Recent history troubling

There’s a whiff of the Amateur Hour hovering over the Hochul administration these days that needs purging soon or New York’s first female governor is headed for an uncertain road to the November election. She is stumbling.

Even with the unusual circumstances that brought Kathy Hochul to the state’s highest office, the coming primary and general election looked to be an easy lift for the Democratic incumbent. But recent political chaos has raised doubts.

Those charged with vetting Brian Benjamin as her lieutenant governor back in August failed miserably. Public confidence in Hochul has been shaken. How a federal corruption probe that has recently gotten Benjamin five felony counts could have been missed is simply incomprehensible.

“He misled us,” was the gist of the defense out of the Hochul camp. Wait. You mean a New York City career politician trying to curry favor for a plum job doesn’t always tell the whole truth? Imagine that. Hochul took a hard hit in the polls over the Benjamin fiasco, and should have.

Misusing state aircraft for political campaigning on the public dime is nothing new. It’s become a cliché in New York after several administrations fell into the same trap. What caught my eye, though, was that it took newspaper stories pointing it out before the current administration fessed up and paid up, a repeat of the past. Apparently no one in state government learns from the past. Same old, same old.

Days after she took over from Andrew M. Cuomo, who resigned under pressure as the Legislature debated impeachment, Hochul made much of bringing squeaky clean ethical behavior and transparency to Planet Albany. She’s apparently been better with transparency, except during budget-making and fundraising. But that’s not saying much. Cuomo was terrible with transparency, for everything. But weak ethics at the very least remain a problem for Hochul, either in perception or in reality. In politics, perception and reality are the left and right arm of the same body.

Fundraising, for example, has been an eyebrow raiser for those sensitive to potential pay-to-play missteps. One of her primary rivals, Tom Suozzi, makes much of this, and he has a point. Times Union reporter Chris Bragg has done a stellar job over a series of articles enumerating instances where active campaign fundraising is associated with offering access, assistance and perhaps even more from the administration. Considering the latitude given by U.S. Supreme Court decisions in recent years, proving pay-to-play as a crime is difficult. But the point is not illegality, it’s ethics. Fundraising is a dodgy business.

The Hochul campaign came up with $22 million from donors by December, breaking even the prolific Cuomo’s past performances. So what are donors getting for all that money? We just don’t know. When we have confidence the governor is doing it right, it doesn’t matter. When our confidence wavers, it very much does and we imagine the worst. We are getting to that point.

And then there’s the monumental screw up over mandated voting reapportionment currently playing itself out with national consequences.

In most important national election years, New York is not much of a player because we are a predictably deep blue state. This mid-year election is an exception. So far, however, it appears Republicans have outthought, out-lawyered and generally outwitted Democrats and neutralized Democrats’ hopedfor gains in the imperiled House of Representatives. Our courts have thrown out the Democraticcreated lines for New York’s 22 House seats as unconstitutional gerrymandering. New lines for congressional and state Senate districts, and probably Assembly districts as well (although that is not yet decided), will be created by a special master who is not apt to be as charitable to Democrats as they were for themselves.

This is all 11th-hour stuff, the result of a designed-to-fail independent redistricting process approved by Cuomo eight years ago. Hochul largely inherited this smoking dumpster, but as titular head of the state Democratic Party, she is now partowner. It is a malevolent octupus with many tentacles.

We may have two primaries, one already scheduled for June and one in August to accommodate the forthcoming new voting district lines. Or one primary in August, that would include statewide and local races as well, depending on court decisions. Hochul strongly favors keeping the June primary in play because reopening the petitioning process for an August primary could work for Cuomo to join the fray for governor, which polls predict may be trouble that Hochul does not need at the moment. Or, Cuomo could decide to run as an independent in the general election if he sees Hochul continue to stumble. This is the scenario Republicans are dearly hoping for, since a three-way race gives them a much better chance of winning the governorship than they have right now.

Completing the perfect storm for Democrats is the addition of Rep. Antonio Delgado to replace Benjamin on the ballot. A good man. But a loss for the Democratic side of the House, as Republicans have gleefully pointed out.

Not a good stretch for Kathy Hochul.