Does Andrew Cuomo Really Think He Can Win A White House Bid As A Democrat?

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.

Too Bad Bloomberg Didn't Run For President

From the NY Post:

Georgina Bloomberg reveals she was relieved that her dad, Michael, didn’t make a run for president, “because it would have been so difficult on him,” she says. “I’ve seen the process of a campaign . . . I know how brutal it is.”

If anybody could use a little brutality - in this case, ego deflation - it's Michael "I Know Best About Everything!" Bloomberg.

Nothing would have been sweeter than seeing Bloomberg outpolled by comedian Pat Paulsen (dead since 1997) in Iowa.

In any case, here's hoping Sheriff Andy Cuomo runs in 2016 or 2020 and gets some similar ego deflation in the Democratic Primary.

In fact, here's hoping Cuomo gets some via Zephyr Teachout in this year's gubernatorial primary.