Bob McManus

Bob McManus

Opinion

Who’s selling out? Cuomo, the WFP — maybe both

New York’s Working Families Party travels to Albany Saturday to pick a candidate for governor. And to reveal its soul.

Will the party designate incumbent Democrat Andrew Cuomo to head its ticket, as seems likely?

Or will it remain true to its principles, such as they are, and tag someone more dedicated to left-leaning politics — a Bill de Blasio type, or worse.

(Education-antireformer Diane Ravitch was being touted in some quarters Wednesday — a name that reflects the party’s abiding allegiance to the state’s teachers unions, and its deep antipathy for children.)

Either way, the decision will strip away the camouflage that has cloaked the party since its inception in 1998 — ostensibly to advance progressive policies but in fact as cover for the transactional politics of the public-employee unions comprising its core.

Sanctimony and subterfuge are hardly unique to the Working Families Party, of course, but it has prospered because nobody has been paying close attention — and because its leaders haven’t been faced with hard ideological choices.

Not in public, anyway.

Not ’til now.

Now the party’s true bosses — the folks who run the health-care workers and teachers unions in particular — are pushing hard for a Cuomo endorsement.

Heaven only knows what practical understandings they’ve reached with the governor, but for sure the decision wasn’t a product of his sunny disposition.

Yet the true believers are pushing back. “The people I’ve spoken with, there isn’t anybody supporting Cuomo,” WFP state treasurer Dorothy Siegel tells Capital New York.

Never mind that Cuomo can credibly claim to have engineered the largest tax hike for the rich in recent memory, bludgeoned through one of the nation’s most restrictive gun laws and brought gay marriage to the Empire State.

Of course, easy compromise is rarely found on the fringes, least of all among progressives — and Saturday will be no exception.

Cuomo’s support for charter schools — as selectively applied as it has been — and his refusal to nick millionaires a second time to support de Blasio’s pre-kindergarten program earlier this year, are like a bone in the throat to the true lefties.

“The state committee members can’t endorse Cuomo, because he goes against what we stand for,” says Siegel.

To a certain extent, of course, this is theater: The union bosses hold most of the cards — the money and the ground troops that any political party needs to be effective — and everybody knows this going into Saturday. A failure to endorse Cuomo would be an astonishment.

At the same time, however, the dissidents are not without resources of their own — pots of money from the George Soros wing of the independent-expenditure universe, plus the unchanneled energy only ideologues bring to politics.

It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve destroyed a party to save it.

So there it stands: A WFP endorsement of Cuomo means that the party has surrendered its soul to the unionists — who then could quit pretending to progressive values and get down to the business of molding state government to fit the best interests of their members.
Just like they did when George Pataki was governor.

For make no mistake: Cuomo won’t win the WFP endorsement without having conducted some business of his own — some of which will quickly be apparent, but most of which will probably never become obvious.

Put more starkly, the governor will have sold his own soul — or a very large chunk of it — to the WFP.

Immediate evidence of this would be strong gubernatorial support for campaign-finance legislation that passes WFP muster — that is, which includes piles of tax dollars for candidates plus sharp restrictions on business and personal political contributions, all along with carve-outs effectively exempting unions from spending limits of any sort.

This would delight Soros and his cadres, even as it would be an obvious violation of criminal law — which, quite reasonably, bars the exchange of policy favors for political support.

A big ha-ha on that last point, of course. How else would anything get done in Albany — Ground Zero for cynical double-dealing in New York?

This probably explains the capital’s enduring fascination to Cuomo — he’s been there, in one capacity or another, since he was 19. And Saturday the Working Families Party will come to play on his turf.

And while the outcome seems clear, so does the fact that neither will escape with reputation enhanced.