Maybe essentially the most pathetic facet of Andrew Cuomo’s marketing campaign for mayor are his vows to ship for 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 all of the sudden calling without spending a dime 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 season 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 town’s bridges and in tunnels.
Nor how he rammed these congestion-pricing tolls by way 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 town extra inexpensive or manageable, aside from when he was blocking dangerous 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” resembling Elevate the Age and the no-bail insanity that drove up metropolis crime beginning in 2020.
Heck, he lauded “defund the police” as a reputable 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 facet.
It’s simply laughable that he’s posing as the very best hope to save lots of 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 part when the going obtained robust.
Certainly, he gave Mamdani an enormous increase by leaping into the Democratic mayoral main — turning into the moment frontrunner on the idea of nothing however title recognition, but in addition 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 working as moderates’ finest hope and so splitting the anti-Mamdani vote merely to serve his personal cussed vainness.
Certainly, the No. 1 purpose to chuckle at Andrew Cuomo’s vows to combat for New York is his decades-long file of combating solely for himself.
