Gov. Cuomo: N.Y.’s Lyndon Johnson
As a champion of public housing, I had a front-row seat to Gov. Cuomo’s advocacy on behalf of tenants suing the city for mismanaging NYCHA. He shined a spotlight on the humanitarian crisis in public housing, promised a new way forward and delivered.
The end result: an executive order that empowers the tenants with a seat at the table for the first time ever and gives the city powerful new tools for delivering better, cheaper and faster repairs. An executive who moves that boldly and swiftly is hard to come by in a political culture that prefers to stand still.
In America’s political discourse, it has become fashionable to glibly dismiss experience as little more than a code word for “establishment.” But experience matters when governing within an entrenched system. The best intentions will only bring you so far and yield you so much. Political mastery, in the end, is what drives change in a place like Albany.
Andrew Cuomo is a political master in the tradition of Lyndon Johnson. Mastering the levers of power, as Johnson did in Washington and as Cuomo has done in Albany, is the kind of experience that sets the doers apart from the ill-fated do-gooders. It was not so long ago, when New Yorkers saw, in the span of two years, the difference between doing and do-gooding.
When the governor took office in 2011, marriage equality was far from a fait accompli. Before then, legislation had languished for years and failed conspicuously in 2009. It was the work and willpower of a political master that finally propelled it to passage.
The failed attempt at marriage equality before 2011 offers a cautionary tale: A progressivism that devalues experience will rarely deliver what it promises. It will give you the words you want but rarely the results you need.
Cuomo has something more real and reassuring than rhetoric: He has a record. Voters who bear the burns of broken promises are inclined to place greater trust in a tangible track record than in things unseen. That is why I plan to vote for Cuomo for a third term. He’s a doer.
The list of accomplishments is long: marriage equality, the $15-an-hour minimum wage, paid family leave, Raise the Age and a historic gun control law, to name a few. But buried beneath the headlines are a few seminal achievements that tell an even stronger story about the governor’s farsighted stewardship of New York.
Cuomo transformed two broken bureaucracies into a formidable force for consumer protection. He set up the Department of Financial Services which, in only a few years, built a national reputation for regulating financial institutions and achieved historic settlements for the taxpayers. There was nothing inevitable about the emergence of DFS as an effective executive agency. It required vision and leadership.
The same holds true for the Medicaid Redesign Team. Its success, including $17 billion in cost savings for the state, set the stage for a federal investment of $8 billion in Medicaid, enabling the most ambitious reform of health care the state has ever undertaken.
Bending the cost curve of Medicaid to the degree the governor has done it is a legacy achievement, one without rival in recent memory. It will help stabilize the finances of New York State for generations to come. It exemplifies why effective and experienced leadership matters in government, and why it should never be taken lightly, even by the governor’s critics, who seem too inclined to overlook the enormous good he has done.
Johnson’s mastery of politics in Washington led to landmark achievements in civil rights, health care, higher education and immigration. Cuomo’s mastery of politics in Albany has likewise led to landmark achievements in gun control, marriage equality and labor. Both men built formidable records on the strength of formidable talent and will power.
I know the governor can be controversial, as Johnson was in his time. The heavy hand of a relentless tactician is never pretty. But it is necessary for breaking the grip of political inertia. The leadership of Andrew Cuomo is a little like surgery without anesthetics: painful to those on the receiving end but effective at doing the people’s work.