Maybe probably the most pathetic side of Andrew Cuomo’s marketing campaign for mayor are his vows to ship for the town on issues he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) in his decade-plus within the extra highly effective place of New York governor.
He’s out of the blue calling totally free bus and subway fares for lower-income New Yorkers, for instance — when his heavy-handed mismanagement of the MTA led on to the 2017 summer time of hell.
To not point out how he looted the company’s funds for $5 million to bail out upstate ski resorts or the $100 million-plus he burned on ornamental lighting and tiles on the town’s bridges and in tunnels.
Nor how he rammed these congestion-pricing tolls by means of the Legislature.
He additionally pushed an insane redo of Penn Station and tousled airport modernization.
In the meantime, Cuomo as gov proposed nothing to make the town extra reasonably priced or manageable, aside from when he was blocking unhealthy concepts from then-Mayor Invoice de Blasio (and even that was extra out of petty private spite for Blas).
Recall, too, that Cuomo signed into legislation (and nonetheless defends!) the criminal-justice “reforms” similar to Increase the Age and the no-bail insanity that drove up metropolis crime beginning in 2020.
Heck, he lauded “defund the police” as a authentic motion.
And his appointees to the state Parole Board are nonetheless springing cop-killers.
In the meantime, even the place he had some virtues as governor, standing up for charters and opposing teacher-union excesses, he’s now flipped to the opposite aspect.
It’s simply laughable that he’s posing as the most effective hope to avoid wasting the town from far-left Zohran Mamdani: As gov, Cuomo routinely claimed he was everybody’s solely hope in opposition to loopy progressive insurance policies — solely to promote out on every thing when the going acquired powerful.
Certainly, he gave Mamdani an enormous enhance by leaping into the Democratic mayoral main — turning into the moment frontrunner on the premise of nothing however identify recognition, but additionally an ideal foil the Democratic Socialist may use to vault to the highest at the same time as different rivals have been starved for oxygen.
And having misplaced that race, Cuomo is nonetheless operating as moderates’ finest hope and so splitting the anti-Mamdani vote merely to serve his personal cussed self-importance.
Certainly, the No. 1 purpose to giggle at Andrew Cuomo’s vows to battle for New York is his decades-long report of preventing solely for himself.
