Andrew Cuomo for vice president in 2012? That was the provocative prediction made last week by former San Francisco Mayor and onetime California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown Jr., widely regarded on the West Coast as one of the savviest political analysts around.
Brown, who writes a well-read column for the San Francisco Examiner, was touching on widespread speculation that Vice President Joe Biden is not exactly an asset and might be dumped from his post by an increasingly nervous and poll-challenged President Obama when he declared:
“Here’s a prediction: Vice President Biden moves over to secretary of state, with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo stepping in to bring new blood to the Obama re-election campaign.
“He’s a big name, a big-state governor. And a Democrat who is taking on the issue of pubic-employee salaries and pensions. Plus, he looks good,” Brown wrote.
A source close to Cuomo said the governor was flattered by Brown’s observations, “especially his saying that he looks good,” but insisted the governor had no plans other than to work hard during the 3½ years remaining in his term.
“The governor is committed to working for the people of New York and is not going anywhere,” said the source.
Cuomo has garnered a still-small but growing number of notices around the country for his successful adoption of a new state budget that closed a projected $10 billion deficit without raising taxes and his willingness to take on costly public-employee unions.
It’s a unique niche as a socially liberal but fiscally conservative leader that, if maintained during the remainder of his first term in office, could position Cuomo as a different sort of Democratic presidential candidate in 2016.
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Meanwhile, some well-known New York Democratic operatives with strong Washington ties are shaking their heads in amazement at Cuomo’s continuing sky-high popularity, claiming that they had expected him to have blown his top by now — Ã la Eliot “F – – – ing Steamroller” Spitzer — and have suffered in the polls as a result.
But a prominent Democratic activist predicted that Cuomo’s sustained self-control thus far is not his natural state, and that “his true colors will eventually emerge, bringing his [poll] numbers back down to earth.”
Many Democratic elected officials have claimed for years that Cuomo is a hothead waiting to explode — but it hasn’t happened since he re-entered elective politics and successfully ran for attorney general in 2006, and it didn’t happen during his abortive run for governor in 2002, although he was damaged then by his insensitive but accurate claim that Gov. George Pataki had merely played second fiddle to Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
The hothead image dates to Cuomo’s role as one of several of Gov. Mario Cuomo’s political enforcers in the mid-1980s, but those who know him well say he has cast off that style.
One longtime acquaintance put it this way: “If dealing with [Assembly Speaker] Shelly Silver hasn’t made the governor blow his top by now, chances are nothing will.”