Cuomo and de Blasio’s Feud Is a Factor in an Anemic Legislative Session

Cuomo missed his calling. He should have been a mob boss.

It's unfortunate that the voters in NY didn't see the light and vote for Zephra Teachout. Cuomo is a disaster and unethical on so many levels. From the Moreland Commission, to our transportation system, to our roadways you can't trust Cuomo. Our gov is insincere from our housing issues, to the failure of his economic development agency to job growth. Nobody knows where Cuomo came up with the so-called 500,000 jobs he said he created.

Cuomo is a politician at his core. He was the "hit man" for his father and continues to govern through bullying, a total lack of ethics, and with a laser focus on his own advancement.

Cuomo has foiled what seemed like genuine attempts for improvement by DeBlasio, over and over again. I feel bad that DeBlasio has been so limited with Cuomo as his governor, and I feel like we New Yorkers have lost out. I can't wait till we get rid of Cuomo, although I fear it will probably be by sending him to the Senate.

The NY State Senate, needs to ignore these two and their quibbling and get on with passing the Adoptee Rights Bill.

The State Assembly, to their credit, passed the Adoptee Rights bill last week. NY Adoptees are grateful to the Assembly for doing their part on this most important legislation.

Now it's the turn of the Senate and then the Governor to do their parts and get this Bill into law.

Please, people in the Senate and the Governor, get this vital job done; this year.

Cuomo is an unethical bully who is the cog in a corruption government. No wonder he wants to take out De Blasio. However, I am confident that Preet Bharara has Cuomo, the third man in the room, in his cross hairs. Albany knows it which is why the legislators are rushing to get out of bed with Cuomo.

It's kind of annoying that for the past couple of days the Times has implied that this is all a "done deal", with a shrug and an "oh well". As the Buffalo News stated today: in Albany "tentative" really does mean tentative. It would be far more helpful if the Times continued to put pressure on the Governor and supported the Assembly which is holding out for a better deal for tenants.

Politics invites the wrong people for the wrong reasons, but Mr. Cuomo surely isn't suited for a position of power. Petulant hardly begins to describe his style of leadership. Far worse is his inclination to help those who need it least and to ignore those who need it the most. Random selection of a New York resident for this job would likely have resulted in someone with a better constitution for the position. No, Mr. Cuomo, the job isn't about you, it's about the people and the lands of New York State. As to Mr. De Blasio, you lost your constituency when you appointed Rudy Giuliani's police commissioner back into his old job and when you appeared to capitulate to the NYPD in the aftermath of the police choking of a man that we all saw on YouTube. Stop giving away the shop before the negotiations begin. You talked a good game to get elected, now do what you spoke about when you were a candidate. Stop capitulating to the forces who would see you fail. New York requires better than what we have been getting.

When these two egomaniacs get into a room, the air and rationality leave. Both claim to be progressives but they are committed to government in the dark, especially DeBlasio. Voters thought when they elected DeBlasio transparency would return to goverment in the city. Instead DeBlasio has intiated and presided over a serious and disrespectful contraction of the free flow of information to the non developer humans in the city and opportunities for non developer humans to have and opportunity to provide public testimony on issues that affect their lives.

Both of these men see voters as necessary evils that they would rather avoid. They need your vote but they don't care what you have to say. But Cardinal Dolan and developers like the president of Extell always have their ears.

Neither can understand why the other doesn't love him. After all, each sees himself as the smartest man in the room.

The pundits skirt the truth. Cuomo is a Republican pretending to be a Democrat and de Blasio is a progressive Democrat. Cuomo has presidential ambitions and feels he must assert his dominance over progressives who did not support his last campaign. He is aligned with the billionaire boys club, corporate privatizers of the public domain such as schools, who are organized labor (union) haters, and the real estate mogols, whom he hopes will fund his presidential ambition. Cuomo is NO friend of working or middle class New Yorkers and he is without compassion. Di Blasio suffers from arrogance, but at least has a better set of values. Cuomo doesn't realize how many people see him for what he is which is why his poll numbers are sinking. Hopefully a more progressive candidate will win the NY gubernatorial primary and that will be the end of Cuomo.

This governor is psychotic. He goes out of his way to humiliate DeBlasio just to prove that he's a bigger man. He wants to be king, not governor.

He only got active in rent regulations when it became clear that voters will blame him if they fail. Otherwise, he danced to the tune of his big real estate donors for the whole session.

His political capital is depleted and he's freaking out, grasping for control everywhere. It's too bad because he has done some good things, hired decent people who are doing good work. But he openly lies and then wonders why people don't believe him.

Seems to me that both may have similar higher political aspirations and one won't let the other appear to show dominance. So all the campaign and in office rhetoric exposing compromise, reconciliation, conversation and all those feel good words and phrases are malarkey. Dysfunctional and questionable governance has been going on for some time now both at the State and Federal level.

This discussion should not be about whether Governor Cuomo likes or does not like NYC's mayor.
(Though worth noting the governor, like everyone else, was afraid of Bloomberg's money and power (Bloomberg).

It should be that Governor Cuomo works on behalf of the people of NYC and NY State, rather than working on behalf of the corporate sector (big real estate and hedge funds backing charter schools).

Both are a couple of hacks pretending to care for the people of New York. They should shake and congratulate each other for fooling so many.

No New York--not New York City and not New York State--deserves to be governed by such an egotistical person of such modest accomplishments as Warren "I spent three weeks in Nica once" Wilhelm or Andy "What's the Moreland Commission?" Cuomo. But they certainly do deserve each other.

You fail to mention that the legislature offered de Blasio a hike to $11.50 in the City's minimum wage - which he rejected because they also wanted more money for police and fireman disability pensions. The City budget would have to pay nothing for raising the minimum wage, of course, but the Mayor continues to economize by not settling with his major uniformed workforces, still without a contract.
Of course, doing anything positive for police would have endangered de Blasio's fan base.

I keep thinking that Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin were right in 1969 when they ran for Mayor on the platform of making NYC the 51st state. At least the payoff money would be spent locally.

What a disgrace that the great State of New York is in the hands of these terrible HACK politicians! Preet Bharara, we need YOU to run our state for us because that is the only way anything positive is going to get done around here. Mayor Do-Nothing DeBlasio wobbling from one program to another. Cuomo at his very worst, failing to LEAD a fractious legislature that now has HEASTIE as Speaker? WHO thought THAT was going to rid us of corruption? I can SMELL the stench of corruption and inaction and ineptitude and graft all the way from Albany (and City Hall).

The primary problems here are Cuomo's need to neutralize those he sees as potential rivals -- even if they're ostensibly allies; and his surprising hostility to his home city (how else to explain his efforts to starve our schools and mass transit).

Odd photo accompanying this article. We get it -- the Mayor is tall.

What a surprise! Cuomo's attitude can be summed up in the phrase "It's my way or the highway". I can't help but notice how similar Cuomo and Christie are to each other in their exercise of "leadership". For both men, this will ultimately derail their presidential aspirations.

From the article: "If Mr. Cuomo practices a jujitsu brand of politics — harsh jabs, canny feints — Mr. de Blasio is a different breed, a former grass-roots organizer who rose to power as an accommodating seeker of consensus."

These descriptions strike me as odd in their use of metaphor, and in their accuracy in describing the style of each man's politics. Jujitsu was originally known as one of the softer styles of the Asian martial arts, and harsh jabs were never part of its fighting style. As for Mayor de Blasio being a seeker of consensus, this seems almost laughable in the face of some of his attempts at political maneuvering during his campaign for the mayor's office and in his first year and a half, which has seemed more like 4 years already, due to his almost complete incompetence as a political operative.

If I were Governor Cuomo, a man with his own political style issues, I'd stay as far away from anything Mayor de Blasio is doing as possible. de Blasio seems to believe that he is on an equal footing with Gov. Cuomo in terms of political power. This is his first mistake. Then he compounds his problems by not communicating first with Gov. Cuomo. de Blasio's State of the State announcement that he wanted to develop low-income housing in the Queens Sunnyside Yards area is a prime example of this sort of shoot-first and ask-questions-later approach that Cuomo immediately countered by saying there were no plans for such activities at Sunnyside.

POLARIZATION COMES TO NY So de Blasio and Cuomo's relationship is polarized? That's old news. It's happening all over the place. My message to them and to all in government: you were hired by the people to work in comity with each other! Do you jobs!

NY's legislature is a cess pool with almost zero credibility, a cat fighting backbiting back water. Too bad Cuomo could not drive it like Jerry Brown dissembled the equally destructive one in CA, turning it into a powerhouse for the people again after The Terminator left in in smoking ruins.

These guys could not make it in the real world, only in our New York world. The real good that they could accomplish, but can't or won't, is work together to improve the private sector business/job creating climate of New York. Instead, we watch as our senior political executives focus on scoring meaningless little wins for their narrowing political bases. These are fearful, lame and uninspiring career bureaucrats who pander, and pander, and pander, and only think about election cycles. An effective municipal manager and an effective governor should always be targeting and managing A PLAN toward an accelerating economic growth rate. No such managers here, just career management.

Cuomo knows DeBlasio is a complete incompetent and wants to distance himself from him as much as possible. So do most New Yorkers.

"An accommodating seeker of consensus"?

In his pre-mayor life, Mr. de Blasio got very little done except to provide his wife with a high-paying job at Maimonides; as mayor he reversed his formerly held, "popular" positions on, say, our libraries, Long Island College Hospital, and real estate development.

Look at the way he has allowed the illegal construction of a building that will forever obscure the iconic view of the Brooklyn Bridge from the Heights promenade -- a view cherished by Brooklynites and tourists alike.

(Not that I don't believe we absolutely need rich people in New York City to pay for the dizzying array of social services we provide that keep us from becoming Detroit. But messing with the Brooklyn Bridge is pretty venal.)

On the other hand, thank goodness de Blasio does reverse himself on some issues: Crime in Flatbush is soaring, and we will be grateful for the extra cops, including the ones in helicopters, who will be trying to keep our area quiet and safe this summer.

Cuomo found himself with two inexperienced legislative leaders in his three men in a room scenario. That he got so little of what he wanted shows how quickly Cuomo fatigue has set in. How does the Times feel now about endorsing Cuomo last year, after refusing to make an endorsement in the primary?

"In some ways, Mr. de Blasio may need to heed a similar lesson. He antagonized Republican leaders in the Senate by aggressively trying to unseat their members in last year’s elections…"

Why was that was a bad thing to do? (Granted, better it should have been successful).