Hochul has gotta give it her brawl!
Novice ‘accidental’ gov faces long odds
KATHY Hochul gets no respect, and no surprise there. She hasn’t earned any. Accidental governors — inexperienced, unelected and with a thin independent power base — start on the outside looking in.
Remember David Paterson? He was the last New York governor to take office after an incumbent, Eliot Spitzer, was chased by a sex scandal — and he never caught traction.
Hochul, installed after Andrew Cuomo’s hurried departure, seems to be headed down that same path. This is a worrisome prospect; a state left to the tender mercies of a rapacious Legislature, which is where New York seems to be right now, is looking at a mountain of hurt.
Certainly the Legislature has treated Hochul roughly, if not rudely. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, and his Senate counterpart, Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, smile broadly as they pile additional billions onto Hochul’s already overstuffed new state budget. Plus they politely kick to the curb such high-profile policy initiatives as mayoral control of New York City schools and to-go restaurant booze sales.
This doesn’t have to be. Constitutionally, Kathy Hochul is among the most powerful governors in America. But authority must be exercised to be effective, and so far she has shown no appetite for that.
Nor does she seem equipped to fight — certainly not in the arena that just chewed up and spit out the famously experienced, and notoriously combative, Andrew Cuomo.
Hochul was 14 years on the town board of Hamburg, an Erie County bedroom community of some 60,000 — or roughly 55% of the population of, say, Jackson Heights. Then she spent four years filing deeds and mortgages as Erie County clerk — before moving on to a single term in Congress and then to six-plus years on the shelf as Cuomo’s lieutenant governor.
Ambitious? Yes. Experienced? Hardly. Allies? None to speak of, apart from the special interests that have pumped some $22 million into her campaign accounts — and favor-seekers are infamously fickle friends.
And so there stands Kathy Hochul — the tourist from Hamburg, wide-eyed in Times Square and eager to turn a quick buck at three-card monte.
Unfair? Perhaps.
By all appearances, though, she’s about to be rolled by a Legislature that wants to add some $6 billion in new social spending to her proposed $216 billion budget — the extra spending mostly to be financed by non-recurring federal COVID dollars.
And what does she get in return? Certainly not her mayoralcontrol and hooch-to-go bills. Nor does she get so much as a fig leaf to stand behind on what’s sure to be the hot-button issue this election year: crime.
That’s because the uber-progressive 2022 Legislature, when not pushing new social spending, is all about criminal-coddling.
Reform bail “reform?” Not without leadership — and right now the only elected leader even talking tougher anti-crime policy is Eric Adams. Good for him, of course, but there are limits to what even the mayor of New York City can do.
Indeed, how odd is it that Adams is the only truly vocal supporter of a full range of issues that are normally a governor’s concern — crime and civic disruption, yes, but also education and postCOVID economic development.
But not nearly as odd as a governor going into a general election without making an effort to build a personal public record that voters can recognize and perhaps embrace.
New York’s governors have been national leaders over the decades — and while many have made their mistakes, very few have just been along for the ride.
Yet that’s where Hochul is at the moment: The Legislature is setting the agenda, Adams is in modest dissent — and she’s just the mouse in the middle.
Can that mouse roar? Will she? New Yorkers can only hope.