This doesn’t look good for Cuomo.
How do New Yorkers feel about him? Does this scandal remove him as presidential material? Did he even have real aspirations for the office?
It looks to me like he tried to fight corruption, but did a lousy job of it. Is this a scandal?
Everyone on MSNBC seems to think so. 
The scandal is basically that he set up the commission to investigate public corruption and then interfered with it and eventually disbanded it when it investigated his allies and donors.
Sounds like he’s spent too much time at the UN. The UN rather infamously set up a special commision to investigate widespread corruption and misappropriation of UN funds, and then fired the guy when he started questioning the wrong people… :rolleyes:
It seems to be a big deal in the NYC newspapers but I haven’t seen much on it here Upstate.
New York is famously corrupt. New York City is famously corrupt. Albany is famously corrupt. Upstate not so much so, but a still a bit. State government has been so corrupt for so long that it’s the default mode. Corrupt people get re-elected all the time.
That doesn’t make what Cuomo did any less stupid. It’s a giant-sized mistake and one that is surprising because it’s so transparent. Did he do it to conceal some other even more giganter idiocy? If so, and if that comes out, then he’s probably finished.
Judging its effect on the presidential race inside or outside New York is much harder. Again, not pursuing corruption is the norm. In New York and everywhere else in the world. It’s going to be hard to make people care. And interfering with a Commission is insider politics, much harder to make into a punch line than Christie’s bridge closure fiasco, although that is objectively much tinier as an issue. However, bullying the bridge people could be used as shorthand for all of Christie’s known issues as a bully, whereas Cuomo has no known history of being personally corrupt.
Cuomo is going to win re-election this year by a zillion points. My guess is that trumps any scandal that doesn’t clearly point at him. The reality is that every candidate has flaws. The 2016 race is going to be supremely ugly because the two sides will harp on the flaws of the other’s candidates and ask how you could possibly vote for a flawed individual? That’s self-defeating because it tells ordinary voters they shouldn’t support that party’s candidate either, because of his or her flaws. You don’t vote for perfect; you vote for “on balance…” We forget that here most of the time.
Why is that?
That’s where the money is. And isn’t.
Then, is state government in California and Texas equally corrupt? There’s a lot of money there, too.
California (Sacramento) is corrupt as fuck. There’s been a recent spat of state legislators being investigated by the FBI, arrested, and disowned by their party. That says nothing about the incestual relationship between the legislature and unions.
Daily News? (I suppose it’s better than the Post, but still very shallow.)
Here is some coverage by the mother ship:
I first came to NY in 1979. From that date until Andrew Cuomo became governor, not one single annual budget for the state was ever completed on time.
As governor, he’s had four in a row.
Not only that, but spending and tax increases have been minimized, not only at the state level, but at the local level as well.
He certainly isn’t cuddly. He plays hardball politics. Maybe in this day and age, it’s what is needed.
I am going to enjoy voting against Cuomo in the primary and I haven’t decided yet whether to vote or abstain on that line in November. (There’s no way I’m voting Astorino). I agree that the corruption commission is way too inside for most people to care about. Cuomo’s pissed me off in plenty of other ways that the commission doesn’t change anything for me personally.
Short answer: yes.
Longer answer. You can’t take corruption out of government. That’s true for every government at every level in every country. You can easily find corruption scales; we’ve discussed the well-known one from Transparency International before.
There are various types of corruption, though. Some are strictly venal - selling of favors for money, often astoundingly low sums. Some are about power - Christie’s Bridgegate. Some are about getting people elected or keeping them out of power. Some require shading votes to a favored direction. How you want to define corruption makes makes a large distinction in how corrupt an institution is. Congress is often accused of being corrupt because seemingly small but quite legal donations get favorable legislation through.
New York corruption tends heavily to the venal. In recent years, say arbitrarily the last 50, few New York politicians see office as a way upward. You don’t rise through the ranks of offices and head off to Washington in the way that’s common in so many other states. We famously put Jim Buckley and Robert Kennedy and Hillary Clinton directly into the Senate. Pols stay put and make their money the old-fashioned neighborhood retail way. Illinois seems to work similarly, judging by their parade of imprisoned governors. Note that our current Illinois-based President was a system outsider then as now. I’m sure that Texans and Californians can tell stories about their states better than I can.
So corruption is not just type, it’s also history and culture. Everybody is corrupt, yet everybody is corrupt in different ways and to different extents. Congress is less venally corrupt than it used to be - remember the guy who got caught with stacks of money in his freezer? - remember Agnew accepting an $11,000 bribe? - but perhaps more institutionally beholden to big donors.
Corruption is perception. Not everybody sees it the same way. That’s why I can’t predict how corruption that seems normal to us will be taken by outsiders.
Oh sorry, I didn’t even notice the source, it was just the only story that came up when I googled this morning.
Fine, actually. It gets to the gist. It’s just that the Times has been writing massively on the subject of late.
For right wing critics of the Times, please note that the paper is ripping on Cuomo pretty hard. Let us see if the NY Post or Faux News do the same for an important Republican candidate this election cycle.
It doesn’t do a thing as far as how I feel about a Cuomo candidacy. The absolute only reason I’d ever want him in the White House is the comedy implicit in Sandra Lee being America’s Hostess.
jayjay, I’m late to respond, but I’m with you on that. Imagine a world where everyone matches their outfit to their kitchen. gah
But also, the U.S. Attorney has warned Cuomo on ethics case.
Did things just get more serious?
As someone noted upthread, Cuomo is a huge favorite to win, regardless of the scandal. Let’s see the Times do this when something is on the line.
[I remember when Elliot Spitzer was first running for State Attorney General (the job which allowed him to indict all sorts of major corporations and thereby make himself into a national figure). He lied throughout the campaign about the source of his campaign funds (borrowed from his father to circumvent campaign finance laws), but was discovered before the election. The Times, in endorsing him anyway, said that despite the disquieting aspect of his having lied outright about his funding, he overall represented the better choice anyway.]