ALBANY — In another tour de force of political dexterity, Gov. Cuomo won a quadruple victory yesterday with landmark pension reform, a finessed legislative redistricting plan, toughened crime-fighting tools and a huge step forward toward legalizing casino gaming.
Getting the new Tier VI pension reform through the normally union-controlled Democratic Assembly was his most remarkable feat, and it was not by accident that union activists in Capitol Park “protesting” the already-passed measure had stunned looks on their faces.
Cuomo’s pension-reform achievement reinforces the view that, during just 15 months in office, he’s accomplished something that Govs. David Paterson, Eliot Spitzer and George Pataki never could: bringing to heel the special-interest-dominated liberal lion of Albany, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.
For many reformers who had hoped for more sweeping results — especially an end to the notorious practice of gerrymandering Assembly and Senate lines — much of what occurred during the past 48 hours was an ugly show of secret talks, late-night deals and flawed or watered-down final products.
But New York politics isn’t high-school civics and, as Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck famously observed: If you want to sleep well at night, it’s best to avoid watching the making of sausages or politics.
New York politics, that is.
Cuomo’s achievements — $80 billion in pension savings for state and local governments over 30 years, a near-ironclad guarantee that gerrymandering will end in 10 years, the most sweeping crime-fighting DNA database in the nation, and first passage of a proposed constitutional amendment to legalize seven casinos — weren’t quite up to last year’s accomplishments.
After all, the governor’s freshman legislative session contained a decade’s worth of achievements: same-sex marriage, a property-tax cap, an on-time, balanced budget that cut spending, and a new ethics law.
Cuomo’s success this year — which involved parlaying lawmakers’ fears that he’d hand the drafting of legislative lines over to the uncertainty of a federal judge unless they backed his programs — and his achievements last year strike many as a profoundly important paradigm shift, ushering in an era of smooth-running government in Albany.
The dysfunctions of past years, that helped define the flawed tenures of Paterson, Spitzer, Pataki and even, at times, Govs. Mario Cuomo and Hugh Carey before them, weren’t always the norm.
That’s a point that the current Gov. Cuomo made as he tried to use his latest successes to bolster his argument that things were changing.
“This is what government should be doing,” Cuomo said on Albany’s Talk 1300 AM Radio. “Government is about action. It’s not a debating society.”