(Albany, NY) – He said it himself in a GQ interview at the end of the year. A big part of the talk about Andrew Cuomo(D) running for president in 2016 is driven by the fact that he is the governor of New York. One of the biggest states in the country, that includes a patch of land known as Manhattan, where the national media is largely headquartered.
If you want to be mentioned as a possible national contender, it helps if the Great Mentioner is your constituent.
There is no doubt Cuomo has had an exceptional first year as governor. He redefined the rules of the debate in Albany. He worked with both sides and he left his few Republican critics arguing only that they would have done it better, or gone farther. A weak argument, if your goal is to remove the top guy and replace him with one of your own – in three years.
Cuomo had some built in advantages. He presented himself as an alternative to two guys who didn’t work out. After the embarrassing fall of Governor Eliot Spitzer(D) and his replacement with the hapless lieutenant governor, David Paterson(D) – there was really no where to go, but up. If you are looking for immediate success, it’s always best to follow failure.
With voters looking for something that would work, it helped that Cuomo was able to run on his own record, his family name and the generally positive memory of his father, former Governor Mario Cuomo(D).
That’s the foundation, but almost immediately after winning the election, Andrew Cuomo began applying all he had learned at his father’s side and through his own career in New York and national politics.
He began reaching out to Democrats and Republicans in the legislature. Building bridges. He called them. Had dinner with them. Met with them. Listened to them. He put forward a very simple agenda that relied on restoring faith in state government through ethics reform, changing how the debate over the budget would be defined and taking the side of the taxpayer against Albany.
Cuomo adopted 1990’s style Republican rhetoric when it came to budget issues. He argued the state’s deficit was not as large as it seemed, because deficit projections were being based on promises the state could not afford to deliver on.
Sounding like a Republican governor, he took on school systems and advocates of government spending, arguing that “a decrease in the expected increase” in spending, is not a budget cut. He insisted the budget gap could be closed without tax increases and he held to those positions until he got his way.
With an agreement on the budget behind him, he was able to pass an ethics reform package and a law allowing gay marriage that will undoubtedly have an impact on the national debate.
Success after success, in a place known for failure, attracted national attention, but Cuomo has mostly refused to step onto the national stage. Except for one trip, he has been within New York state borders for the entire year and has stayed off national television screens as well. New York’s problems are too big to lose focus right now, or dream of bigger things.
In November, it appeared Cuomo’s winning season had come to an end. In his own words, the budget he had helped craft was “collapsing” under the weight of falling revenues.
Again, he summoned the parties together and produced a compromise agreement on an emergency budget deal that raised taxes on high income earners, but lowered taxes for most people in the middle class. It was a reversal of his “no new taxes” pledge, but he framed it as “tax reform” and said times had changed.
The voters don’t seem to mind. A Quinnipiac poll out this week puts his approval rating at 68%. Almost impossible numbers for any governor in this economy.
Unlike Governor Scott Walker, whose first year in office has had a nationwide impact, Governor Cuomo’s victories are limited mostly to New York and the cold, gray city of Albany. But that’s the way Cuomo has planned it. If he intends to step onto the national stage, in 2016 or beyond, he is first building a record to run on and he clearly intends to run one race at a time.
