Cuomo’s line changes. Shelly’s cover for Lopez only emboldened his bad behavior — and transformed a creep into a paradigm for Albany’s stink. So long as the governor defends Shelly, he will be defined by Shelly.