Andrew Cuomo faces a profound test of character over the course of the next five months — a test that will go a long way to demonstrating his ability to lead New York state should he be elected its next governor.
Cuomo has to keep himself from destroying himself.
That should be a simple test, but Cuomo has failed it before. And early indications suggest it would be a great pity if he were to fail it this time — because the candidate is saying some pretty extraordinary things.
“New York state is upside down and backwards; high taxes and low performance,” he said in announcing his candidacy on Saturday. “Raising taxes is not an option — period. Sometimes the answer is just ‘no.’ People will vote with their feet and leave. We are in a financial emergency.”
The bracing, tough-minded and sensible policies he’s proposing are heartening, to say the least — particularly since many of those proposals involve offending powerful Democratic constituencies and fellow elected Democrats.
His studied silence over the past year, as the parlous condition of the state’s finances and balance sheet became ever more plain, was both tactically prudent and strategically wise. He made no promises and laid down no markers.
This gave him time to develop a mature governing agenda that he would be able to bring to bear on Albany beginning with the day of his inauguration — an agenda that indicates he has both learned from some of President Obama’s mistakes and taken heed of some of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s uncompromising successes.
But Cuomo has to get to his inauguration first, and to do that he has to get elected — and to get elected he has to show the same patience and care he showed by keeping his mouth shut these past 12 months.
The problem is that now he can’t keep his mouth shut — and in the past, when Andrew Cuomo has opened his mouth without caution, he’s displayed a propensity for inelegant, injudicious and deeply unpleasant conduct.
The most obvious example came eight years ago, when he seemed to explode destructive depth charges around his own campaign for the Democratic nomination for governor on a weekly basis. Only six months after 9/11, he barked out a shockingly petty and unnecessary insult of the Republican incumbent, Gov. George Pataki, for being inappropriately deferential toward Rudy Giuliani — “he held the leader’s coat.”
In the months that followed, Cuomo continued to put his foot in it until finally he found himself compelled to exit the primary contest in favor of his hapless opponent, Carl McCall. Pataki won a fourth term that he didn’t deserve in part because Cuomo defeated himself first.
In his early-’90s Washington years, Cuomo displayed comparable gracelessness. As assistant secretary and then as secretary of Housing and Urban Development, he engaged in a years-long assault on a lower-level official named Susan Gaffney, the department’s inspector general. When her audits of some politically useful HUD programs revealed a pattern of politicized spending — audits that proved to be accurate — Cuomo personally set upon her with untold numbers of intimidating phone calls, installed officials under her to undermine her authority and in general behaved very badly.
But all of this is in the past. Cuomo is older, has been knocked around by life a bit more and certainly seems wiser, at least when it comes to policy.
If he can make it to Nov. 2 without getting in his own way, he will win the governorship and have a real chance to make a profound difference in New York’s future fortunes.
That may not be a big if. But it’s an if. And here’s what his supporters should worry about: The more relaxed Andrew Cuomo is about the inevitability of his victory, the more likely it is that the old Andrew Cuomo will reemerge and put that victory at risk.
John Podhoretz is the editor of Commentary.