Albany has once more felt the heavy hand of Andrew Cuomo — to what useful purpose, it remains to be seen.
Politics, not policy, looks to have been the point of Cuomo’s so-called SAFE Act of 2013, a gun-control bill marinated in rhetoric certain to please those liberal Democrats who pick presidential candidates — but which promises to make New Yorkers only very marginally safer.
That is, it’s cosmetically correct, but it’s substantively — and perhaps constitutionally— a cynical exercise.
Pure Cuomo, in other words — a man for whom it’s always all about the polls.
After Newtown, it’s hardly surprising that politicians feel the need to do something — anything. But the unreasonable haste with which this measure proceeded — state senators had all of 15 minutes to read it before the balloting began — suggests that Cuomo & Co. believe it couldn’t withstand close study.
It’s highly intrusive, but it seems unlikely to address many security concerns — apart from tightening some lax laws governing gun access by the potentially violent mentally ill.
The law focuses heavily on rifles, for example, never mind that rifles were used in all of five murders in New York state in 2011; fists killed 28.
As for handguns, New York’s laws are already among the nation’s strictest — but criminals simply ignore them; only Mayor Bloomberg’s aggressive stop-and-frisk program seems to be having any positive effect. When he’s gone, so will be stop-and-frisk, and then it’ll be Katie-bar-the-door once again.
But if Cuomo had waited, some other governor would have gotten there first — dimming the luster of his own rising star.
In that respect, the gun bill essentially embodies the cynicism that has animated the administration from its first days.
Cuomo’s property-tax cap generated high acclaim, though it wasn’t until much later that anyone noticed his lack of an appetite for offering local governments any relief from the state mandates that drive up their spending. Without mandate relief, the tax caps aren’t viable.
He promised no new taxes generally, and stuck by the pledge until the polls started trending against it — at which point it went overboard without a qualm.
He essentially promised to make mineral extraction — fracking — central to his upstate economic-development programs, but he’s scared witless of the impact a public fight with environmentalists will have on the polls. And so fracking is dying the death of a thousands cuts.
He neglected the Long Island Power Authority, for which he is responsible; when Superstorm Sandy did its damage, he was left looking foolish and impotent. His response was a poll-bolstering commission, some very public firings and a “What, me worry?” face to the world.
All of this appears to have worked: Andrew Cuomo’s numbers are in the stratosphere — and, to give him his due, it wasn’t all done with sleight of hand.
For one thing, he brought a swift end to the government-by-freak-show ethic that he inherited, and that got him off to a rousing start in the polls.
As well it should have.
Meanwhile, Albany is no longer a town where a well-placed phone call by a special-interest pleader is guaranteed to produce results.
Props to Andrew for that, too.
But while the pleaders, who are legion, may have been nudged off balance by the new order, they are sly and crafty people.
They’ve long since noticed Cuomo’s almost paranoid solicitude for his numbers, and it appears that they’ll be pursuing their goals this year by targeting them.
As the state budget debate proceeds, for example, look for TV ads featuring schoolkids allegedly disadvantaged by budget economies; newspaper op-eds making double-domed arguments in opposition to Cuomo initiatives and much mindless celebrity tongue-clucking of the sort that has paralyzed the governor on fracking.
The objective: Saw five or 10 points off the polls, and watch Andrew crumble.
There is certainly nothing intrinsically wrong with this approach: Discussion produces sunlight, something Cuomo’s SAFE Act could have used more of.
But, in the end, the new way will be just as cynical and manipulative as the gun bill itself: The real point will be to serve a compelling private interest, not the public, and in the end nothing substantive will have changed.
Bob McManus is The Post’s former editorial-page editor.