The Cuomo Conundrum | The Nation


The Cuomo Conundrum

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Take, for instance, Mario Cuomo. It was the elder Cuomo, after all, who played the key role in rejuvenating the language and the politics of New Deal liberalism in the Reagan era. His words still managed to revive the progressive vision languishing at the time, beneath Reagan’s two landslide electoral victories and endless episodes of intra-liberal bloodletting. Cuomo’s simultaneously erudite and eloquent orations succeeded in honoring (New Left) cultural difference as they embraced the (old left) ethic of team work and economic opportunity for all: a “patch-quilt” nation working together, rather than the “melting pot” of old. Most moving, politically and emotionally, was his 1984 Democratic National Convention keynote address, still engraved in the memory of millions who watched it on TV or heard it on the radio. In that speech, as in many others, Cuomo argued for a liberal philosophy built on a foundation of “family, mutuality, the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all, feeling one another’s pain, sharing one another’s blessings.” True, few political lives demonstrate the adage that Cuomo himself coined—politicians “campaign in poetry” but “govern in prose”—more than Cuomo’s own, as his policies were often more conservative than his rhetoric. (New York liberals’ gallows humor at the time included the observation that his administration’s most significant jobs program was prison construction.) Even so, under the first Cuomo administration, the state made a strong commitment to such unfashionable causes as increasing unemployment benefits, exempting low-income workers from the tax rolls, building housing for the homeless, helping seniors pay for prescription medicine and aggressively enforcing the state’s environmental laws. Cuomo also paid close attention to civil liberties when appointing judges and drafting legislation. But if Mario Cuomo represented the pinnacle and perhaps the last gasp of New Deal liberalism, Andrew Cuomo may well turn out to be its undertaker.

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Eric Alterman
Eric Alterman

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Cuomo had justified his hard-line opposition to taxing the wealthy with the argument that New York cannot remain economically competitive if its wealthy residents are asked to pay higher taxes than they would elsewhere. Though he did support President Obama’s call for higher taxes on the wealthy at the federal level—as a top administration official was quick to point out when I raised the issue—Cuomo repeatedly demanded that if taxes were to be raised, this should only be done at a federal, rather than state level. In the course of our discussion of the issue, I pointed out that wealthy people on Wall Street and elsewhere in the state have never had it so good: stock market prices and corporate profits are at their highest points ever recorded, while virtually every serious study of the issue demonstrates that “tax flight” by the wealthy is a myth propagated by anti-tax ideologues. (Indeed, state revenue almost invariably increases when levies at the top are raised, while inspiring little if any so-called migration of the wealthy to neighboring states.) To this, Cuomo’s aide replied that this was simply a philosophical disagreement, and we would have to leave it at that. I asked if the aide could point me to any research that might support the administration’s “philosophy.” None was forthcoming.

What was forthcoming, in secret, however, turned out to be a shocker. Literally on the day the print version of this article went to press, Cuomo, according to press reports, reversed himself on the issue, and helped engineer an extension of what he had previously insisted had been a temporary higher tax bracket for seven-figure incomes in order to fund a cut for middle-income earners. The tax had been set to expire at the end of 2014 (which happens to be an election year). Cuomo had made no mention whatever of extending the tax in his January “State of the State” message, nor did either he or any of his aides bring it up as they travelled around the state to win support for their proposals. (And I heard no hints about it during my back and forth with his aides.) The New York state Democratic Party went so far as to commit itself to a television campaign trumpeting the lack of new taxes of any kind in his budget.

If we rule out the possibility that Cuomo so feared being portrayed as a economic conservative in a lengthy Nation article and so reversed himself on what had been a defining foundational aspect of his administration in order to mess with its author, then one can only conclude that the combination of the ongoing budgetary crisis, Washington’s sequestration melodrama, and the actual fact of the explosion of inequality in New York forced him to reverse himself in plenty of time to remake his image for both the 2014 and the 2016 elections. The surprise factor, moreover, had the effect of catching potential opponents off-guard, which has always been Cuomo’s modus operandi.





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