Gov. Cuomo probably couldn’t get away with ripping Attorney General Letitia James’ fingernails in public – even New York’s crazy politics have limits – but he would no doubt want to try. The governor is a terribly vengeful fellow.
Political big shot or anonymous government team, it doesn’t matter – cross Cuomo, or get in his way, and gear up for tough weather.
On Thursday, James tore the crust of a festering Cuomo administration ulcer, exposing with hard data the deadly toll the coronavirus took in New York’s nursing homes last year. In doing so, she quashed the governor’s attempts to disguise an amazing example of mismanagement.
History suggests that Cuomo will retaliate for this betrayal – or burst a vein trying.
And aside from the considerable merits of James’ report, it’s treason. The AG would still be New York City’s public advocate had Cuomo’s final aid in the 2018 election not brought her to her current position.
So how sharper than a serpent’s tooth is it to have an ungrateful child and all that jazz?
Once installed, James proved as petty and partisan as her patron – she brushed up her progressive faith by incessantly hindering former President Donald Trump, suing the National Rifle Association, and so on.
So it is with some irony, but no surprise, that her devastating nursing home report follows in form and function the devastating attack carried out by then Attorney General Andrew Cuomo against the then government. Eliot Spitzer in 2007. It would eventually take a hired woman scandal to drive Spitzer from his office, but his slide began with Cuomo’s evil message.
Spitzer, a former attorney general who was himself no stranger to disgraceful reprisals, immediately after becoming governor had gone to war with the senate – falsely, if not illegally, relying on state police at then-majority leader Joseph Bruno for alleged abuse of the state. plane.
Or so Cuomo fell in a 53-page report – a lightning-quick investigation that was politically chasing an unsuspecting Spitzer.
Kind of like Tish James did with her patron on Thursday. She clearly paid attention to the larger landscape during her rise from New York City Council to New York State’s chief of legal affairs.
Spitzer’s real sin, of course, was in holding an office that Cuomo rightly considered his own. Whether James has similar ambitions remains to be seen, but who says she doesn’t? And if so, can the governor complain? (Or maybe the monster that killed Dr. Frankenstein?)
Revenge, of course, is another matter. No trifle is too small to escape Cuomo’s attention.
Last month, there was the issue of Lindsey Boylan, a former administrative assistant who accused the governor of sexual harassment and soon after found out that her state personnel file had been “obtained” by the Associated Press.
Beyond the merits of Boylan’s accusations – she’s running for president of Manhattan and presumably in need of publicity – news organizations don’t “get” such data. They delivered them.
Boylan’s experience parallels that of Mike Fayette, a former civil engineer who was forced to leave his state job in 2012 for speaking to a small newspaper in the Adirondack region without permission. State Director of Operations Howard Glaser actually went on the radio to read from Fayette’s personnel file!
Again, big or small – no one is beyond Cuomo’s view.
Especially Bill de Blasio.
Bitter rivalry between governors and mayors is traditional – Nelson Rockefeller vs. John Lindsay was epic – but the torment Cuomo visited on the Blasio borders on the pathological. Make that sadistic.
True, the bumbling, foolish, and monumental lazy mayor brought much Cuomo hellfire on himself; yet, from day 1, when the mayor said “up,” the governor barked “down!”
If de Blasio said ‘open’ since the pandemic, Cuomo said ‘closed’ and vice versa. The outrageously chaotic rollout of the coronavirus vaccine in New York is a product of this childish bickering, but there is hardly a single aspect of the city-state relationship – housing, education, public transportation, and so on – that has not suffered so well.
It’s hard to imagine James attempting to deny Cuomo a fourth term next year or, more to the point, avoid expecting retaliation for Thursday’s report. She knows the record as well as anyone.
But whatever her plans, she just gave the governor a full ration of his own politics, and good for her. If anyone’s ever had it, it’s Andrew Cuomo.
Twitter: @ rlmac2