ALBANY — Gov. Cuomo dialed back the sweeping promises of tax cuts and spending restraints that defined his first year in office yesterday with a big-on-rhetoric, modest-on-proposals State of the State Address that won’t do anything to threaten his 70 percent approval rating.
Cuomo, to his credit, emphasized something rare for a New York Democrat, the creation of tens of thousands of private-sector jobs through the leveraging of public spending on roads, bridges, an upgraded Javits Center complex and, most dramatically, a $4 billion convention center — the largest in the nation — at Aqueduct.
In so doing, he redoubled his effort to win political support from the state’s still-powerful but shrinking construction trade unions, which he hopes will offset the radical activism and open hostility he’s receiving from the public-sector unions that were forced to swallow, under threat of massive layoffs, zero-growth contracts just a few months ago.
And while Cuomo paid lip service to some of the reform themes that have dominated his first year in office — education accountability, campaign-expenditure restraints, a new, less-costly public-employee pension tier — he did so toward the end of his speech and without specific proposals.
That’s partly because Cuomo knows the scandal-scarred members of the Legislature — and especially Senate Republicans frightened of losing their majority — are in no mood to confront the campaign war chests of the public-employee unions and their allies in the massive health-care industry in a legislative election year.
Cuomo, a potential Democratic candidate for president in 2016, also pulled his punches because he doesn’t want to do anything to endanger his standing as the most popular big-state governor in the nation — a fact of which he is well aware.
“The governor feels like he accomplished an amazing amount of progress in his first year, and he’s willing to give the Legislature something of a break as they face their own election problems in November,’’ was how a source close to Cuomo charitably put it.
The governor could have used his popularity and expended some political capital by doubling down on his first-year’s successes in cutting the bloated health-care and education budgets, by pressuring out-of-control local governments to further rein in their often-confiscatory property taxes, and by green-lighting the greatest potential source of private- sector jobs out there, drilling for natural gas using the controversial technique of hydrofracking.
But Cuomo signaled last month he was in no mood to cut the major areas of state spending when he dropped his opposition to a “millionaires tax,’’ which will now help fund promised 4 percent increases in health care and education in his new budget.
Cuomo also has yet to escape the political heat from the stronger-than-expected blowback last year’s property-tax cap produced.
And he simply chose to punt on the question of hydrofracking — perhaps the most contentious issue in the state — leaving that decision for another time in the months to come.
The many theorists out there who believe Cuomo wants President Obama to lose in November in order to abet his own presidential aspirations will find support on Page 25 of the speech, where, when noting the new federal health-care law should cut some insurance costs in New York, the governor failed to give Obama any credit for his signature plan.