Your humble sometimes-blogger (hey, I'm still technically here! I haven't put a complete end to RAGGED THOTS as Andrew Sullivan did to The now-departed -- dormant? -- Daily Dish) returned to Opinion Journal on Friday. I
chatted with Mary Kissel on the squabbles over New York city mayoral control of public schools. On one side is, of course, the mayor, Bill de Blasio. On the other, is his favorite nemesis, Gov. Andrew Cuomo!
Check out the video for the rest:
.
Our NYP editorial
will give further context!
Labels: Andrew Cuomo, Bill de Blasio, charter schools, schools
# posted by Robert A. George @ 10:30 PM
The Wall Street Journal editorial board's
Mary Kissel and I chatted Wednesday about the impending Long Island Rail Road strike and its implications for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio (vacationing in Italy, Mr. Mayor? Serioiusly?).
Enjoy the segment!
Labels: Andrew Cuomo, Bill de Blasio, LIRR, Long Island Rail Road, strike, unions
# posted by Robert A. George @ 6:27 PM
Originally published in the New York Post, February 25, 2014
Both Cuomo, de Blasio Heirs to Clinton Politics
Since Election Day 2013, there’s been a tight struggle between Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio to determine, not just who’s the King of New York, but who’s the biggest “SOB.” That is, who’s the true “Son of Bill” — the rightful heir to that other Bill who still looms over Democratic politics: Bill Clinton.
After all, the still-beloved-by-his-party 42nd president swore in New York’s 109th mayor on Jan. 1. But, ever the master of the middle-of-the-road, he tipped the rhetorical hat to departing Mayor Mike Bloomberg — striking a different tone than others on the inaugural stage — even while endorsing the new mayor’s concerns over income inequality.
Just a few feet away sat Gov. Cuomo, who served as President Clinton’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development — where de Blasio worked before heading back north to run then-First Lady Hillary Clinton’s US Senate campaign.
Publicly, both the governor and the mayor claim they’re old friends from that time. But de Blasio confidantes paint a slightly more complex picture, saying Cuomo was a high-handed boss who didn’t mind reminding subordinates (particularly one Bill de Blasio) who was top dog. That dynamic seems to fit what’s happened in the few weeks since they shared that inaugural stage.
The fact is, each man seems to have learned different things from Clinton: Cuomo’s copied Clintonian tactics, while de Blasio seems to have absorbed some of his worst habits, including political ones.
Cuomo has plainly mastered the classic Clinton technique of triangulation — and skillfully used de Blasio to do it. The president set himself up as the above-the-fray moderate between an unacceptable/incompetent left (old-school Democrats) and a radical right (my then-boss, Newt Gingrich, and the post-1994 Republican Congress). That allowed him to reject the overly ambitious liberal agenda (HillaryCare) of his first two years, rebound from a disastrous 1994 midterm election that swept the GOP into power and cruise to a rather easy 1996 re-election.
Cuomo has done something similar since de Blasio became mayor. The progressive mayor has provided the governor with a tax-and-spend (on Pre-K and minimum wage) foil that Cuomo has been only too happy to parry at every turn.
Thus, even the governor’s rhetorical misstep about there being “no place” for pro-life, Second Amendment-supporting conservatives in New York (a case of triangulating a little too hard?) seems to have faded from the collective memory, replaced by the image of a “reasonable” leader balancing a social policy that enjoys widespread support statewide while hewing to a fiscal rectitude “brand” by refusing to raise taxes for that policy — as one too-liberal mayor demands.
Secondly, how was that fiscal rectitude brand first displayed? By trading decades of Albany dysfunction for three (soon to be four) on-time balanced budgets.
The on-time bit makes for another interesting contrast with de Blasio, who in his first weeks in office has shown an impressive ability to emulate one of Bill Clinton’s least endearing habits — perpetual lateness.
Ask anyone who had to engage with the then-president in the ’90s, and you’ll always hear the same thing: He can’t be on time for almost anything — and the earlier in the day the event was, the less likely he’d make it.
And while Clinton never started his State of the Union a half-hour late, Mayor de Blasio did just that at his first State of the City.
Apparently, like Clinton, the mayor stays up late — and thus doesn’t get up so early. That squares with what we know about one incident: He was wide awake enough to call the NYPD following the post-11 pm arrest (and subsequent release) of Bishop Orlando Findlayter.
Needless to say, perpetual tardiness leads to other poor judgment calls — such as, ahem, speeding to your next appointment two days after calling for stricter speed laws.
Hey, it’s been barely two months. Bill Clinton managed to right his ship of state after the aforementioned midterms. Bill de Blasio may just want to slow down, get some rest and study some of those lessons, so he can become not just Tall Bill, but NYC’s true SOB.
Labels: Andrew Cuomo, Bill Clinton, Bill de Blasio
# posted by Robert A. George @ 8:00 AM
In just two weeks, GOP gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino has, 1) alleged his Democratic opponent Andrew Cuomo had affairs while married to then-wife Kerry Kennedy; 2) gotten into a shouting match with a New York Post reporter -- and called a Daily News columnist a liar; 3) issued a supposedly clarifying video in which he declared that Cuomo's "prowess is legendary"; 4) Sunday, declared his opposition to children "being brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option..."; 5) apologized for previous statement; 6) lost the support of the religious Jewish group which he was originally trying to impress; 7) learned that campaign aide Roger Stone marched in this year's New York Gay Pride Parade -- with Spitzer "madam" candidate Kristen Davis (possibly NSFW pics included).
And on and on goes the fun saga of Mr. Paladino. On an almost daily basis, the candidate can't seem to get out of his own way. It's one ill-timed, ill-said comment after another -- given in a year when, even in New York, Democrats are particularly vulnerable. Instead, Cuomo has barely had to say a word, as Paladino self-destructs.
Read more »Labels: Andrew Cuomo, Carl Paladino, New York state politics
# posted by Robert A. George @ 10:31 AM
Last week was hardly John McCain's finest moment when, deciding that the Securities and Exchange Commission bore major responsibility for the Wall Street madness, he essentially called for SEC Chairman Chris Cox to be fired.
(Perhaps it was my imagination, but it seemed like the day after McCain called for Cox's head, President Bush went out of his way to lump Cox, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke as a tight troika dispatched to get the financial markets back in order. It seemed like there was a message being sent that Bush wasn't signaling blame for any single one of them.)
On "60 Minutes" tonight, McCain amended that by saying that, yes, he recognized that, technically, after nomination by the president and confirmation by the Senate, the head of the SEC can't be "fired" by the president who appointed him in the first place. However, he asserted, "When I'm president, if I want somebody to resign, they resign."
So, correspondent Scott Pelley asks, who would McCain replace Cox with. The response: "This may sound a little unusual, but, I've admired Andrew Cuomo. I think he's someone who could restore some credibility, lend some bipartisanship to this effort."
Pelley points out that Cuomo "served in the Cabinet of Bill Clinton." McCain responds, "Yes, and he did a good job and he has respect and he has prestige."
Huh? Is McCain serious? Now, don't get me wrong. Cuomo, currently New York state attorney general, is a smart Democrat, and moderate in many ways. However, there's a strong case to be made that, as Clinton's HUD secretary, many Cuomo decisions actually may have exacerbated the mortgage meltdown that is at the heart of the current financial industry crisis.
In fact, the best case for that was made, in of all places, the Village Voice. Author Wayne Barrett is an ideological journalist (as, is, of course, the publication for which he writes), but in this case, that very bias gives more strength to the argument that Barret makes in tying the Cuomo-led HUD's decision to push Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into the subprime mortgage markets: Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis. He took actions that—in combination with many other factors—helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded "kickbacks" to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans. Three to four million families are now facing foreclosure, and Cuomo is one of the reasons why.
What he did is important—not just because of what it tells us about how we got in this hole, but because of what it says about New York's attorney general, who has been trying for months to don a white hat in the subprime scandal, pursuing cases against banks, appraisers, brokers, rating agencies, and multitrillion-dollar, quasi-public Fannie and Freddie.
It all starts, as the headlines of recent weeks do, with these two giant banks. But in the hubbub about their bailout, few have noticed that the only federal agency with the power to regulate what Cuomo has called "the gods of Washington" was HUD. Congress granted that power in 1992, so there were only four pre-crisis secretaries at the notoriously political agency that had the ability to rein in Fannie and Freddie: ex–Texas mayor Henry Cisneros and Bush confidante Alfonso Jackson, who were driven from office by criminal investigations; Mel Martinez, who left to chase a U.S. Senate seat in Florida; and Cuomo, who used the agency as a launching pad for his disastrous 2002 gubernatorial candidacy.
With that many pols at the helm, it's no wonder that most analysts have portrayed Fannie and Freddie as if they were unregulated renegades, and rarely mentioned HUD in the ongoing finger-pointing exercise that has ranged, appropriately enough, from Wall Street to Alan Greenspan. But the near-collapse of these dual pillars in recent weeks is rooted in the HUD junkyard, where every Cuomo decision discussed here was later ratified by his Bush successors.
And that's not an accident: Perhaps the only domestic issue George Bush and Bill Clinton were in complete agreement about was maximizing home ownership, each trying to lay claim to a record percentage of homeowners, and both describing their efforts as a boon to blacks and Hispanics. HUD, Fannie, and Freddie were their instruments, and, as is now apparent, the more unsavory the means, the greater the growth. But, as Paul Krugman noted in the Times recently, "homeownership isn't for everyone," adding that as many as 10 million of the new buyers are stuck now with negative home equity—meaning that with falling house prices, their mortgages exceed the value of their homes. So many others have gone through foreclosure that there's been a net loss in home ownership since 1998.
Read the whole piece: Making allowances for Barrett's ideological leanings, the article is well-reported.
Now, John McCain might not know all the intricacies of the financial crisis, but, of all the possible individuals out there to consider to head the Securities & Exchange Commission, the first person that comes to McCain's mind is Andrew Cuomo?
Oh, and considering Andrew Cuomo as possible head of the SEC in a McCain administration is also problematic given that, last week, McCain's campaign launched two ads linking Obama's relationship to two former Fannie Mae executives -- Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson!
Ye gods.
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit and Politico readers! To underscore the point made above, the most troubling aspect of McCain's Cuomo reference isn't merely the glib nod toward "bipartisanship" and Washington-focused "respect." Instead, it's that McCain didn't seem to consider the HUD-Fannie/Freddie connection. Sure, he might not know the specific details of what Cuomo may have done in the late-'90s. But, you have to know that HUD has basic oversight of those agencies. Consider: HUD -- beginning in the Clinton-Cuomo era and continuing into the Bush years -- may have been far more culpable in creating the conditions for the current crisis than anything the SEC has done under Chris Cox. But McCain is suggesting replacing Cox with Cuomo. Unbelievable. No wonder George Will said Sunday (before the "60 Minutes" piece aired), "John McCain showed his personality this week, and it made some of us fearful."
Labels: 60 Minutes, Andrew Cuomo, John McCain, Presidential politics
# posted by Robert A. George @ 8:41 PM
