How Albany’s mighty do fall.
The latest case? Gov. Cuomo.
When the governor won election in 2010, he came to office with powerful prospects.
But now he’s apparently too weak to push through an education tax credit supported by majorities in both chambers of the state Legislature — not to mention a diverse alliance of religious and racial groups, city dwellers and suburbanites, upstaters and downstaters, unions and businesses.
In short, as our lawmakers wrap up their 2014 session, a bill to offer tax credits to New Yorkers who donate to private-school scholarship funds or public-school programs looks dead. Even though Cuomo had assured Timothy Cardinal Dolan and other bishops it was a done deal.
Hard to see how this show of weakness will help Gov. Cuomo the Younger fulfill his dreams of eclipsing his dad, Gov. Mario Cuomo, in terms of big achievements — and perhaps even running for president, as Mario famously declined to do.
No doubt one big reason for Andrew’s cave-in is that he fears his left flank: the radical Working Families Party — and an obscure leftist professor named Zephyr Teachout, who’s challenging him in the Democratic primary.
Beholden to the teachers unions, both the WFP and Teachout oppose measures that would give New York parents more and better schools for their children.
The human tragedy, of course, is who will pay the price for Cuomo’s alliance with the Working Families Party & Co.: i.e., the children of actual working families, who have no avenues of escape from rotten public schools where they aren’t learning.
So much for the governor who likes to call himself “the students’ lobbyist.”