Man to watch in 2011 . . . Andrew Cuomo?


The most dramatic event of 2011 may have happened this Saturday in Albany, New York (of all places), when Andrew Cuomo was sworn in as Governor of New York. Cuomo’s election in a state largely dominated by Democrats did not surprise, nor did the loftiness of his rhetoric, a trait inherited from him father. It was what Governor Andrew Cuomo said that may radically reshape American politics from top to bottom.

That the New York Post had such high praise for his words was telling, but here’s some of the verbiage itself:

State government has grown too large, and we can’t afford it. This state has no future if it’s going to be the tax capital of the nation.

Beyond the rhetoric, Cuomo “has vowed to shrink the number of state agencies by one-fifth and to make substantial cuts to the state’s Medicaid program, the most costly in the nation” (New York Times). One day after taking the oath, he imposed a state workers pay freeze (NYT) and said he wants a “temporary tax increase” on wealthy New Yorkers to actually be temporary (i.e., expire this year) – “I say no new taxes, period” (Saratogian).

Keep in mind, this is a New York Democrat.

Now, Cuomo faces both a $10 billion state budget deficit and a legislature that is actually more dysfunctional than Congress. Any other Governor who talked like that in New York – no matter what their party – would be almost certainly eaten alive.

However, this is Cuomo, the heir to a political family that is as close to royalty as New York has – and a man whose reaction to the Republican nomination of a Teabrewer to oppose him last year was to try running to the Teabrewer’s right. He didn’t succeed in that, but it did get him a landslide victory in the process.

New York’s fiscal year starts in April, so in theory we should know if Cuomo can convince a barely Republican State Senate and an Assembly controlled by machine Democrats to cut the budget and avoid tax increase by then. In practice, almost all New York budgets are passed late, and odds are this one probably will be, too.

However, if Cuomo can manage to pull it off, it could trigger several tectonic political shifts at once.

For starters, any politician who talks about tax increases, from the lowliest supervisor to the president himself, will be forced to answer why they can’t cut spending properly if Andrew Cuomo can. For Republican tax-hikers, this could be especially painful as they face the prospect of primary challengers reminding them that a liberal Democrat from New York managed to do what they couldn’t.

The real long-term implications, though, are probably things not even Cuomo himself is pondering.

Imagine it’s late 2011. For whatever reason, the GOP attempt to roll back spending in Washington bogs down. Teabrewers are angry and demoralized. Voters that thought they were sending to Washington and their state capitals folks who would cut government and deficits down to size start to wonder if either political party gets it. Talk of “third parties” grow.

All of a sudden somebody whispers, “Andrew Cuomo for President” . . .

. . . and Katy bar the door.

Sure, Cuomo himself will insist he has no interest (and he’d probably be honest about that), but what happens when some Teabrewers (and there will be some), Italian-Americans, heartbroken Clinton-backers, and Democrats worried about Obama’s re-election chances converge on the Empire State leader who tamed the culture of corruption and runaway spending in Albany?

Even without a presidential run, a Governor Cuomo who managed to balance the budget in New York without reaching for New Yorkers’ wallets will end up creating (if only by accident at first) and then leading (probably not by accident) a new faction of limited-government Democrats. It could create nationally the Virginia anomaly of the middle of last decade, when tax-hiking Republicans drove small-l libertarians into the arms of the Democrats – only this time without someone driving them just as batty with his own predilections for raising taxes (i.e., Kaine or Warner).

With a Cuomo presidential run, we could actually see both parties compete for supporters of limited government – which would be a first in American history.

Of course, Cuomo actually has to pull this off, first. The odds are long, and let’s face it, nearly all Democrats (and many, many Republicans) have terrible histories when it comes to turning talk on reducing the size of government into action. However, if Andrew Cuomo does manage to hold true to his word, the Democratic party – and American politics – may never be the same.

Stay tuned.

>Cross-posted to RWL

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