New York Note

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@zohran_k_mamdaniLos neoyorquinos latinos son el corazón de esta ciudad y merecen un alcalde que les hable directamente. Este vídeo es un esfuerzo a presentar nuestra visión a la comunidad latina, para que podamos trabajar juntos para construir la ciudad que todos merecemos. Latino New Yorkers are the heart of this city — and they deserve a mayor who will speak to them directly. This video is an effort to introduce our vision to the Latino community, so we can work together to build the city we all deserve.

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This is pretty irritating, from the New York Times Editorial Board keeping its promise not to endorse any candidates in local elections any more ever again:

Given those polls [showing Cuomo and Mamdani dominating over the other nine candidates] the crucial choice may end up being where, if at all, voters decide to rank Mr. Cuomo or Mr. Mamdani. We do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots. His experience is too thin, and his agenda reads like a turbocharged version of Mr. de Blasio’s dismaying mayoralty. As for Mr. Cuomo, we have serious objections to his ethics and conduct, even if he would be better for New York’s future than Mr. Mamdani.

For any voters tempted to leave both off their ballots, it is important to understand that this decision would be tantamount to expressing no preference between the two. It is similar to voting for neither major-party candidate in a traditional election.

“We refuse to choose, because it's beneath our awesome dignity, but if you follow our example you're a moral coward. Also, you should choose the ethically challenged Cuomo." As they make clear by devoting three paragraphs to Zohran Mamdani's shortcomings, condemning his ideology, policy ideas, and inexperience, and the way he reminds them of de Blasio, and just one to Andrew Cuomo's—the issue of his weird though probably not criminal mistreatment of women, over which he resigned from the state governorship four years ago, on the advice of this same editorial board, which now seems to think that was less serious a fault than advocating a minimum wage hike or free buses, as Mamdani does.

In the first place, the argument is bullshit. It's a rank-choice vote among 11 candidates, and it is not similar to voting for neither major-party candidate in a traditional election. With the much smaller (and better informed) turnout you expect in a primary, and only Democrats voting in New York's closed-primary system, it's easy to imagine one or two of the other candidates emerging if enough people decided not to rank the two frontrunners, and if the frontrunners are as bad as the board seems to think they are, that's what the board ought to call for, instead of using this backhanded technique of pushing us in one direction.

Then, Cuomo's ethical failings aren't limited to the #MeToo moments that helped to drive him out of office. In the middle of his first term as governor, in 2013, he named what's called a "Moreland Commission" in New York to fight corruption in state government, then abruptly shut it down halfway through its 18-month appointed lifetime. It later became apparent that Cuomo and his aides had never really allowed it to function, as The Times reported:

Mr. Cuomo’s aides repeatedly pressured the commission, many of whose members and staff thought they had been given a once-in-a-career chance at cleaning up Albany. As a result, the panel’s brief existence — and the writing and editing of its sole creation, a report of its preliminary findings — was marred by infighting, arguments and accusations. Things got so bad that investigators believed a Cuomo appointee was monitoring their communications without their knowledge. Resignations further crippled the commission. In the end, the governor got the Legislature to agree to a package of ethics reforms far less ambitious than those the commission had recommended — a result Mr. Cuomo hailed as proof of the panel’s success.

One Trump-style enforcer, Larry Schwartz, explicitly told the commission that investigating Cuomo was off limits. Later, at the height of the COVID pandemic, he was named "vaccine czar" and, after the sexual harrassment allegations against Cuomo surfaced, conducted a loyalty survey of county officials that led one county executive to file an ethics complaint, afraid that if he was regarded as disloyal to the governor it might affect his county's vaccine supply. And there was more:

several close Cuomo associates were convicted of corruption-related crimes. In 2016, former Cuomo aide Todd Howe pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges after having used his access to Cuomo’s administration to grant favors to lobbying clients. In 2018, Joe Percoco, Cuomo’s former executive deputy secretary and one of his closest advisors, was found guilty of corruption-related charges after he received more than $300,000 in bribes from executives of companies with business before the state. That same year, Alain Kaloyeros, a Cuomo associate whom the governor had appointed to manage a $1.5 billion economic package invested in the city of Buffalo, was convicted of “steering more than $850 million worth of state-funded contracts” to Cuomo allies.

Like Trump, Cuomo has an aversion to public records, allowing his staff to use private email accounts with emails programmed to self-destruct after a period, and himself preferring Blackberry messages and phone calls; he vetoed two attempts by the legislature to reform New York's Freedom of Information Law.

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Then there are his underhanded political dealings, from the "Independent Democratic Conference" he sponsored in the New York State Senate from 2011 to 2017 to keep the Democratic majority from functioning as a majority to his seemingly pointless feuding with Bill de Blasio, which may well have increased New York's COVID death toll, as de Blasio recently told The Times:

When I called for “shelter in place” it was because the situation got dire and we needed to take aggressive action, and we saw it already starting to work in San Francisco.

I thought Cuomo’s response was political and small and nasty. He had a chance to say, “This is something that we need to immediately act on.” Instead, he kind of mocked the idea. That was irresponsible. You can look at different studies, but I don’t have a question that there were very dire consequences to that delay

Speaking of COVID, I won't even get into the misreporting of nursing home deaths or the way he had his staff ghostwriting his $5 million book while the pandemic raged. I'm saying he's garbage. I'm saying if Cuomo wins the primary I may well end up voting in November for the "independent" candidacy of Eric Adams, as Tom Scocca suggests at Defector (please read the whole thing!):

Say what you may about Mayor Eric Adams—he's a buffoon, he's a stooge, he's so corrupt he found an even more corrupt way to stay out of prison than the alleged corruption that could have sent him to prison—but one of the things he ran on was fighting rats, and deploying the trash cans was a victorious battle in that war. Since we got the cans, there are nowhere near as many rats around. The rats aren't gone; the city is still the city. But the constant scurrying to and from the curbside smorgasbord is a thing of the past.

Adams said, at least in this instance, what he intended to do—get rid of the damned rats!—and did it. Whereas Cuomo wanted to waffle about it, as he does about everything.

I expect to be voting for a lot of people I've voted for before, often for different offices

• State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal for Manhattan borough president

• District Attorney Alvin Bragg for district attorney

• Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine for city comptroller

• Public Advocate Jumaane Williams for public advocate

Possibly adding some other candidates in the rankings; and for mayor

• Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani

• Comptroller Brad Lander

• City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams

• State Senator Zellnor Myrie

• former Assemblyman Michael Blake

Blake (replacing Jessica Ramos, who I dropped after she sort of dropped out and endorsed Cuomo) and Myrie performed very well in the debates, but I think they're too little known citywide and will be among the early losers in the elimination rounds. I don't think former borough president and former comptroller Scott Stringer—who I've been seeing campaigning on Broadway for something like 26 years now—is a good campaigner, and although his record is solidly progressive, I'm still peeved with him over his time as comptroller when he seemed to me to be continually undermining Mayor de Blasio (Stringer was running for mayor then, too, of course).

The top three would all make excellent mayors, in my opinion, if in very different ways: Adams because, as she keeps saying, she's doing it already (I don't know if that's a hint that Eric Adams isn't doing his job and she's filling in as a kind of prime minister, but that's what it sounds like), but that's not a very exciting campaign line. As a Black woman from Queens with strong union connections, she's well placed to appeal to the whole party coalition, but I think she made a tactical mistake in taking a lot longer to announce her candidacy than the others. I'll be very happy to vote for her in November if I'm wrong.

Lander is a kind of ideal Brooklyn progressive: member of the Democratic Socialists of America but mild-mannered in demeanor. He's Jewish, which enables him to serve as a valuable foil to Cuomo's latest skullduggery, of attacking progressive Democrats as antisemitic over the Gaza issue; a living instance of the fact that the movement opposing the illegal Israeli occupation of Gaza and Golan and the West Bank and East Jerusalem is every bit as Jewish as the movement of blindly toeing the Likud line. Or sometimes a good bit more Jewish:

“It’s very simple: anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” Cuomo said in his speech [April 1] at West Side Institutional Synagogue. He proceeded to accuse some of his rivals of fitting the bill, and claimed that Lander divested city funds from Israel — which Lander has denied...

Lander, the city comptroller and a candidate for mayor, decided to clap back ...with a curse of his own — in Yiddish.

“A beyzer gzar zol er af dir kumen,” Lander, who is Jewish, said at a press conference.

It’s a phrase that translates literally to “May an evil decree come upon him.” But in the words of one Brooklyn political reporter, the rough translation is a little more colorful: “Get the f— out of here.”

Lander added, “Andrew Cuomo doesn’t get to tell me how to be Jewish.”

Mamdani, who is Muslim (family from the South Asian community that dictator Idi Amin threw out of Uganda), can't quite do that, at least not the way he handles Spanish, but he's a spectacular campaigner, up there on a level with Ocasio-Cortez, and a special draw on the yutes (disclosure: my Millennial daughter has been out canvassing for him). I'm not concerned by his relative inexperience: he's extremely smart, and seems to have a wonderful temperament, and he and Lander are said to have made some kind of compact whereby if one of them wins the primary the other one will get an important administration post enabling Lander to bring in his experience either way. I think either of them stands a good chance of winning the primary in the rank-choice system, which, again, is committed Democrats—it's my view that the people who really hate Cuomo the most are liberal and progressive Democrats who can't get over how unlike his father he is, and those are the likeliest voters.

Or not, you know, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, as Mom used to say.