Cuomo caves to the Tea Party of the left
The floodgates open for a radical agenda
You’d think that after watching the Tea Party divide and weaken Republicans, Gov. Cuomo would know to steer clear of hard-line ideologues on his end of the spectrum.
But there he was Saturday, bowing and scraping for approval from the Working Families Party. He finally won the endorsement he coveted — but at the cost of tarnishing his brand as a fiscally sensible Democrat.
Suddenly, a governor who boasts about bringing bipartisanship to Albany was pledging to oust the bipartisan coalition that controls the state Senate.
Worse, a governor who rightly says New York has no future as the America’s highest-taxed state was helping to elevate a third party that believes just the opposite.
While the WFP’s politics hew to the hard left, the parallels between its convention and a Tea Party rally were hard to miss.
First, there was the almost ritualistic shaming of apostates within the ranks.
Just as the tricorn-hat crowd disparages anyone who shows the slightest moderation as a “Republican in Name Only,” so, too, was Cuomo derided as a “right-wing douchebag” and worse.
When the governor who legalized gay marriage addressed delegates by video — and pledged support for key WFP goals — many turned their backs and booed.
Also on display was a Tea Party-style insistence on ideological purity.
Delegates complained that Cuomo failed to devote more money to public schools, when New York already spends more per student on education than any other state — and gets mediocre results for the money.
They fault him for modestly cutting taxes on corporations, when New York still has one of worst business tax climates in the U.S.
The WFP claims to want more good-paying jobs for the working families in its name, but its platform flat-out opposes hydraulic fracturing to tap huge reserves of natural gas upstate — which would employ thousands.
Its knee-jerk distrust for corporations is the mirror image of the Tea Party’s distrust of any and all government programs.
And both groups are willing to waste a lot of political capital on infighting. While the Tea Party reflexively mounts primary challenges against anyone a millimeter to the left of Genghis Khan, the WFP aims to boot the state Senate’s Independent Democratic Caucus, which has a power-sharing deal with the GOP.
You’d think defeating Republicans would be the first priority. Instead, they target the likes of Staten Island’s Diane Savino — a former WFP activist who supports most of the party’s agenda and is currently leading the charge for the progressive cause of legalizing medical marijuana. Four years ago, Cuomo drove a hard bargain with WFP — insisting that party leaders issue a statement of support for his no-newtaxes agenda before accepting their endorsement and helping them claim the 50,000 votes needed to keep control of a ballot line.
This time, it was the party making demands — and Cuomo, leery of a challenge from the left, who caved.
He stuck to his guns against tax hikes, which is good. And most of his other concessions amounted to paying lip service to goals he has previously paid lip service to.
But if he follows through on his pledge to campaign for a Democratic Senate — which reportedly came with a promise to help raise $10 million for the cause — the centrist course he has pursued thus far would be in real jeopardy.
With both houses of the Legislature in the hands of Democrats — a large percentage of them cross-endorsed by the WFP — the floodgates would open for the party’s high-tax, business-hostile agenda.
And only Cuomo, or whoever succeeds him as governor, would stand in the way.