Cuomo Breaks Working Families Party Promises

Gee, here's a surprise:

It has been more than four months since the fragile marriage between the governor and the Working Families Party was consummated: The group endorsed Mr. Cuomo, over many of its members’ objections, after he agreed to pursue a long list of liberal goals, as part of a deal that Mr. de Blasio helped broker.

The top priority was an effort to tilt the balance of power in the State Senate, where Republicans currently share leadership with a group of breakaway Democrats.

Less than a month before Election Day, with polls showing some key Senate races leaning in Republicans’ favor, the arrangement with the governor appears increasingly fraught. Despite his pledge to push for Democratic control of the Senate, Mr. Cuomo has at times seemed not to have a strong opinion about the outcome of the November elections.

“You can’t say, ‘Well, I can work well if they elect this party,’ ” he told reporters last month. “They elect a legislature: Democratic, Republican, whatever they elect. I think the job of the governor is to figure out how to make it work.”

Some of the governor’s grudging supporters say he has already faltered on his promise: Mr. Cuomo has not ruled out endorsing a Republican incumbent from Buffalo, Mark J. Grisanti, calling the decision “personally difficult.” Mr. Grisanti, who lost the Republican primary to a right-leaning challenger but is staying in the race as the candidate of the Independence Party, backed the governor’s push to legalize same-sex marriage.

... 

Democrats hoped that with the support of Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Cuomo, they would be able to win enough seats this year to take control of the Senate. But those efforts are not going so well. A promising candidate running on Long Island ended his candidacy in September after his former law firm accused him of fraud, and a series of polls conducted last week offered a bleak outlook in several other contests.

The polls, by Siena College, found three incumbent Democrats trailing Republican challengers by double-digit margins. And in two Republican-controlled districts on Long Island that Democrats had hoped to capture, the polls showed the Republican candidates holding wide leads.

City officials have framed the fate of the State Senate as crucial to their agenda. A shift in the balance of power, they say, could help advance legislation related to the minimum wage, campaign-finance reform and immigration, among other issues.

Cuomo doesn't want any of those things - an increase in the minimum wage, campaign-finance reform, immigration reform - so he doesn't really want a Democratic State Senate.

What he wants is for things to remain the same, with Republicans in control, an Independent Democratic Caucus backing Republicans and the rightward lean of the State Senate remaining as it is.

His book, out soon, says it all:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo , whose center-right policies have alienated him from much of his party’s progressive base, attacks the “extreme left of the Democratic Party” in his new memoir, according to a report in the New York Times.

While his father Mario Cuomo’s 1984 address at the Democratic National Convention served as a liberal rallying cry, Andrew Cuomo has repeatedly found himself starkly at odds with the liberal wing of the party. Although the governor signed marriage equality and gun safety legislation into law and has staked out a robustly pro-choice position, he has also slashed corporate taxes, capped property taxes, maneuvered to keep his own party from controlling the New York State Senate, lent conditional support to fracking, and earned plaudits from the right-wing National Review for his conservative economic agenda. There’s also the federal probe into Cuomo’s disbanding of his much-heralded anti-corruption commission, which Cuomo had touted as evidence of his commitment to good government.

...

 Given his center-right track record, it’s hardly unsurprising that Cuomo is no fonder of the left than the left is of him. According to the Times – which got its hands on a copy of his new memoir, All Things Possible: Setbacks and Success in Politics and Life – Cuomo rips the “extreme left” in the book, particularly for what he depicts as its hostility to the rich. Leftists, Cuomo writes, “speak of punitively raising taxes on the rich and transferring the money to the poor” and seek to “demonize those who are very wealthy.”

Few things aid Cuomo's helping of the 1% than ensuring the State Senate continues to run as it has.

And so, Cuomo's promises to WFP were worthless.

Again I say, gee, what a surprise.