Andrew Cuomo has my vote for mayor – NYC cannot – Latest News
If anybody had dared to inform me final winter that I’d ultimately vote to make Andrew Cuomo New York’s subsequent mayor, I’d have shot back, “Never.”
I used to be nonetheless totally disgusted with the previous governor, had applauded his pressured 2021 exit from Albany and noticed no proof he was doing something to make himself match to carry public workplace again.
In the three-plus years since his resignation, he had continued to play protection and assault his critics, together with me, however had achieved nothing to show he had discovered something or accepted any accountability for his historic collapse.
In his public remarks and personal conversations, there have been no apologies for the heartless nursing home debacle he triggered during the COVID pandemic.
Nor was there regret over the discovering that he was guilty of sexually harassing 13 ladies.
I’m voting for Andy
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He by no means mentioned so straight, however he appeared to consider that if he obtained back into politics, enough voters enamored of the Cuomo title would give him a second probability, even when he didn’t show them why he deserved it.
My view was that the nursing home deaths and the harassment findings in all probability marked the top of any probability to get back into the sport.
In truth, he had turn into so poisonous in his own occasion that not a single fellow Democrat anyplace defended him as his troubles piled up.
His reflexive protection towards criticism — “it’s all politics” — wasn’t working because it was his own occasion tearing him down.
Even then-President Joe Biden joined the refrain in calling for his head.
Facing sure impeachment and elimination by the Legislature, the governor threw within the towel and skulked out of city, presumably, in political phrases, a lifeless man strolling.
But destiny gave him a new probability.
And destiny has pressured me to see him from a totally different perspective.
The result’s that I do certainly plan to vote for him subsequent Tuesday.
Getting right here has been a long, bumpy course of pushed by information and the poor different decisions within the race for City Hall.
The marketing campaign has advanced in a approach that these of us who care about our outstanding metropolis no longer have the posh of seeing Cuomo solely because the sum of his misdeeds and failures in Albany.
The information command us to see him as the one candidate who can steer the SS Gotham away from the approaching iceberg.
This is an SOS second.
Anyone failing to understand that at this late date is lacking the important thing truth: Perfection is just not on the poll, however catastrophe is.
Unilateral energy
Its title is Zohran Mamdani.
The query of whether or not New York would ever get better from a Mamdani mayoralty is just not solely a honest one.
It is important as a result of he can be in a place to do huge harm and switch back the clock on many years of progress, particularly on public security and high quality of life points.
As Mayor Adams advised me just lately, the hazard lies in how a lot unilateral energy a mayor has.
Mamdani may order the NYPD to disregard, say, shoplifting or road prostitution.
He may enable the homeless to reside on the subways or set up road encampments in residential neighborhoods.
The imposition of socialist and antisemitic indoctrination in faculties would even be within his realm.
Those abominations ought to focus the eye of the anti-Cuomo holdouts on the truth that he’s the one candidate remaining within the three-man area who has ample expertise in management and the views needed to information the town’s large paperwork and 300,000 staff on a wise, reasonably priced course.
He can be the one one who can beat Mamdani, a undeniable fact that has been apparent to me for the reason that June main, the place Mamdani beat him by 12 factors.
That marked a remaining nail in hopes that a average Dem different than Cuomo would emerge or that Adams may make a comeback.
Meanwhile, the coronation of Curtis Sliwa by GOP leaders, with out a main, proved the insular occasion remains to be content material with placing up a protest candidate who’s unelectable.
Sliwa misplaced in a blowout to Adams 4 years in the past, getting simply 28% of the vote.
This time, his solely doable affect is to be a spoiler and siphon off enough of the vote to permit Mamdani to win with a plurality.
By far, Cuomo can be the best mayor of the three.
The proper priorities
Even an abbreviated record of his priorities versus these of Mamdani illustrate why I’ll have no hesitancy in checking his title on my poll.
The former governor pledges to rent 5,000 new police officers to bolster the shrinking NYPD.
For the identical motive, he additionally vows to raise beginning salaries.
He additionally desires to take care of mayoral control of metropolis schooling, a energy that quite a few mayors earlier than him fought to win.
On these points, Mamdani desires to hog-tie the NYPD and switch the faculties over to the tender mercies of the rapacious United Federation of Teachers.
And these are solely two of many areas the place Cuomo and Mamdani are at odds.
To say the variations don’t matter is to be willfully blind to actuality.
Cuomo’s reemergence and my determination to help him have pushed home an previous truism about politics and politicians: No matter how they begin, elections ultimately are all the time about comparisons and onerous decisions.
This yr’s race confirms the purpose — with an exclamation mark.
As 2025 began, I didn’t take Cuomo significantly as a result of I assumed there can be much better choices for City Hall.
That was my massive mistake.
None emerged, and so right here we’re.
Pied-piper
Early polls confirmed Cuomo with a massive lead, however I all the time believed his help was gentle, and that a lot of it was primarily based on title recognition.
That turned out to be appropriate as Mamdani surged, and received handily by way of the unconventional left’s manipulation of the ranked-choice system, which steered the votes of all the opposite candidates to him.
That victory spotlights the hazard he represents.
In my 50 years of writing about politics, I’ve not often seen a candidate so unworthy of the workplace he seeks.
Initially, I dismissed him as too younger and too unserious for the heavy lifting the City Hall job requires.
Most Dems did, too, as he was caught in single digits within the main polls for months, whereas Cuomo seemed to be coasting to victory.
But because the marketing campaign wore on, it turned clear that Mamdani is a smooth-talking, pied-piper for many younger voters.
But the world view he’s promoting would destroy just about every little thing good about New York.
He was raised by his dad and mom to hate America, our historical past and our establishments, and plenty of of his associates are cut from the identical radical material.
His election can be far more than simply a mistake.
It can be a tragedy.
