Super parasites can kill their hosts too quickly — bad news for the host, but for the parasite, too, as it also dies.
Keep that in mind as the civil war within New York’s Working Families Party — now on low simmer — comes to full fratricidal boil by mid-May.
On the hard-left side of the conflict are the super parasites — the true-believers: the Occupy Wall Street types clamoring for ever-escalating minimum wages, mandatory private-sector sick leave and paid vacation, “affordable” apartments on demand, fundamentally unconstitutional restrictions on campaign-spending, universal “free” health care and so on.
Translated into policy, such fantastical demands suffocate economic opportunity, throttle down growth and choke off the real-world tax revenue needed to fund schools, public safety and infrastructure renewal — areas traditionally of great interest to public-sector unions.
And therein resides the conflict.
For what the WFP’s firebrands seem not to understand — that there really is no such thing as a free entitlement — the adults in the party see all too clearly.
The grownups populate the unions that essentially formed the WFP to begin with: first for the benefit of their members, then their allies and then for the radicals and redistributionists — brought in largely as ideological camouflage, anyway.
The latter, of course, are always the squeakiest of wheels. And they’re the ones leading the effort to deny Gov. Cuomo the party’s endorsement in this fall’s general election.
The governor, you see, didn’t attend the free-entitlement school of public policy. Sometimes he says no — and means it. So he must pay.
But this is a risky business. If successful, it could (though probably wouldn’t) cost the WFP its permanent, automatic spot on the New York state ballot for the next four years.
At the same time, it wouldn’t make any meaningful difference in the outcome of the campaign. And the party, even if it keeps its ballot spot, would be left to contend with a re-elected governor best known for a long memory and vengeful impulses.
Not a happy place to be, in other words.
Certainly not for the WFP’s constituent unions — which, again, formed the party 20 years ago to advance their parochial interests.
These include:
- Local 1199 SEIU, now engaged in maneuverings with Cuomo’s people over the fate of Brooklyn’s Long Island Hospital and existentially concerned with its future in the age of ObamaCare cutbacks, and with the effects of health-care reform in general.
- The Hotel Trades Council, determined that New York’s a-borning casino industry be fully unionized.
- The United Federation of Teachers, now engaged in negotiations with the de Blasio administration that likely can’t be settled in the UFT’s favor without substantial increases in state aid.
- The Communications Workers of America, now looking desperately to Albany to buffer the effects of the digital age on its copper-wire-bound membership.
- The Communications Workers of America, now looking desperately to Albany to buffer the effects of the digital age on its copper-wire-bound membership.
- And the Transport Workers Union, which just struck a lush deal with the gubernatorially controlled Metropolitan Transit Authority — testimony to the value of keeping Andrew Cuomo happy, which may well have been the point.
Also not lost on union leaders are the lessons of Bill de Blasio’s bumpy ride early on in his mayoralty.
The mayor is the WFP’s trophy politician: He embraced the party line virtually without qualification, and party reciprocity delivered him to office.
Then came his cold shower.
The governor publicly schooled de Blasio on charter schools and resentment-driven tax policy — each of particular concern to the engine of New York’s economy, the financial sector. The lesson was not lost on the traditionally transactional unions.
Beyond their own special interests, they know that a private sector on life support means smaller paydays for their members.
So now the WFP is reported to be polling its constituents for strategic guidance.
Do they prefer ideological purity? Will Cuomo be punished for his sometimes-centrist policies — never mind the long-term cost to the unions of such an approach?
Will pragmatism prevail? Will the party swallow hard, accept the governor’s inevitability and settle for whatever spoils are on the table — now and down the road?
Or, put in more clinical terms, does the Working Families Party understand that the successful parasite is the one that leaves something of the host for later?
To back Andrew, or not to back Andrew? That is the (hard) question.