Think of him as Andrew Cuomo, odd man out.
That is, think of New York’s governor-elect as a man committed to fundamental reform of a sort that the party he now heads considers wormwood and gall.
And that the voters have no use for, either.
Think of him, in fact, as Gary Cooper in “High Noon”: The clock is ticking and the gunsels are gathering — but this time there will be no Grace Kelly lurking in the shadows to back-shoot a bad guy and help save the day.
The Republican Revival of 2010 bypassed the Empire State almost completely on Tuesday.
Democrats were elected to all statewide offices — with key roles being played by the special interests that Cuomo must defeat if he is to have any hope of achieving the reforms he says are essential to a successful first term.
The unions, trade organizations and third-party operatives who delivered for the Democrats at the statewide level appear also to have kept a death grip on the state Senate.
The body may yet flip to the Republicans — key races were undecided last night — but in the end the margins will be too close for the body to be an ef-fective reform agent, anyway. Especially since its previous Republican proprietors were as transactional as any Democrat, ever.
It truly is astonishing, when one thinks about it.
Government in New York has been a running joke on “Saturday Night Live” for years, and the state’s inspector general just delivered dossiers on the Democratic leaders of the Senate to state and federal prosecutors.
One would think that this alone — never mind everything else that passes for business as usual in Albany — would give voters pause. One would be wrong; they lap it up and ask for more.
Yes, the top of the Republican ticket Tuesday was a millstone for the down-ballot races. Carl Paladino had a real talent for diagnosing New York’s ills, but none whatsoever for convincing anyone to vote for him — and along the way he scared a lot of folks away from the GOP ticket.
Terrified them, actually.
But it remains that New York was largely impervious to the most dramatic mid-term correction in generations, and the blame for that can’t be hung entirely on Paladino. It was structural.
But what does it mean for Cuomo?
The governor-elect has intricate plans, for sure. Problem is, most of them assume that New Yorkers want reform. And, after Tuesday, that simply can’t be taken for granted.
Certainly the Working Families Party, the health-care-workers union and New York’s sprawling public-education cartel won’t be coming to Albany as supplicants in January.
Going into Tuesday, they already owned the Assembly, its speaker, Sheldon Silver, and the inordinate influence he has with the state Court of Appeals and the Board of Regents.
Tuesday they renewed their leases on Eric Schneiderman, the incoming attorney general, and Comptroller Tom DiNapoli — and, again, they are uncomfortably close to control of the Senate.
That’s about as near to a clean sweep as it gets.
All that’s left is Gary Cooper, er, Andrew Cuomo.
And the ticking clock.