Three years and three months into Gov. Andrew Cuomo's first term in office, progressive reform advocates have figured out that he cares deeply about their issues — right up until the sort of deadline that Lyndon Johnson used to call "nut-cutting time."
This tendency was codified by my former TU colleague Jimmy Vielkind, now the Albany bureau chief for Capital New York, as Vielkind's Second Law of Cuomo: "Cuomo Will Always Make a Deal." Vielkind's First and Third Laws of Cuomo are "Chaos Is Not Cuomonian" and "Cuomo Only Respects Force" — meaning political force.
Future political textbooks must give Jimmy full credit.
The Second Law was on full display in this week's approval of a state budget that includes a "demonstration project" for public financing of elections — or in this case, election singular: the 2014 race for state comptroller.
Advocates for broader campaign finance reform were gobsmacked at the speed that will be required to set up the public matching oversight system. They had their gobs re-smacked by the realization that this complex setup and oversight has been tasked to the state Board of Elections — an entity not usually described in sentences that include the words "speed" and "oversight."
Speaking of speed, or its lack: The board is currently without a second Democratic member due to State Committee Co-Chair and Assemblyman Keith Wright's inexplicable failure to appoint a successor to Evelyn Aquila, who attended her last board meeting in December. To be fair to Wright, it's a good bet that Cuomo will be the one making the selection.
Progressive advocates are livid with the governor, and some have suggested that the diminishment of public financing could be the last straw that leads to his facing a left-flank challenger from the Working Families Party. In previous gubernatorial elections, the 16-year-old WFP barked and whined about seeing its issues pushed by the Democratic candidate, but in 2010 tucked its tail between its legs and went directly to Cuomo with its ballot line — the better to secure the minimum 50,000 votes needed to maintain it.
This week's progressive rage bears a distinct resemblance to their reaction in March 2012 when Cuomo shopped another one of their statewide dreams, an independent process for the once-a-decade task of redrawing the state's political lines. The compromise on that issue, part of a memorable "Big Ugly" that brought us Cuomo's longed-for Tier VI pension plan and lots more, won't take effect until 2022 and will allow the Legislature to keep their sticky little mitts on the process, albeit less directly.
The constitutional amendment that would create the new redistricting scheme is on the ballot this fall, and some on the left are already muttering darkly about turning against the proposal, in the same way they're calling on Comptroller Tom DiNapoli not to "opt in" to the pilot public financing system.
As Blair Horner of the New York Public Interest Research Group put it in reference to the comptroller-only system, "The plan is hardly 'half a loaf.' A designed-to-fail public financing system is not even a slice of a loaf. More like a moldy crumb."
On both of these compromises, Cuomo argues that the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good, and that politics is the art of the possible, and that the progress he has made on both redistricting and public finance outstrips anything that's come before after years of advocates' pushing and pleading. Moreover, he points out that Republican opposition in the Senate doomed any hopes for a more robust public finance system.
When he's in a more cranky mood, the governor knocks the progressives as just another gaggle of special interests backed by big money — usually from the wallets of unions, many of whom have had strained relations with Cuomo.
But no single politician in the state has done as well under the current campaign finance system as the governor has.
With more than $33 million on hand in his re-election account, you would sooner see Cuomo performing a one-man staging of "Hello, Dolly!" than agreeing to let his own office be used as a test case for public financing.
Because it would be chaotic. And chaos is not Cuomonian.
cseiler@timesunion.com • 518-454-5619