Opinion

Cuomo’s Nixon game

Democrats kick puppies.

No, really. Look what they just did to Ed Cox — the hapless, harmless, endlessly affable chairman of New York’s Republican State Committee.

This week Cox accused Gov. Cuomo of cheap grandstanding on issues such as guns and gay marriage while ignoring his real responsibilities. “New York,” said Cox, “has a governor with neither the experience nor the guts to spend his political capital on the necessary steps required to create jobs.” He ticked off some things the governor said he wasn’t going to do but did (e.g., raise taxes), or that he said he would do but hasn’t (approve fracking upstate).

Cox’s message — preached softly to a choir of GOP leaders — was neither novel nor provocative, yet the response was swift, personal and vicious.

“The more Cox speaks,” said state Democratic Party Director Rodney Capel, “the clearer it becomes that he is the son-in-law of — and the rightful heir to — Richard Nixon’s extremist and divisive politics.”

Overwrought rhetoric is cheap these days — but honestly? Richard Nixon’s heir?

Ed Cox is the antithesis of the former president. He wouldn’t shoo a fly if it landed on his nose — and that’s a big part of the fading party’s current problem.

Certainly it’s not hard to imagine Nixon asking Cox why he’s busy nipping at Cuomo’s heels when the GOP’s already vanishing thin hopes of contending in this year’s mayoral election are about to be obliterated in a divisive and unnecessary primary.

Extremism? Cox couldn’t buy any if they were selling it on eBay.

But Capel used the word, in one form or another, several times — and that’s instructive. Translated from the Cuomospeak, it means “anyone who disagrees with the governor” — and to be thus labeled is to be marked for an unhappy fate.

Politically speaking, of course.

Cuomo owns Albany, lock, stock and legislator, and he means for that not to change. Which is fine; that’s how we govern ourselves, and the intersection of policy and politics is often marked by overreach.

Take the gun bill that Cox criticized. Or the Cuomo’s euphemistically titled Women’s Reproductive Health Act — which Cox pointedly didn’t mention, but which Capel attacked him on anyway, gratuitously and repeatedly.

Neither accomplishes much in a public-policy sense — but each is rich in potential political payoff for Cuomo.

The gun bill — now law — does virtually nothing about illegal handguns, which kill a lot of New Yorkers. But it cracks down harshly (if not irrationally) on legal rifles, which don’t.

The second bill seeks to marginally extend abortion-rights protections in a state where the procedure is already a secular sacrament and in no danger whatsoever.

So, again, neither will have much practical impact.

But each demonstrates unequivocally that Andrew Cuomo can read the election returns.

Indeed, it was pretty hard to miss the startling gender disparities in last fall’s presidential voting. Team Obama engineered the widest gender differential in a generation — winning women by 12 percentage points while losing men by eight, an eye-popping 20-point gap.

No single factor accounted for the difference, but the campaign’s Sandra Fluke-defined “reproductive rights” demagoguery drove the debate for weeks. And it clearly paid dividends.

Fast-forward to Albany.

Cuomo’s hyperventilating defense of not-at-all-endangered “reproductive rights” in his annual message last month can reasonably be read as picking up where the Obama campaign left off.

And his hollow gun crackdown — along with Capel’s attack on Cox — can just as reasonably be read as an effort to get on the correct side of the mommy vote post-Newtown.

And that, too, appears to be working.

Quinnipiac University pollsters report that, while the governor took an overall popularity hit in the wake of the gun bill, there’s more to the story than the headline.

That is, while Cuomo’s overall approval dropped by 15 points after passage of the gun bill, it tumbled 20 points among men — but only nine among women. Allow time for Cuomo’s abortion-bill pander to sink in, particularly on Long Island, and the governor’s numbers should recover nicely.

None of this is shocking, nor should it be. Again, it’s how we govern ourselves in a cynical and superficial era, and Andrew Cuomo is a depressingly adept practitioner of the art.

And it’s certainly not his fault that Richard Nixon’s son-in-law is so ridiculously overmatched.

But while it’s easy to knock down straw men, it would be far better if Cuomo applied his considerable talents to solving problems of substance.

Heaven knows New York has its share — high unemployment, a withered upstate and morally corrupt (and politically corrupting) public-employee unions top the list.

Style or substance — that’s Cuomo’s challenge. And his choice.