By Steve Levy
Say one thing about Andrew Cuomo (D): he knows how to reinvent himself for political gain.
Cuomo liked touting himself as a liberal in Bill Clinton’s cabinet. As Clinton’s housing czar, he orchestrated the homes-for-everyone equity crusade, strongarming banks to lend to underfinanced borrowers that eventually led to the real estate collapse a decade later.
Then, when he ran for governor in 2010, he sought to reinvent himself as a crime-fighting, fiscal conservative. I should know. As a fiscal conservative engaged in a short-lived run for governor that same year, I saw the vast majority of my proposed fiscal reforms posted on my website eventually being siphoned onto the Cuomo site.
Those policy stances fit the time, as New York residents were reeling from a recession (caused in part by Cuomo’s housing policy) and were looking for a steady fiscal manager.
And, in fact, for the first year or two, Cuomo delivered on fairly conservative fiscal budgeting. But soon, he was feeling the heat from the radical-left Working Families Party. He faced a primary from a little-known radical law professor named Zephyr Teachout and was able to handle it. However, Cuomo really got frightened when Hollywood celebrity Cynthia Nixon of Sex and the City fame went after him from the far left in a primary in 2018. That’s when Cuomo reinvented himself once again and couldn’t run fast enough to the furthest perches of his leftist base.
All of a sudden, he started advocating for closing prisons and changing the state’s criminal justice laws to make it harder to detain the severely mentally ill and violent criminals.
He championed the “Me Too” movement and denied the rights of young men accused of sexual abuse to get due process.
He started spending like a typical liberal Democrat once again in his leftist renaissance, which became a disaster for the people of New York. Crime went through the roof. His reversing of his campaign promises to end the tax surcharge on high-income earners led to a mass exodus of the very people who fund the state coffers.
And then Cuomo was hoisted on his own petard when his strong “Me Too” rhetoric came back to haunt him after he was accused of sexual assault. He was the guy saying you must believe all women and that men have no due process. It led to the sinking of his political career.
And, of course, Cuomo’s shutting down of the state’s schools and economy was the epitome of the heavy-handed, big-state authoritarianism copied by his fellow Democrat governors around the nation.
But now he’s looking perhaps to resurface on the political scene with a possible run for mayor since Eric Adams is sinking in the polls. His M.O. is to run for mayor from the right. So, suddenly, he is denouncing the very congestion pricing laws that he put into effect.
He’s calling for the mentally ill to be committed after he let them out of the institutions. He’s calling for more cops when his policies led to their mass exodus.
If you want to know who the real Andrew Cuomo is, check out the Woody Allen movie, Zelig.
The main character was a simpleton chameleon who would adopt the position of whoever he was talking to at the moment. While Cuomo is no simpleton, he is a shrewd master of remolding himself into anything that will further his political career. That’s who we had in New York: Andrew “Zelig” Cuomo.
Don’t for a second believe that anything Cuomo is telling you is coming from the heart. It’s all calculated based on polls. And that might be good for a year or two, but, sooner or later, he’ll morph into yet a different Andrew Cuomo, when the polls change as well.
Steve Levy (R-Bayport) is President of Common Sense Strategies, a political consulting firm. He served as a Suffolk County Legislator from 1985 to 2000, as a New York State Assemblyman from 2001 to 2003, and as Suffolk County Executive from 2004 to 2011. He is the host of “The Steve Levy Radio Show.” He is the author of “Solutions to America’s Problems” and “Bias inthe Media.” www.SteveLevy.info, Twitter @SteveLevyNY, steve@commonsensestrategies.com
