Perdido 03

Perdido 03

Friday, January 15, 2016

Cuomo Loses One To De Blasio - For Now

Andrew Cuomo put somewhere between $800 million and $1 billion dollars in state aid cuts for NYC into the state budget in an attempt to further harm his "frenemy" Bill de Blasio - but this time, Cuomo's attack on de Blasio backfired.

Here's the Daily News on that:

Andrew Cuomo backs off budget proposal that would have cost NYC an extra $800M after protest from Bill de Blasio
Score one for the mayor.

Hours after Mayor de Blasio vowed Thursday to do whatever it takes to scuttle up to $800 million in costs Gov. Cuomo wanted to force the city to cough up, Cuomo began to backpedal on the costly proposal.

Cuomo presented a budget in his State of the State address Wednesday that called for the de Blasio administration to take on massive CUNY and Medicaid bills now paid by the state — but by the end of Thursday, he was pledging the city would not have to pay a penny.

Calling the cuts “harmful” and “debilitating,” Hizzoner said he’d go all out to sink the plan.
“There’s a phrase from American history, ‘By any means necessary.’ I would invoke that phrase,” de Blasio said when asked how he’d turn back the plan. “We’ll do whatever will work.

“We will fight these cuts. We will ask the assistance of both houses of the Legislature in fighting these cuts. They are unprecedented and they are unfair to this city,” said de Blasio, who has been feuding with Cuomo since summer after he accused him of governing with a vendetta.

Amid the criticism from de Blasio and budget watchdogs, Cuomo changed his tune on the plan — suggesting the point of the proposal was simply to get players to the table to cut costs for CUNY and Medicaid.

“This is the beginning of the budget process. The budget process goes on for months. This is really the beginning of the discussion,” he said on NY1 Thursday afternoon.

“At the end of the day, what you’ll see is it won’t cost New York City a penny,” Cuomo said. “We have to reduce the cost of the bureaucracy at CUNY. We have to reduce the cost of administration for Medicaid.”

Cuomo blamed the "tabloids" for causing trouble:

Taking note of a Daily News front page with the headline “Hey, Blaz, hope you played Powerball!” Cuomo said: “God bless the New York City tabloids. They can try to make trouble in the best of news and that’s what they’re doing here.

Oh yeah, the tabloids were causing trouble - because we all know how much trouble it is when the newspapers report that the governor's budget will cost the city between $800 million (reported by the Daily News) and $1 billion (a figure Politico NY reported.)

Cuomo's continuing to screw with de Blasio, it seems to be the only thing that motivates him these days other than that vision he has of himself as the new Robert Moses.

But just as happened with Cuomo's vaunted homeless policy of mandating municipalities take homeless people off the streets at gunpoint when the temperature hits freezing (another doozy aimed at hurting de Blasio that ended up hurting Cuomo instead), Cuomo has had to "backpedal" on the budget proposals that cut so much from NYC.

I would expect that Cuomo will try other ways to stick it to de Blasio (and thus NYC) in this budget before it's all said and done.

The irony is, the only place Cuomo shows any strength in polling is in NYC.

That's why, with headlines blaring that Cuomo was looking to destroy the city with budget cuts, he has no choice but to "backpedal" and say, "Oh, no - we're just starting the negotiation process here."

De Blasio may be weakened politically, but Cuomo's not in much better shape (he's at 39% in the last Siena poll) and if he takes a hit to his NYC approval numbers, he'll be in the mid-twenties before long.

With the NY Times and the other papers taking aim at Cuomo this morning, this doesn't look to be a battle with the city that Cuomo can win.

But we'll see.

Evil is like water - it looks to find a route no matter what.

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