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There are two possible explanations for the sudden change in Gov. Cuomo: Either he fell and hit his head, or he’s making a sharp left turn. Because there have been no 911 calls from his house, it must be that he’s shedding the mantle of a centrist he fashionably donned last year.
Cuomo’s second State of the State speech stands in stark contrast to his first. A year ago, he was warning of disaster if Albany didn’t slim down. He reduced spending, combined agencies and said, “New York has no future as the tax capital of the nation.”
Last week, fresh off imposing a tax hike on millionaires that he swore he would never support, he unveiled a dizzying array of stimulus spending and government expansion. Under a section titled “New York as a Progressive Capital,” he rolled out at least seven new bureaucracies, including ones for foreclosure relief, tenant protection and tax “fairness.” He announced a “special adviser on vulnerable persons.”
Perhaps that office should focus on beleaguered taxpayers, who will be endangered in the new come-and-get-it atmosphere. Most telling, Cuomo’s order that Mayor Bloomberg end finger-imaging for food-stamp recipients was a slobbering kiss-up to the entitlement culture he previously criticized.
Cuomo deserved most of the praise he got for his first-year reforms, which included closing a $10 billion budget gap without new taxes and forcing through a 2 percent cap on increases in local property levies.
But there were hints he was not fully committed to being a different kind of Democrat. He walked away from medical-malpractice reform and signed an ethics law that is scandalously weak. In both cases, he gave a pass to legislative leaders, Republicans and Democrats, who make big money from tort lawsuits and want to hide their outside income.
The punch-pulling, it is now clear, was just the start. Cuomo’s speech last week was devoid of fresh thinking — gambling was its big idea — but was so chock-full of populist pandering and Big Government ideas that it could have been given by President Obama. It recited all the talking points, spending is “investment,” that Cuomo sneered at a year ago.
The beneficiaries of new or expanded programs run the laundry list of Dem captive groups — immigrants, minorities, women, labor, tenants.
The single most distressing evidence of a New & More Liberal Cuomo came on food stamps. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn elevated the issue into a holy war with Bloomberg because the city alone requires fingerprinting to protect against fraud. The prints are not shared with law enforcement or immigration.
Yet Quinn, hoping to succeed Bloomberg, is using the issue to show she is up to liberal snuff by claiming fingerprinting stigmatizes recipients.
Cuomo, without consulting Bloomberg, gave her what she wanted. He twisted the facts to get there.
He echoed her silly claim of “barriers” and said working families who need help were afraid to get fingerprinted, though he didn’t say why they would be stigmatized or cite any evidence.
“We must stop fingerprinting for food,” he declared. “No child should go hungry . . . and we will do all that we can to prevent it.”
Here are facts he ignored: “Barriers” notwithstanding, there are now 1.8 million people in the city getting food stamps, up 600,000 in four years. The city is getting an award from the Obama administration for being a “hunger champion” because it made the process easier.
Applications, which no longer involve any asset limit for recipients, can be done online, by phone or mail. Fingerprinting, which happens only once, requires a visit to an office, which is also open Saturday.
Fingerprinting is required for many government workers who somehow overcome the “stigma.”
Then there is this: Under a state law, all welfare recipients are finger-printed. A pilot program that led to the law started under Gov. Mario Cuomo after many reports of fraud.
Son of Mario didn’t mention any “stigma” for welfare recipients. Maybe he’s saving that surprise for next year.
Deafening silence on Syria
One of the great mysteries of American foreign policy concerns the way President Obama has stayed mostly silent during the slaughter in Syria. After first coddling Syrian butcher Bashar al-Assad and calling him a reformer, the White House has turned its head from the carnage.
The humanitarian crisis and the Arab nation’s noxious role as a helpmate to Iranian terrorism argue for at least strong verbal support, yet Obama is not even leading from behind. He’s missing in inaction.
Comes now one of my favorite writers with an explanation.
Fouad Adjami, a scholar at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, has an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal where he argues that the Syrian government and protesters both know the score. “An American president ceding strategic ground in the Greater Middle East is no threat to the Damascus regime,” he writes.
And then Adjami adds this devastating view: “With an eye on his bid for re-election, President Obama will boast that he brought the Iraq war to an end, as he promised he would. That applause line precludes taking on Syrian burdens.
“In Obamaland, foreign policy is full of false choices: either boots on the ground or utter abdication. Libya showed the defect of that choice, yet this remains the worldview of the current steward of American power.”
The brave and brutalized Syrian people, Adjami concludes, “are on their own.”
Surely, America can do better.
Blessed is our city
The Powerhouse is getting some new juice — Archbishop Timothy Dolan is to be cardinal. Following in the footsteps of his most illustrious predecessors, Cardinals Spellman and O’Connor, Dolan is likely to bring St. Patrick’s Cathedral back into the forefront of New York life.
He interpreted the Vatican announcement as a salute to his adopted home. “It’s as if Pope Benedict is putting the red hat on top of the Empire State Building, or the Statue of Liberty, or on home plate at Yankee Stadium,” Dolan said.
We are fortunate to have such a happy warrior in our midst. May his tenure be long and productive.
Crook’s crooked clients
The guilty plea of New York lobbyist Richard Lipsky in a bribe scandal answers some questions, but a leaves a big one open. Lipsky confessed to funneling $250,000 to crooked Democratic state Sen. Carl Kruger, who pleaded guilty to selling his office and resigned.
But left unanswered is whether Lipsky’s clients were in on the scam. If not, that means Lipsky used his own money to pay the bribes so his clients could get favors from Kruger. Has anybody ever known a lobbyist to be so generous and selfless?
Not me.
First lady is best at fitting the ‘Bill’
Block that metaphor, or whatever it is.
Politico reports that author Jodi Kantor says First Lady Michelle Obama is the better politician in the family. Comparing the Obamas to the Clintons, Kantor says a source tells her, “She is Bill Clinton, and he is Hillary.”