Cuomo's opponents have taken his attendance as an opportunity to question Cuomo's reform credentials, to paint Cuomo as politics as usual.
There's surely a grain of truth to the accusation that Cuomo is, or at least has been, an insider. Cuomo doesn't actually seem to deny this. For example, on the campaign trail he talks openly about his time working in the gubernatorial administration of his father, Mario Cuomo. Andrew Cuomo appears to base his reform credentials not on a complete lack of insider status, which if he tried to claim it would be a lie for sure, but because but because as Attorney General he hasn't directly been part of the political game as it's currently being played.
But why would any would-be reformer, even a would-be reformer who's also an unapologetic once-insider, want to be seen with a politician like Rangel, who's rarely referred these days to without being described as “ethically challenged” or “disgraced?” Especially since Rangel's career appears to be the ultimate American political cautionary tale. Rangel replaced the famous Adam Clayton Powell in the U.S. House of Representatives after the latter's ethical problems, only to now face ethical problems of his own.
Andrew Cuomo himself provided one answer:
“Let’s get the facts and then we’ll make the decision once we have the facts,” Cuomo said. “I think we have to be careful jumping to conclusions before we have all the facts and we get both sides of the story. But I’ve been at this long enough to know there’s always two sides to a story—and sometimes there’s a third side.”
And while his statement is surely correct, I don't think anyone believes that was the only reason for Cuomo's attendance. There's two or three sides to every story, but not everyone who has a story has Andrew Cuomo in attendance at his or her birthday party. Not even every politician, or every Democratic politician, does.
Another answer of course is that provided by radio commentator Alan Chartock:
Because, clearly these people [politicians] know that he's highly popular, Rangel, within a certain community [the Black community], and he [Cuomo/generic politician] doesn't want to lose those votes.
Chartock wasn't talking exclusively about Andrew Cuomo, but did clearly mean to include him.
Andrew Cuomo in particular cannot take the Black vote for granted, as he faces a challenge from fringe candidate Charles Barron. Barron is a current Member of the New York City Council, and a former Black Panther, whose campaign is explicitly based on race and racial issues. Indeed, the candidacy was founded over Barron's unhappiness with Cuomo's White running mate. Though considered a fringe candidate, Barron did manage to get nearly 45,000 petitions for his candidacy, in contrast with Carl Paladino's 28,000.
As far as I'm concerned, that means that if Paladino is a viable candidate, necessarily so is Barron. Therefore, Andrew Cuomo can't take the Black vote for granted.
There is, however, potentially another, more personal, reason for Andrew Cuomo's attendance at Rangel's birthday party.
The relationship between Rangel and the Cuomo family, it seems, goes back awhile, to an early run by Mario Cuomo to be Mayor of New York City. Then-incumbent Mayor Ed Koch had rankled the city's substantial Black population rather badly. Rangel and Percy Sutton (another Harlem-based Black political leader) were looking for a reason to endorse anyone other than Koch, and Cuomo first seemed viable. Cuomo, however, didn't meet Rangel's and Sutton's hopes or expectations. As Rangel described in his book, And I haven't Had a Bad Day Since,
When we [Sutton and Rangel] met with Cuomo, he took great pains to explain that he was color blind, and therefore could not promise a certain number of positions for blacks in a Cuomo administration. He said that he himself wasn't even Italian; he was just an American. The very idea that blacks would need particular political support was racist, Cuomo told us. (And I Haven't Had a Bad Day Since, page 206)
This simply wouldn't do, especially as contrasted with Ed Koch's more accommodating stance. “What do you want,” Koch asked Rangel and Sutton. “How can we work this out?” Interestingly, and tellingly about how politics is done in Harlem, Rangel also complained bitterly about how “a handful of blacks,” without his approval, endorsed Cuomo on the steps of City Hall. (And I Haven't Had a Bad Day Since, page 207.)
Rangel also related how he was upset about Mario Cuomo becoming nominated by then-Governor Hugh Carey to run to be Hugh Carey's Lieutenant Governor in the election of 1978.
In my opinion, Mario Cuomo had done nothing to merit getting on the very short line to the governor's chair. What had he done? He arbitrated a nasty dispute between residents of Forest Hills [a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens] and advocates seeking to build public housing there.
Meanwhile, we in the African-American community believed State Senator Basil Patterson [sic] deserved consideration. The whole idea that [Mario] Cuomo was slam-dunked for the governor's chair while Patterson [sic] was overlooked didn't sit well with us. Twenty-four years later, Andrew Cuomo didn't do much to redeem his dad when he challenged our Carl McCall in the 2002 [gubernatorial] primary. (And I Haven't Had a Bad Day Since, page 210, emphasis added by me.)
Sometimes, politics in New York State is personal. Could it be that Andrew Cuomo showed up at Rangel's birthday party in part because he feels the need to redeem his father in the eyes of Representative Rangel?
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