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ALBANY — Now comes the really hard part.
Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo, having crushed hapless Carl Paladino, must move swiftly on his pledge to rebuild the state’s crippled economy, cut spending and drain state government’s notorious cesspool of corruption.
Otherwise he’ll go down as just another failure in a long string of governors — David Paterson, Eliot Spitzer, George Pataki and, yes, even Mario Cuomo — who promised much and delivered little.
For the governor-elect to succeed he must break the iron grip of the status-quo-defending special interests who have bankrupted the state as they held the Legislature hostage for decades: the public-sector unions and their allies in the “nonprofit” health-care industry.
To do it, Cuomo must rally a cynical public, mobilize business and good-government groups, enlist job-hungry private-sector unions and convince editorial writers in a new nonpartisan coalition that will support his efforts at change.
Cuomo must also bore from within the Legislature by quietly putting together his own bloc of supporters — newly elected members and those few true reformers — willing to take on the hidebound leaders in the battle for change.
“Andrew now has to build as large a coalition as he can of people who feel that this state is going off the cliff; he needs to mobilize those people into a coherent and powerful political force,” said William J. Stern, once a key adviser to Mario Cuomo.
To be successful, Andrew Cuomo is going to have to be a genuine manager — something the state hasn’t seen in years — and keep a firm and constant hand on the reins of state power and work at the job 16 hours a day, seven days a week.
The good news is that Cuomo has already been thinking about implementing ideas like these, not just for months but for years.
The governor-elect learned important lessons about successful governing from that master of triangulation, Bill Clinton, for whom he served as housing secretary.
Should Cuomo deliver on his promises and become the first truly successful governor in at least two generations, he’ll rightly start hearing the strains of “Hail to the Chief” in his politically attuned brain.
Washington, after all, once regularly beckoned New York governors, some of whom made it to the White House.
With a real record of achievement, there’s no reason why Washington shouldn’t beckon this Gov. Cuomo as well.