Will Andrew Cuomo run for President in 2016? The conventional wisdom is suggesting just that, due to the New York Governor’s leadership in achieving his state’s same sex marriage law – an achievement that turned Cuomo into the political Justin Bieber of Democratic Party liberals.
The narrative took on such a frenzied life that the New York Post reported Cuomo ordered his staff not to speculate and not to appear on talk shows because it would distract from his job and he has “seen this dance before” with his father Mario in 1992. But he won’t definitively rule out a run.
The conventional wisdom – that group-think journalistic mechanism which in May insisted Obama’s re-election chances were greatly enhanced by the killing of Osama bin Laden – kicked in hours after the law’s passage.
Time declared it “a powerful example of the kind of power a governor can wield when he fully commits himself to a legislative goal.” The New York Times said the vote showed “how a Democratic governor, himself a Catholic, who used the force of his personality and relentlessly strategic mind to persuade conflicted lawmakers to take a historic leap.” The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza noted that “political strategists are forever looking toward the future and the next big thing – and Cuomo made a claim to that title by guiding passage of the same-sex-marriage legislation through the Republican-controlled state Senate.”
Liberal blogs were ecstatic, noting the assertive contrast with you-know-who in the White House. The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd said the nuanced Obama was “letting Cuomo… go down in history as the leader on the front lines of the civil rights issue of our time” and was politically “binary.” Nate Silver conjured up images of LBJ.
Longtime Democratic strategist Bob Shrum noted in “The Week” Obama’s need to “evolve” on gay marriage and wrote: “If you’re old enough, you may find a use for those “Cuomo for President” buttons from the 80s and 90s… It’s true that Cuomo captured this moment, but he also made it.”
This hype isn’t without merit. I’ve long believed Cuomo would become a major player. Just as George W. Bush seemed determined not to make the errors he believed his dad made, Andrew Cuomo seems determined not to make his dad’s mistake of dithering forever. Mario Cuomo’s elusive moment came in 1992 when he was a hot political property and agonized so much over running for President that he was called “Hamlet on the Hudson.” Prediction: this Cuomo won’t miss a beat.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.