Bob McManus

Bob McManus

Metro

Cuomo caves to get Working Families Party nod

Meet Zephyr Rain — the girl who made Andrew Cuomo cry.

That would be Zephyr Rain Teachout, the Occupy Wall Street activist who grew up on a Vermont farm with a pet pig named Budweiser.

Her potential Working Families Party gubernatorial candidacy may have lasted no longer than a summer shower — but it focused high candlepower on New York’s fetid politics.

To wit, it:

- Revealed the famously ferocious Cuomo for the hollow log that he is — all echo and no innards.

- Demonstrated that the Working Families Party itself is not about working, or families. It is, as one founding member wrote, “nothing more than a bunch of Park Slope limousine liberals.”

- Provided US Attorney Preet Bharara with a boatload of new leads for his current corruption probes. Offering policy concessions in return for political favors — which Cuomo & Co. reportedly spent most of Friday and Saturday doing — is a felony in some circles, after all.

It was a badly fractured WFP that arrived in Albany Saturday to designate its gubernatorial candidate. In the end, its nod went to Cuomo – but not before he took a rhetorical blistering from delegates, even as Teachout received rafteshaking cheers.

Still, it was clear that both the unionist wing of the party and its hard-left activist elements remained dedicated to squeezing the New York economy dry.

The difference is that the unionists want to keep the proceeds for their members – and the activists don’t really care where the money goes, so long as they get to spank capitalism and feel good about themselves.

This initially didn’t much matter to the Cuomo camp, which thought it had a rubber-stamp lock on the party designation because of support from the unions, traditionally the party’s core.

Not so fast, said the party’s activists. Cuomo’s first four years have been too centrist — too Republican! — for them, so they advanced a Teachout candidacy. The onetime Howard Dean acolyte and OWS lawyer-cum-agitator is right up their blind ally.

Whereupon Cuomo panicked.

Going into Saturday’s nominating vote, he reportedly had pledged to reverse himself, and to deliver, on activist positions ranging from community-determined minimum wages to unambiguous public financing of political campaigns — and to abandon his de facto alliance with state Senate Republicans as well.

There’s no walking back from something like that, and while he’ll try to mask the surrender with rhetorical filigree, it remains that it was this weekend when the celebrated Cuomo credibility disintegrated.

Plus he owes a humiliating public debt to Bill de Blasio — who basically brokered the surrender. Payback is indeed a bitch.

But while all of this is of intense interest to the pickpockets who make up New York’s political class, practically speaking it was a teacup tempest for just about everybody else.

Indeed, nobody was talking this weekend about New York’s new employment numbers: Net job gains for April stood at zero.

This isn’t news, of course; it’s been the drift for decades.

But that trend means that soon enough fat-cat unionists and lawyers named Zephyr will have nothing to squabble over except an empty treasury; what a pity that Andrew Cuomo, who knows better, went over to their side.