Perhaps the most pathetic aspect of Andrew Cuomo’s campaign for mayor are his vows to deliver for the city on things he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) in his decade-plus in the more powerful position of New York governor.
He’s suddenly calling for free bus and subway fares for lower-income New Yorkers, for example — when his heavy-handed mismanagement of the MTA led directly to the 2017 summer of hell.
Not to mention how he looted the agency’s funds for $5 million to bail out upstate ski resorts or the $100 million-plus he burned on decorative lighting and tiles on the city’s bridges and in tunnels.
Nor how he rammed those congestion-pricing tolls through the Legislature.
He also pushed an insane redo of Penn Station and messed up airport modernization.
Meanwhile, Cuomo as gov proposed nothing to make the city more affordable or manageable, other than when he was blocking bad ideas from then-Mayor Bill de Blasio (and even that was more out of petty personal spite for Blas).
Recall, too, that Cuomo signed into law (and still defends!) the criminal-justice “reforms” such as Raise the Age and the no-bail madness that drove up city crime starting in 2020.
Heck, he lauded “defund the police” as a legitimate movement.
And his appointees to the state Parole Board are still springing cop-killers.
Meanwhile, even where he had some virtues as governor, standing up for charters and opposing teacher-union excesses, he’s now flipped to the other side.
It’s just laughable that he’s posing as the best hope to save the city from far-left Zohran Mamdani: As gov, Cuomo routinely claimed he was everyone’s only hope against crazy progressive policies — only to sell out on everything when the going got tough.
Indeed, he gave Mamdani a huge boost by jumping into the Democratic mayoral primary — becoming the instant frontrunner on the basis of nothing but name recognition, but also a perfect foil the Democratic Socialist could use to vault to the top even as other rivals were starved for oxygen.
And having lost that race, Cuomo is still running as moderates’ best hope and so splitting the anti-Mamdani vote simply to serve his own stubborn vanity.
Indeed, the No. 1 reason to laugh at Andrew Cuomo’s vows to fight for New York is his decades-long record of fighting only for himself.
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