A Tale of Two Conventions
After accepting the state Democratic Party’s nomination last week, Gov. Cuomo was off and running for re-election — against President Trump.
The gov devoted much of his 48-minute acceptance speech to Trump-bashing — not to presenting his vision for New York over the next four years, except to oppose the prez: “New York is the alternative state to Trump’s America,” he thundered.
Then again, Cuomo is eyeing a White House run in 2020, so he won’t be a full-time governor by the middle of next year.
Even the stuff we liked in his speech (as we noted Saturday) also works to boost his national ambitions: his vows to raise the minimum age for buying firearms to 21 and to pass a “red flag” law to let family members petition courts to temporarily seize guns from badly troubled loved ones.
Most of the pageantry served the same purpose: the endless PowerPoint that former City Council Speaker Chris Quinn slogged through, flagging all his past accomplish- ments, and of course the pro-Cuomo speeches from Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Tom Perez, the Democrats’ national chairman.
Perez’s endorsement was a shock: He’s been insisting all year that the national party
shouldn’t get involved in primaries. More, his line on how “Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul are charter members of the accomplishments wing of the Democratic Party” was a diss of Jumaane Williams, whom the polls suggest has a real shot at beating Hochul in the lt.-gov primary.
For any real vision of change in New York, you had to look to the Republican convention, where GOP gov nominee Marc Molinaro’s speech focused on issues that Cuomo ignored: stopping pay-to-play corruption; ending cover-ups of sexual harassment in Albany and in state government; reining in economic-development giveaways and fixing the MTA.
“Government should serve the people, not the political ambition of a governor,” he noted. At least one guy is running for the job he wants to actually for the next four years.