Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, center, with Sheldon Silver, the Assembly speaker, left, and Dean G. Skelos, the Senate majority leader, in March.
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
Published: April 6, 2011
ALBANY — He has clashed with unions, who he believes have helped drive his state into bankruptcy. He has been praised by prominent conservatives like Sarah Palin and Rudolph W. Giuliani. And he has taken thousands of dollars in campaign money from the New York billionaire David H. Koch, who with his family has financed the Tea Party movement.
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Times Topic: Andrew M. Cuomo
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His name: Andrew M. Cuomo, the governor of New York, a state where Democrats dominate and where his father, Mario M. Cuomo, is still invoked as a paragon of activist government and liberal principle.
In his first months in office, Governor Cuomo is taking a different tack. The man who began public life advocating for homeless people won passage of a budget that makes steep cuts to schools, health care and social services. In a year when Wall Street posted record profits, Mr. Cuomo firmly rejected a politically popular income tax surcharge on the wealthy that was sought by many Democratic lawmakers. And Mr. Cuomo has promised to press for a cap on local property taxes, an idea with its modern roots in the conservative-led California tax revolt of the 1970s.
Mr. Cuomo’s approach to governing has burnished his prospects for higher office — an ambition he neither confirms nor denies — playing against the conventional stereotype of a New York Democrat and drawing praise from the political right (some of it, perhaps, not entirely sincere). Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican, has called Mr. Cuomo “my soul mate.” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has praised Mr. Cuomo’s “ruptures with Democratic orthodoxy.”
But Mr. Cuomo’s choices have also rankled some former allies and stirred suspicions among some fellow Democrats about his motivation.
“Governor Cuomo wants to be president, and he would do anything to be president,” State Senator Rubén Díaz Sr., a Bronx Democrat, said in a speech on the Senate floor as lawmakers debated the budget whose terms were largely dictated by Mr. Cuomo. “He would take away the Medicare from the people,” Mr. Díaz said, “he would take the services from the poor, he would take the money from education.”
Mr. Cuomo would not be the first politician to flaunt his inner centrist as governor, a job in which voters tend to reward nuts-and-bolts governance over ideological crusades, and state laws requiring balanced budgets pull governors of both parties toward the middle on fiscal issues.
And in Albany, Mr. Cuomo must be measured against a political culture far more transactional than ideological, a realm in which powerful labor unions, including those that have accused him of deserting progressive principles, are as comfortable allying with conservative Republicans as with liberal Democrats when it comes to protecting jobs and benefits for their members.
Asked to describe his own beliefs during a news conference in Albany on Saturday, Mr. Cuomo was succinct.
“I am a progressive Democrat who’s broke,” he told reporters.
“I disagree with the concept that the only way to get better services is more money, more money, more money,” he added. “We’ve been spending a lot of more money. We’re not getting better services.”
Fortuitous political circumstances have given Mr. Cuomo unusually wide latitude to shape his own terrain. Without a Democratic primary opponent last fall, he was able to keep his party’s core constituencies at bay, arguing that the faltering economy required fiscal restraint in Albany and promising voters he would not raise taxes.
It was a notable contrast with his unsuccessful run for governor in 2002, when Mr. Cuomo emphasized issues like raising the minimum wage, ending mandatory jail time for drug offenders and providing universal prekindergarten.
In office, Mr. Cuomo has benefited from a consensus — among voters and insiders alike — that Albany has become ungovernable, its finances out of control and its reputation desperately needing rehabilitation. A Siena Research Institute poll conducted in March showed Mr. Cuomo with about the same job approval ratings among Democrats as among Republicans or unaffiliated voters. Most Democratic lawmakers voted for his budget last week even as some voiced concerns about its cuts.
“I don’t think you can make any real ideological judgments about Andrew, because there was a political tsunami that he rode with great skill,” said Richard L. Brodsky, a former Democratic assemblyman who is now a senior fellow at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. “The result was foreordained. The net result of the campaign was that we should reduce our investment in public institutions and infrastructure.”
As governor, Mr. Cuomo has tried to protect his left flank, largely sparing environmental programs from his budget ax and pledging to make same-sex marriage legal in New York. Still, some critics view the contrast with his father as particularly stark on fiscal issues.
The elder Mr. Cuomo spoke often of the state budget as a moral document reflecting the values of the state, saying at his first inauguration as governor that a “technically balanced budget that fails to meet the reasonable needs of the middle class and poor would be the emblem of hypocrisy.”
Taking office amid a recession in the early 1980s, the elder Mr. Cuomo’s first budget laid off 11,000 state workers but increased school aid and raised $1 billion in revenue through new or expanded taxes on oil companies, the real estate industry and other businesses.
The younger Mr. Cuomo, determined to keep his campaign promises, ignored demands from his party to consider such measures. And in some respects, he has governed less like his father than like the Republican who beat him, George E. Pataki. Mr. Cuomo, like Mr. Pataki in his first term as governor, joined forces with Senate Republicans to cut programs and services that were historically linked to his party’s base, though he restored some spending in negotiations with Assembly Democrats.
“Candidly, progressives are quite disappointed with the governor’s budget,” said Jon Kest, a veteran organizer and executive director of New York Communities for Change, an advocacy group for low-income New Yorkers. “We will stand with him when his actions align with our values, but that is not the case today.”
Those close to Mr. Cuomo say that he is above all a pragmatist, bent on reshaping Albany’s paralyzed government so that it can once again be an effective and credible force in New Yorkers’ lives. His approach as governor, they say, is consistent with his work both at Help USA, the nonprofit housing organization he founded in the 1980s, and as housing secretary in the 1990s, where he slashed budgets, trimmed the work force and developed policies to reward innovation.
If some remain wary of Mr. Cuomo’s true goals, it may be because he so rarely discusses his beliefs in public. His predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, delivered speeches about the future of the Democratic Party, and once wrote an article that appeared on the cover of The New Republic on the role of government in fostering economic dynamism. Mr. Cuomo has shied away from self-conscious declarations of his political vision.
Mr. Cuomo declined to be interviewed for this article. In a rare on-the-record interview last October, as he was running for governor, he showed little interest in ideological labels.
“I’m a realist,” Mr. Cuomo said at the time. “Numbers are numbers. ‘I want to have a political-philosophical discussion,’ " he mimicked. "They’re numbers. Forget the philosophy. Here are the numbers."
Thomas Kaplan contributed reporting.
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