Bill de Blasio is Andrew Cuomo’s dream come true.
The further to the left the mayor goes, the more reasonable the governor looks.
And Cuomo knows it, which is why he is so eager to pick fights only two months into de Blasio’s tenure — first on how to pay for pre-K and now on charter schools.
As hundreds of charter-school kids and parents arrived in Albany on Tuesday to rally for institutions now facing a de Blasio death sentence, Cuomo pointedly stood by them. “We are here today to tell you that we stand with you,” he said. “You are not alone. We will save charter schools.”
In other words, he will save them . . . from de Blasio.
Remember: These two men are politicians from the same party.
De Blasio decided to make good on his promise to punish charter schools for, well, being too good and threatening to his teacher-union masters. And he made it personal — going specifically after three schools run by his old City Council nemesis, Eva Moskowitz.
The mayor doesn’t even make any bones about it. He spits out the words “Eva Moskowitz” as though they constitute an obscenity.
Moskowitz’s crime isn’t only that she runs good schools. She also had the temerity to investigate corruption in the schools when she was on the City Council — and didn’t support de Blasio’s 2002 bid to be speaker.
Neither he nor his backers on the progressive left, who targeted Moskowitz and defeated her bid to move up to Manhattan borough president, have forgotten or forgiven. They sought to destroy her in 2004 and they want to destroy her in 2014, and if there’s still a fight in 2024 they’ll be going for her jugular again.
What kind of fight is this for the new mayor to wage? He’s had no honeymoon, and going to war against hundreds of poor kids who are doing well in a Harlem school isn’t going to start one for him.
His lame response to the snowstorms, his ward-heeler late-night phone call to get his connected supporter out of the pokey and his pompous declarations about obeying the speed limit while his own car zoomed through red lights all contributed to his rocky start.
But so has Cuomo’s remarkable decision to paint a political target on de Blasio’s forehead.
The governor is playing Democratic superego to the so-far-hapless mayor’s leftist id.
Cuomo began by short-circuiting de Blasio’s push for a special tax hike to fund pre-kindergarten by saying he’d find state money to pay for it. This forced de Blasio to make clear he actually wanted the tax increase to satisfy his own redistributionist ideological zeal.
That made Cuomo appear extraordinarily reasonable by comparison.
And the more reasonable Cuomo seems, the more grateful New York City’s staggeringly affluent business community will be to the governor for his efforts in stalling or stopping his fellow Democrat’s aggressive advances.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the city’s businessmen and -women are in a state of freak-out and meltdown when it comes to de Blasio’s seriousness of purpose in effecting his progressive semi-socialist agenda.
Though mostly Democrats themselves, many of them despair of the regular public schools, and have donated to efforts to effect change for the better. Many are generous charter backers, and they don’t like seeing them trashed.
Enter Cuomo. If he gets New York’s rich and wealthy Democrats to think of him as a savior, he’ll have all the money in the world — not only to walk away with re-election later this year but for whatever political ambitions he might harbor later on.
Cuomo is staking out a national role as his party’s rational liberal, the guy who believes in progressive solutions but is willing to fight against the progressive frenzy to punish those who dare to think otherwise.
Bill de Blasio is making it so easy for him that Cuomo should send a nice fruit basket to Gracie Mansion.