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Governor Cuomo probably couldn’t get away with Attorney General Letitia James’ fingernails in public – even mad New York politics has limits – but he would definitely like to try. The governor is a terribly vengeful man.
Big political coup or anonymous government worker, whatever – drive through Cuomo, or get in his way, and rig for heavy weather.
James plucked the scab from a purulent Cuomo administration wound on Thursday, exposing with solid data the death toll from the coronavirus in New York nursing homes last year. She thus demolished the governor’s efforts to cover up an astonishing example of maladministration.
History suggests that Cuomo will even get it for this betrayal – or burst a vein trying.
And, regardless of the considerable merits of James’ report, it is a betrayal. The GA would still be New York City’s public counsel if it hadn’t been for Cuomo’s definitive help in the 2018 election that pushed her to her current position.
So how much sharper than a snake’s tooth to have an ungrateful child and all that jazz?
Once settled in, James proved to be just as mean and partisan as his boss – polishing his progressive credibility by endlessly harassing former President Donald Trump, suing the National Rifle Association and so on.
It is therefore with some irony, but no surprise, that his damning nursing home report follows in form and function the devastating attack launched by then-Attorney General Andrew Cuomo on the government of the day. Eliot Spitzer in 2007. It would ultimately take a hired wife scandal to kick Spitzer out of office, but his slide started with Cuomo’s malicious advice.
Spitzer, a former attorney general who himself was no stranger to vituperative retaliation, had gone to war with the State Senate as soon as he had become governor – inappropriately, if not illegally, by drying up the police. State to the then majority leader, Joseph Bruno, for an alleged abuse of state. plane.
Or so Cuomo loaded up in a 53-page report – a blitz that politically ended an unsuspecting Spitzer.
Kind of like what Tish James did to his boss on Thursday. She obviously paid attention to the larger landscape during her rise from New York City Council to New York State General Counsel.
Spitzer’s real sin, of course, was to hold a position that Cuomo rightly saw as his. It remains to be seen if James has similar ambitions – but who can say she doesn’t? And surely the governor can’t complain if that is the case – is the turnaround fair play? (Or maybe the monster killing Dr. Frankenstein?)
Revenge, of course, is another matter. No slight is too trivial to escape Cuomo’s attention.
Last month there was the case of Lindsey Boylan, a former administration official who accused the governor of sexual harassment and, soon after, discovered that his state personnel file had been “obtained. By The Associated Press.
Leaving aside the merits of Boylan’s accusations – she is running for president in the Manhattan borough and presumably needs name recognition – news agencies are not getting such registrations. They have them delivered.
Boylan’s experience parallels that of Mike Fayette, a former civil engineer forced to quit his job in the state in 2012 for speaking without permission to a small newspaper in the Adirondack region. State Operations Director Howard Glaser actually went on the radio to read Fayette’s personal file!
Again, big or small – no one is beyond Cuomo’s gimlet gaze.
Especially Bill de Blasio.
Bitter rivalries between governors and mayors are traditional – Nelson Rockefeller v John Lindsay was epic – but the torment Cuomo visited in De Blasio borders on pathological. Make it sadistic.
It’s true that the awkward, foolish and lazy mayor as monumental drew a lot of hellfire Cuomo; even so, from the first day, if the mayor said “up”, the governor barked “down!”
Since the pandemic, if de Blasio said “open,” Cuomo said “closed,” and vice versa. The shockingly chaotic rollout of the coronavirus vaccine in New York City is the product of these childish feuds, but there is hardly a single aspect of the city-state relationship – housing, education, public transportation, etc. – who did not suffer too.
It’s hard to imagine James trying to deny Cuomo a fourth term next year or, more specifically, hoping to avoid retaliation for Thursday’s report. She knows the record as well as anyone.
But whatever her plans, she just handed the governor a full ration of her own politics, and good for her. If anyone ever had it coming, it’s Andrew Cuomo.
Twitter: @ rlmac2
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