Gov. Andrew Cuomo completed his first legislative session Friday night with yet another breathtaking display of political skillfulness, the likes of which hasn’t been seen in the Capitol for at least 50 years.
Cuomo’s first six months in office have, in fact, been nothing short of a grand slam of remarkable successes: a revolutionary redefinition of marriage, closing a $10 billion budget deficit without new taxes, a game-changing local property-tax cap, and sweeping ethics reform.
This represents for long-dysfunctional Albany — once a national beacon of governmental creativity but in recent years a national joke — a tour de force of what leadership should be about.
“The governor has stolen all of the issues,” conceded former state GOP Chairman William Powers, who helped orchestrate the defeat of Cuomo’s father, Gov. Mario Cuomo, in 1994.
Added Steve Boggess, one-time chief of staff to former Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno (R-Rensselaer): “The governor, quite frankly, ran the table.”
Powers even said he wouldn’t be surprised to see Cuomo become president in 2016 — a widespread, albeit premature, expectation but one that is expected to grow exponentially, especially in Democratic circles, in the wake of the gay-marriage victory.
It’s easy to forget today that it was just 18 months ago that the “marriage equality” bill legalizing same-sex marriage went down to a lopsided defeat in a Democratic-led Senate.
Even the governor had his doubts that a Republican-controlled Senate could be convinced to approve the measure in such a short time. But Cuomo threw himself into the effort anyway and the results will no doubt encourage him to fight what some will say are losing battles during the 3 1/2 years remaining in his term.
The new property tax cap, bitterly opposed for years by union-funded Assembly Democrats, holds the potential of reversing both decades of population losses upstate and the accelerating outmigration of young people in the suburbs who can’t afford the property taxes imposed by spendthrift local governments.
It’s a far stronger cap than the one imposed last year in New Jersey by Gov. Chris Christie, who, of course, is regularly touted as a possible Republican presidential candidate — next year or in 2016.
A year ago, the idea that Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan) would pass a law requiring him and other lesser known lawyer/legislators to publicly disclose their outside incomes would have seemed inconceivable.
The powerful Silver, to his credit, vowed early on to avoid the clashes that he had had with the last three governors and turned into a loyal Cuomo ally, even though it’s caused him occasional political embarrassment.
Cuomo faced a projected $10 billion deficit in his first budget, and he closed it without new taxes and without the renewal of a “millionaire’s tax” favored by his left-wing base of union activists and “progressive” tax-and-spend Democrats.
The action showed what a difference a new governor could make. Just two years earlier, a weak Gov. David Paterson dealt with a projected deficit by hiking taxes $8 billion!
Cuomo, during his whirlwind first six months in office, has, in the view of many, including some tough early critics, redefined New York’s notoriously dysfunctional and infamously corrupt government.
That’s the meaning of a half-dozen recent public-opinion polls showing him with overwhelming support from his fellow Democrats as well as from Republicans and even from conservatives.
National polls show our governor is now the most popular big-state governor — Democrat or Republican — in the nation.
Cuomo brought a widely recognized personal charisma to his relations with the Legislature in a way not seen since the famous schmooze sessions of Nelson “hiya fella” Rockefeller, whose hands-on treatment of individual lawmakers helped him craft the most ambitious agenda in modern New York history (the high cost of which, sadly, the state is still paying for).
That hands-on approach was never better on display as in Cuomo’s successful battle for same-sex marriages. He routinely held personal one-on-one chats with lawmakers seeking their support, taking them to his office suite on the second floor of the Capitol for intimate talks or having them to dinner at the palatial Executive Mansion just a few blocks away.
Cuomo, significantly, ends his first legislative session on remarkably good terms with the powerful leaders who often ended past sessions without even being on speaking terms with the state’s chief executive.
Cuomo witnessed the destructive impact of that kind of rift first hand with the wars between Silver and Paterson in 2009 and then-Senate Majority Leader Bruno and Gov. Eliot Spitzer in 2007 and 2008.
Cuomo worked overtime to keep good relations this year with the liberal Silver, who was being painfully pushed by his fellow Democrats to accept ideologically difficult, fiscally conservative, policies and with Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos (R-Nassau), who in the end made one of his toughest decisions ever by agreeing to bring gay marriage to a vote.
It wasn’t by accident that as midnight approached Friday night the governor left his office and headed one flight upstairs to the Senate, where he met privately with Skelos to thank him.
Cuomo, like his father, brought an old-fashioned commitment to hard work — on such complex policy issues as cost-cutting, government consolidation, and economic development — to the job of governor, something that had long been in short supply during the tenures of former Govs. Paterson, Spitzer and George Pataki.
Many a morning, from Jan. 1 on, guards at the Capitol were startled to see Cuomo, fresh from a six-hour sleep at the nearby Executive Mansion, show up at his office at 6 a.m. And the next shift would often see him depart at 10 p.m. or later.
Cuomo, unlike his father, was prepared to keep the left wing of the Democratic Party at arm’s length, as he seemed at times to relish the embrace of Republicans and conservatives enamored with his fiscal policies.
He even successfully neutralized the highly influential, union-controlled Working Families Party, which, with a socialistlike commitment to class warfare, is seeking to force New York Democrats even further to the left.
While it may seem minor to government outsiders, Cuomo also returned a highly important old-time commitment to trust to government, especially in dealing with the legislative leaders.
Among the many things Paterson was notorious for during his short tenure as an accidental governor was mendacity, lying to those around him, including legislative leaders.
Spitzer during his short time in office became notorious for backstabbing lawmakers — even trying to use the State Police to destroy one of them — and Pataki was known as a double-crosser who routinely sought to steal the limelight.
Cuomo, by sharp contrast, is considered an honest broker, and he’s repeatedly gone out of his way to praise state lawmakers, even at the expense of media criticism.
While he has chalked up sweeping successes so far, there is no shortage of major state problems waiting to be addressed.
New York has the highest tax burden in the nation and continues to suffer the population and private-sector job losses that come as a result.
It’s the private sector jobs that provide the tax revenues that fuel state spending, a simple truth that Cuomo understands, but one many of his fellow Democrats refuse to accept.
Public-employee pension and labor costs still need to be dramatically reduced, and modern technologies can be brought to bare to streamline costly governments, many of which should be consolidated or abolished.
New York’s energy costs remain among the highest in the nation, disproportionately burdening consumers and the private sector.
But there’s a natural gas bonanza out there — in the form of state and local tax revenues, income for local land owners, and a big step toward energy independence — awaiting exploitation in the Southern Tier area, along the Pennsylvania border.
One of the biggest questions now is: Does Cuomo have the guts to take on the fanatical environmental activists, the modern-day Luddites who claim that modern science and engineering can’t manage such relatively simple technology as horizontal deep-well drilling?
We’ll know the answer to that one relatively shortly, since a high-level state report on the safety of “hydrofracking” will be presented to Cuomo July 1.
‘’You’ve done in six months what many governors hope they can do in four years,” one of Cuomo’s closest advisors told him recently.
But then the advisor quickly added, “The question for you now is: ‘With all that you’ve done, what are you going to do next?’ ”
That’s a question many savvy New Yorkers are asking as well, but one thing is for sure: Given what the last six months have brought, there’s a good chance that Cuomo will succeed at whatever the next 3 1/2 years will bring.
Frederic U. Dicker is The Post’s state editor.