Andrew Cuomo was kind enough to spend two hours with us Monday — and prove that he hasn’t changed a whit.
If you disagree with him, it’s politics. He can’t name an actual mistake he made, can barely say what he’d have done differently.
His campaign and those coming round to supporting him are sold on the idea that he’s going to stand up to the left.
But the emperor has no clothes. The left gained ground his whole time as governor, to the point that it was setting the Albany agenda even as he was appeasing it to get his pet projects (congestion pricing, the lunatic Climate Act) passed.
But the bad bills he signed into law would’ve been even worse without him, he claims.
If, that is, he’ll even admit they were bad: The other day, he was insisting the no-bail law is perfectly fine, at least now that it’s been repeatedly tweaked. The real problem at this point is judges and prosecutors, he says.
Except that, pressed to defend the law, he points to the irrelevant stats the left used to pitch it in the first place, then pretends (as the left does) that this was the only way to prevent another Khalief Browder from being jailed for two years without ever coming before a judge.
And never mind that Browder did come before a judge eight times — including twice before then-Supreme Court Justice Darcel Clarke, now Bronx district attorney — before his suicide.
As mayor, Cuomo says, he’ll have more strength against lefties on the City Council than he did as governor vs. the progs in the Legislature.
Good luck with that!
The Albany left is New York City’s main problem, and as mayor he’d have less power to fight it than governors do. Excuse us if we take his tough-guy pretensions with a huge pinch of salt, based on past performance.
And given the field of lefties he’s running against in the Dem primary, Cuomo, like he did as governor, is tacking left to appeal to that voter base.
As a mayoral candidate, he won’t even say that he won’t back progressive DA Alvin Bragg’s re-election campaign.
Meanwhile, the ex-gov and his team are as slippery as ever.
When the editorial board quotes back to him his words in October 2020 at the height of his war with Trump — “I think it’s going to be a very skeptical American public about taking the vaccine, and they should be” — an aide claims we’re “cherrypicking.” Huh? He said it on “Good Morning America.”
Forget about getting to the bottom of the whole sordid nursing-home mess: His evasions, distortions and distractions are infinitely layered.
The ex-gov is relentless in pitching his version of reality (don’t let him start showing you slides!), indomitable in dodging direct challenges, fearless in shifting responsibility, heroic in posturing as the only rational guy.
He’s running as the only guy who can save New York City, by erasing every bit of history that reminds us how badly he failed the people of New York state before.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
