Andrew Cuomo: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Regular readers may recall my simultaneous admiration of and disquiet with New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo. I enthusiastically supported his run for Governor even as I was disquieted by him before the race actually began (he, in my estimation, improved himself considerably as time wore on), and I didn't just support him because he was better than Paladino (though he clearly was). Rather, I thought I saw in him just the right, if perverse, balance of pragmatism and idealism, and I thought I saw in him someone with his father's mind and Bill Clinton's hands. Or, at least, the potential for such.

Time has for the most part proven me right. There is very little doubt that Andrew Cuomo has been an amazing legislative governor. As an administrative governor there's positive and negative signs (more on the negative signs later). Finally, his approval ratings together with the glowing reviews of his natural enemies are together proof enough that he is a master of the politics of his day as well.

This isn't to say, however, that he's perfect. (Really, what politician can be. Show me a perfect politician and I'll show you a fraud or a fiction.) I've divided some of Andrew Cuomo's most-prominent characteristics into 3 analytically useful categories: good, bad, and ugly.

THE GOOD

There's little doubt that Andrew Cuomo is a great legislative Governor; great at getting the New York State Legislature to do things he finds pleasing. Two on-time budgets in a row (with no great brinksmanship dramas). Ethics reform . Gay marriage. Property tax cap. Tier VI retirement plan. Newly progressive tax code. This is just a partial list and, whether you agree with all or any of them, they are notable achievements individually, let alone taken all together. I haven't gone through and done some kind of formal analysis of his legislative track record. The big ticket items have themselves been enough that I really don't need to.

Hypothesis made, hypothesis tested, hypothesis proven. Andrew Cuomo is effective at getting his policies enacted into law. Governor Cuomo, agree with him or not, gets the job done.

This New York Times article on the passage of the gay marriage bill I feel best-displays the multi-faceted nature of Andrew Como's legislative genius. He temporarily turns natural enemies into temporary and limited allies, enslaves natural allies, and marginalizes or (metaphorically) kills allies who will not be enslaved. He knows when to back-stab, and when to preach. Note, for example, how Governor Cuomo sealed the deal on gay marriage with a little bit of the soaring rhetoric that his father was famous for; and note also how this rhetoric was delivered not at a podium for a crowd, but in a smoke-filled room, and not to an enthralled popular audience, but for the same Senate Republicans he knows that he is, sooner or later, going to have to (metaphorically) kill. And it worked.

Andrew Cuomo, judging by his approval ratings also seems to have a way of communicating that people respond to. While I can't think of how to construct an opinion poll or a focus group that would really answer these questions satisfactorily, I think Andrew Cuomo's communication method benefits mightily from this little-commented on characteristic: You can more or less believe what he says, if you listen to what he actually says and try to not read too much into it.

The press and other actors in the political system, ranging from the Manhattan Institute to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to New York State Senator Reuben Diaz, paint Andrew Cuomo as a conservative because he is seen doing conservative things. He is criticized by Democrats, and liberal activists such as labor unions, for doing what the Wall Street Journal praised him for, departing from the Democratic orthodoxy. He is then criticized by the right for doing things the right does not approve. One excellent example is the way the Manhattan Institute referred to Tier VI as a missed opportunity; it didn't go far enough for them, you see. Both sides criticized Cuomo over the millionaires' tax, the left for letting the millionaires' tax expire and the right for raising the normal tax rate on high-income New Yorkers. (More on that in a little bit.)

The mistake the insiders make is to not listen to what Governor Cuomo actually says. He has not once said he was a conservative. Indeed, this quote from a New York Times piece is, I suggest, extremely telling:

Asked to describe his own beliefs during a news conference in Albany on Saturday, Mr. Cuomo was succinct. “I am a progressive Democrat who’s broke,” he said, adding: “I disagree with the concept that the only way to get better services is more money, more money, more money. “We’ve been spending a lot more money. We’re not getting better services.”

Who said Andrew Cuomo was a conservative? Surely not Andrew Cuomo. Indeed, Cuomo also specifically signaled that, were he President of the United States facing fiscal problems similar to that faced by President Obama, budget-cutting would not be his first choice of what to do:

“They [the federal government] have a different situation than the state has. The federal government has some capacities that a state doesn’t have, primarily the capacity to print money.”

Governor Cuomo's late 2011 legislative triumph with the New York State tax code was also subject to criticisms from both sides, with the left calling him Governor 1% for technically letting the millionaire's tax expire and the right calling him a traitor for allegedly going back on a promise to let the millionaires' tax expire. Lost in the shuffle was the fact that Cuomo never once, that I saw or read or heard, stated he was opposed to the idea of a more-progressive tax code. He said he was opposed to the millionaires' tax, which was a very particular surcharge which did, in fact, expire on schedule. The following quote from this piece found on the Capital Tonight blog is very telling:

“They have a much different situation than the state. From the state’s point of view, you raise taxes, you put yourself at a competitive disadvantage, right? People don’t have to be in New York, people can move to Connecticut, people can move to New Jersey, they can move to Pennsylvania. We’re literally hemoraghing [sic] people from our borders right now. So the state is in a fundamentally different position than the federal government.”

There's nothing in there that appears to suggest Andrew Cuomo was opposed to the millionaires' tax, or more-progressive taxation generally, on anything other than pragmatic grounds. A conservative he is not. He is a liberal who does not wish that liberal orientation to get in the way of achieving liberal ends.

Finally, as far as I can tell, the more-progressive tax rates worked into the New York State tax code now will not expire as the millionaires' tax did. I haven't reviewed the language but no account I've read suggests that the new Cuomo tax code will expire, though it is as I recall subject to formal review at some point. Since when did being progressive or liberal be defined by one's reliance on a temporary funding stream or one-shot? Andrew Cuomo did liberalism the right way: He made a permanent progressive change in the tax code. Feel free to call it a millionaires' tax or not tall it that according to your whim. I have the distinct impression that Andrew Cuomo doesn't much care what you call it.

Andrew Cuomo is, as demonstrated, clearly great at getting his way with the New York State Legislature, and at projecting a consistent image to which the public responds in a positive way. I withhold judgment on his ability to perform one of the other major jobs of a Governor of New York, public administration, until I have more concrete data (the Sage Commission, for example, is still in the middle of its work, the NY Performs effort is still in its infancy, and there's some good signs and some bad ones about both efforts), but early signs are (on balance) good.

For example while New York's unions may be grumbling about the content of the deals they made with the Cuomo administration they were in fact really quite good, especially relative to, say, Wisconsin. For another example, while the Sage Commission perhaps shows signs of lack of direction and being unsure what to do, I will take that over some of the overnight, more or less thoughtless government “reforms” of Goerge Pataki, the needlessly hard-charging but rudderless “steamroller” approach of Eliot Spitzer, and the demoralizing drift of David Paterson.

THE BAD

One aspect of Governor Cuomo's political persona that I think voters respond to well is his New York City, Italian-American, mafioso swagger. It seems to go well with his ability to bargain one moment, inspire the next, then slit your throat the next. It also seems to go well with his appeal to a well-reasoned variant on common sense.

However, that swagger does get him into trouble on occasion. While Cuomo handled well Eliot Spitzer's pointing out (correctly if hypocritically) that Andrew Cuomo is known as a dirty player behind the scenes (Cuomo issued an icy statement through a spokesman), he did not handle it as well when State Senator Diane Savino opposed the Tier VI retirement package. Cuomo responded as follows:

Subsequently asked about Sen. Diane Savino’s scolding of Megna (“While you may be confident that you could accomplish (Tier VI) talking amongst yourselves, you’re not going to get anywhere,” she told him at one point), Cuomo said the tenor of her comments suggested she was saying, “‘I don’t want to have to do it unless CSEA tells me it’s OK; I don’t want to have to do it unless PEF tells me it’s OK.”

“And then I would say back to the senator who scolded my budget director, ‘Who do you represent, the people of the state or the labor unions?’” Cuomo said. “That’s why, good thing she didn’t ask me that question.” He turned to Megna, sitting a few seats over on his right. “Did you say that? That was a good response for you yesterday.”

There was, in fact, an excellent reason Budget Director Megna did not respond that way. It was a stupid statement that needlessly questioned the integrity of one of the State Senators whose integrity is the least-able to be reasonably questioned.

At best Cuomo exaggerated. At worst he came far too close to comfort to the political style of Carl Paladino. Cuomo, perhaps, learned all too well from the surprising successes conservatives enjoyed against his old boss, President Bill Clinton, in large part through use of wildly exaggerated rhetoric. That might work, for a long while even, but it won't work forever and it's best when someone dumb does it. The public will, I think, buy dumb things done by a dumb guy but not dumb things done by a smart guy. And the Cuomo name alone ensures that no one will ever see Andrew Cuomo as dumb.

This kind of exaggerating is unworthy of Andrew Cuomo and I suggest strongly that he needs to cut it out. It has already led, I suggest, to a needlessly heavy handling of government employees, for example during the contract negotiations.

Cuomo's mafiaoso swagger has lead to other self-defeating actions and statements. See this piece from Crain's New York for some examples. Here's a few telling quotes from that piece.

“He is so unbelievably involved in almost everything,” said an Albany insider of Mr. Cuomo. “On one level, it's very impressive because he's a machine in the way he works. But it's also completely paralyzing and debilitating because [agencies] can't go to the bathroom without him giving the go-ahead.”

Excessive micro-managing is a bad enough tactic when attempting to run a bureaucracy as big and complex as New York State's. If Andrew Cuomo has his sights set higher, he may well discover that it's an even worse tactic in Washington than it is in Albany.

Also, the following was said by a now-former counsel of Governor Cuomo's:

“I don't care if you've done stupid for 20 years. We don't do stupid.”

That quote occurred in the context of a long-standing Labor Department interpretation of the law that the Cuomo Administration felt was out of step with the “New York is open for business slogan. I don't know about you, but, based on this piece, the earlier take on the law doesn't sound “stupid” to me. It sounds like a clash between reasonable interpretations of the law. Andrew Cuomo's potential micro-managing of the agencies potentially ruins his status as a competent public manager. Given that during the campaign he staked his reputation in-part on his achievements at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, note the prominent role played by Cuomo's role at HUD on Cuomo's campaign Internet site it is a potential major issue for Cuomo to be a bad public manager in a way it might not have otherwise been.

As I hope is obvious from the above examples, the kinds of exaggerations that Andrew Cuomo seems prone are problematic in and of themselves but lead to other problems, such as an excessively heavy-handed management style. Perhaps Andrew Cuomo should take a lesson from himself and learn to deal with his own bureaucracy as he has with the Legislature? Which is to say with the knowledge a predecessor of his lacked that steamrollers tend to get stuck?

On a related note, Andrew Cuomo also seems to have bizarrely learned from Republicans that the private sector is inherently better than the public sector. This concerns me because the prejudice, and that's really what it is, is both untrue and uniquely resistant to evidence. The head of Cuomo's SAGE Commission, for example, is Antonio M. Perez, the current head of Eastman-Kodak, who in addition to his Sage duties is also in the middle of a major effort to reform and reorganize Eastman-Kodak.

One problem, though. I looked through business-related Internet sites and journals to see if I could find some indication that Mr. Perez is well-regarded and that his efforts are commonly considered likely to succeed. I found very few. If his job is to bring to New York State's bureaucracy what he brought to Eastman-Kodak, then I am afraid that this is a sign Andrew Cuomo has fallen prey to one of the private sector's worst fallacies: The belief that if something is said short and loud, that something must be true. The public sector, fighting for much more than just monetary value to the shareholders, cannot afford to hold to this mentality. New York deserves better, deserves real and thoughtful and deliberative government reforms, and Andrew Cuomo certainly seems capable of delivering that. But if he persists in modeling himself after the private sector, how long, I wonder, until New York State resembles Wall Street during the waning days of the Bush Presidency?

Some of these issues were touched on by Elizabeth Benjamin, in this piece, wherein Cuomo addressed some of the comparisons between himself and Governor Al Smith and the famous “power broker,” Robert Moses. This excerpt from Cuomo's remarks, apparently in response to a question asked by Benjamin, is potentially telling:

“The point of Al Smith and his ability to manage the government just on this point I thought was profound, especially coming in the door because in many ways that’s enemy number one. The misamangement the atrophy of state government that has been years in the making…that’s what Al Smith was all about.

…

People trusted Al Smith. They trusted the government’s capacity and integrity. There are ways for government to get things done without using a ramrod, obviously. Your characterization that Mr. Moses used a ramrod — other people would disagree with that characterization, but it was yours. But the consultation and the process shouldn’t be paralyzing. You know, government needs to work, society needs to be able to replace a bridge.”

What I see in this quote, ironically, leads right into “the ugly.”

THE UGLY

One of the better college-level introduction to US politics textbooks is The Democratic Debate, by Bruce Miroff, Todd Swanstrom, and Raymond Seidelman. In it, these authors downplay the traditional liberal/conservative divide and recast American political conflicts as being between different visions of democracy. “Popular democracy” stresses political participation by the masses, both an involved and informed electorate during the electoral process and an involved and informed consumer of services during the policy-making and governing processes. “Elite democracy” stresses the role of leaders. Under elite democracy, the people elect leaders to lead, then the people step out of the way. If the people do not like what those leaders do, the people will vote those leaders out next election cycle.

The authors of the textbook have an admitted bias toward popular democracy, but I for one do not. I think there's an excellent case to be made for elite democracy. After all, who wants to be involved in the gut-wrenching, soul-staining decisions that are part of day to day life in politics and government. Which fire houses will close. Which government employees will be laid off, and thus deprived of their livelihoods. Which interrogation tactics constitute torture, and which don't. The whole idea of electing leaders to do the people's work is that some of the people's work is both complex and nasty and ordinary people shouldn't have to do it.

Governor Cuomo is often accused of not maintaining an open enough government. His responses, delivered himself and through such illustrious surrogates as Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, often draw from notions of elite democracy. The following example, spoken by Sheldon Silver as reported by Elizabeth Benjamin here is, I think, very telling. Responding to allegations that the debate over the new tax code was not open enough, Silver stated:

“I think there has been open debate for a year and a half now on what we put forth in a millionaire’s tax. There have been no secrets about it. We have taken a strong position. The public has weighed in. Labor has weighed in. Editorial boards have weighed in. There has been as much public debate about our tax codes as there have ever been. I think what the great thing is about this is, unlike our colleagues in Washington, we came together with diverging views from different parties or the same party, we have to put New Yorkers back to work.”

In other words: The voices were heard and considered. When it came time for the actual decision to be made, the time for participation had passed and the time for leadership had begun. Debate over the particular measure to be considered isn't as important as is on the underlying issues.  Though this quote wasn't from Cuomo or one of his direct employees, it was from a prominent supporter of his and is along lines similar to those I've heard from Cuomo and his direct employees, and thus using the quote seemed fair.

Now I am, as stated, a genuine believer in elite democracy, so what's so ugly about this? What's so ugly to me about a fellow believer in elite democracy ascending to the Governorship of New York State? On one level this is elite democracy at its finest.

Well there's two answers to that question. The first is that, sometimes, a lack of openness can lead to an appearance of impropriety at minimum, actual impropriety at worst. Sunlight may not always be a great disinfectant, but the lack of it sure doesn't help, especially when it comes to those all-important perceptions. Note, for example, this editorial piece from the New York Times. Whether the Times is right in its implications about the Committee to Save New York and gaming/gambling interests is, for present purposes, less relevant than the fact that the Cuomo Administration has, through its lack of openness, walked into a trap.

The second answer is more complex. I feel that even an elite democracy should at least value openness, even if it doesn't always practice it. What I am afraid I feel from Andrew Cuomo when openness questions are asked is that he doesn't particularly value openness. And there is to my mind a difference between a Governor who values openness but is not afraid to not practice it, versus a Governor who does not value openness. Even in an elite-led democracy, I want those elites to value openness.

There's still time for Governor Cuomo to win me over on this issue I suppose. Despite myself he's won me over on many others.

But until that day, until he either changes his ways or convinces me that I was incorrect all along, I feel safe in labeling this strange characteristic of Andrew Cuomo's “ugly.”

CONCLUSIONS

So where does this all lead?  What does it all ad up to other than making a movie analogy?

The truth is that I don't know.  A lot depends on what happens next.