Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Cuomo Says He's A Calm Guy Who Never Takes Anything Personal

Governor Cuomo, responding to questions about Mayor de Blasio's critique from last week:

A week after Mayor Bill de Blasio eviscerated Gov. Andrew Cuomo in a pair of stinging interviews, Mr. Cuomo declined to punch back, telling reporters that the mayor was “obviously frustrated” with Albany.

“He chose to publicly vent his frustration. We all have our own styles and our own comportment and we all see our roles in a certain way,” Mr. Cuomo told reporters today after an unrelated announcement in Manhattan. “My father had one style, Koch had one style … that’s the mayor’s style, it’s not my style.”

Mr. Cuomo claimed that he often had to “bite” his “tongue,” implying that his more measured approach with the press today was an outcome of that tact.

“I try to bite my tongue once in a while,” he told the Observer.

More:

Oh yeah, Cuomo's a real calm guy who never takes things personal and always tries to bite his tongue.

You know, like this example from June 1:

The long-simmering animosity between Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio flared after the mayor hired a former Cuomo aide as his press secretary, a move the governor viewed as a betrayal, sources told the Daily News.

The new details into the bad blood between two of the state’s top Democrats emerged Monday just as de Blasio and Cuomo privately agreed to bury the hatchet, with both men taking pains to praise each other in public.

“Bill and I are going to be friends after these jobs are over,” Cuomo said during an appearance on upstate public radio’s “The Capitol Pressroom.”

But privately, Cuomo has been seething over de Blasio’s decision to hire Karen Hinton last month, sources said.

Hinton, along with de Blasio, worked for Cuomo when the governor was secretary of housing and urban development.

She is also married to Howard Glaser, a former top Cuomo aide who stepped down from the governor’s office last year.

“The governor was incensed,” said one source.

“He was berating his staff, ‘How can you let this happen?’ He sees imaginary slights everywhere, especially from the mayor.”

Cuomo was particularly outraged that he didn’t find out about Hinton’s hiring until after it was leaked to the press, sources said.

Some close to Cuomo were “calling around to see if there was any way to back it off,” the source said.

“He treats it as an act of treason in the environment we’re in,” said the source.

A second source said of Cuomo’s reaction, “There was a lot of anger (over the hire).”
And it was directed squarely at de Blasio.

See how calm Cuomo is?

See how he never takes anything personal?

As for biting his tongue, here's an example of that from June 25:

A wide swath of local politicos believe New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) basically admitted that he was the anonymous official who criticized New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) in a newspaper story.

The story in question was published in the Daily News on Wednesday evening. In it, a person who was only identified as a "top" Cuomo administration official was extensively quoted accusing de Blasio of bungling his relationship with the state government. De Blasio and Cuomo have an infamously tense relationship and the mayor did not achieve many of his top legislative goals on the state level this year, including those related to affordable housing and education.

"He is more politically oriented in terms of his approach ... and then he makes it almost impossible for him to achieve success," the anonymous Cuomo official said to the Daily News.

The interview was striking to many of the Albany reporters most familiar with Cuomo. The anonymous official spoke with one of Cuomo's most famous mannerisms: asking himself questions before answering them in order to reframe the issue at hand.

Underneath the teasing Thursday morning headline "Cuomo impersonator attacks mayor," Capital New York documented several reporters calling attention to the "eerily familiar" quotes in the Daily News interview.

See, he bites his tongue.

That's Governor Andrew Cuomo for you - a calm guy who never takes anything personal and always tries to bite his tongue and live by the adage that if you don't have anything nice to say about someone, you shouldn't say anything at all about them - on the record, at any rate.

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