It's pretty clear New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is preparing for a presidential run in the future.
Over the past few months, Cuomo has tried to raise his national profile, going on TV programs he once eschewed in order to sell his book (a book that has actually sold little, but that's another story), making high profile overseas trips to Israel and Aghanistan to tout his experience keeping New York safe from terrorism and joining fellow metro area governor Chris Christie in going his own way on the Ebola crisis response.
While Cuomo will not run in 2016 if fellow New Yorker Hillary Clinton runs, he certainly is positioning himself to run in two years if she doesn't run or in 2020 if she runs and loses to a Republican.
Cuomo has tacked to the right most of political career but even more so lately, hammering teachers and public schools in the weeks before the election, mocking the liberal base of his party in his recently released memoir (and elsewhere) and doing pretty much everything he can to keep the State Senate in Republican hands (despite promises to Working Families Party to the contrary in return for their ballot nod.)
This looks like a general election strategy, not a strategy for a Democrat who needs to get through Democratic primaries in a potential White House run, so what Cuomo is doing here is anybody's guess.
This weekend, in another sign he couldn't win a Democratic presidential primary, Moveon.org hammered him in an email blast.
In the past, Markos at the Daily Kos has hammered him too.
This election cycle, Cuomo has infuriated liberals in his party even more than usual, taking special care to tweak them even more right before the election.
I dunno, maybe he thinks he can run a general election strategy in a Democratic primary and eke out a win.
Maybe he's delusional and he thinks he's not doing permanent damage to his relationship with the liberal base of the Democratic Party (after all, he did repair his image after nearly destroying it in 2002 with the Carl McCall debacle.)
More likely, though, he simply despises liberals and the base of his party and can't help himself when he slams liberals, shoves through right-wing policies and governs like a fiscal conservative.
In any case, he has no chance to ever be president, no matter how many trips he makes abroad or how many appearances on FOX Business with Maria Bartiromo he makes - not if he runs as a Democrat at any rate.
The base of his party despises him and that scorn becomes more and more clear by the day.
He'll win re-election tomorrow and he may even post decent numbers doing it.
But the anger he's engendering with his antics will come back to haunt him in the end.
If things break properly for him he may actually win a nomination in 6 years or so - or at least a place on the ticket. Love him or hate him, he is busy building a reputation for competence in governing the most important state. If he landslides to victory tomorrow this fact won't be lost on the more practical power brokers in the Democratic party either. In a general election, disdain from the left fringe is actually an asset.
ReplyDeleteNahh - think you're misreading whats been going on lately.
DeleteThe press he got over the Ebola flip-flop was bad.
He's lost his natural constituency in the DC Beltway - look at the way he was hammered on the Morning Joe Show over the summer over Moreland.
Moreland remains a big problem for him. It's not going away. Bharara didn't warn him publicly because he's going to meekly go away. Whatever happens, you can bet it will be damaging to Cuomo. Maybe not an indictment of him, but Preet's pissed over the Moreland shutdown and the way Cuomo tried to make a fool of him. That will come back to haunt Cuomo in some way.
As for his reputation for competence that was also undercut with the first Moreland Commission - the one that looked at LIPA. The Times article last week was brutal on him. They would get a lot more scrutiny if he ran nationwide.
And I haven't even mentioned all the enemies he's made over the last few years. There are a lot of people who want to stick the proverbial shiv in him and his career as payback for his treatment of them. So it's not like he's got a lot of friends to help him out. In fact, he has no friends at all, except for Billy Joel.
Looks as though the NYT made nice this morning after reaming him the other day. They produced a little slide show of New York City residents expressing their admiration for his strength and the great job he is doing, remembering his father, pretty positive, so it was heavily edited. Just one had a tepid reaction to Cuomo.
ReplyDeleteOne look at Cuomo's face says it all.
The LIPA story was brutal. He runs nationally, he;s going to get a lot of scrutiny like that. And he won't be able to control the narratives anymore either.
DeleteLet Cuomo run as a Republican and spend his second term kissing up to the Tea Party.
ReplyDeleteHe certainly would fit right in with the Republican Party of about 1984, on the fiscal side at least.
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