It’s no real surprise that Andrew Cuomo has shifted markedly left as he runs for mayor — since that simply continues the turn he took as governor.
Which at least undermines his claims to be running to save New York City from the extremists, and arguably makes that pose just laughable.
That is: Cuomo may not be an enthusiastic man of the left, but he’s all too likely to side with the zealots rather than stand up to them.
Yes, Cuomo feuded with the Working Families Party — but he also worked with it as long it served his ambitions.
His infamous cat fights with then-Mayor Bill de Blasio were less about ideology and more about who’d get the media spotlight, as well as Cuomo’s well-established mislike of any other politician with an Italian last name.
Yes, he intrigued for years to keep progressives from controlling the Legislature, helping engineer the centrist Independent Democratic Conference’s alliance with Republicans in the state Senate.
But after the IDC gambit collapsed in 2018, Cuomo let the lefties run rampant.
In 2019 alone, he agreed to a host of ill-conceived and carelessly-written measures that have fueled disorder and decay, especially in New York City:
- The “no bail” law that puts most perps back on the streets after almost every arrest, prompting a crisis of retail theft and revolving-door justice even for dangerous perps.
- The Discovery for Justice Reform Act that buried prosecutors in paperwork and let countless criminals walk on utter technicalities.
- The Housing Stability & Tenant Protection Act, which is helping drive small landlords into insolvency across the city and reducing the affordable-housing supply.
- A finalized deal to fund the MTA with “congestion pricing” tolls.
After a year spent mismanaging New York’s pandemic response, he followed up in 2021 by embracing a Rube Goldberg road to pot legalization that wound up producing the plethora of gray-market weed shops that still plague New York neighborhoods.
As Mayor Eric Adams has pointed out, the “reforms” Cuomo signed into law are largely to blame for the city’s spiraling recidivism problem. Yet the ex-gov insists he still stands by the no-bail law because it “righted a terrible wrong.”
Cuomo has dubbed his pet third party (allowing him to fight on in the general if he loses the Dem primary) “Fight and Deliver” — when as gov he didn’t fight the left but instead delivered on its big policy pushes.
Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani may pose a truly toxic threat to the city’s future, but we don’t see why a Mayor Cuomo would be any greater check on a progressive-dominated City Council than Gov. Cuomo was to a prog-run Legislature.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
