Op-Ed: Cuomo’s Rancid WFP Deal By Hon. RICHARD BRODSKY

Voters are Fed Up with Corrupt Bargains

The headline is “Cuomo Gets Working Families Party Ballot line.” But that’s the least of it. In fact, economics and politics collided — and politics won.

The last-minute deal struck between the fiscally right-wing governor and the altogether left-wing political party was ripe and rancid. It came with threats, pounded tables and wounded feelings that left both sides damaged, and the fight over New York’s economic future unresolved.

An enormous amount was at stake. Polls, public and private, showed an amazing reality: A Working Families Party (WFP) candidate opposing Cuomo’s economic agenda turned the governor’s bid for a second term from an easy win into an unpredictable three-way contest that could leave his political brand badly tarnished, even in victory.

Cuomo had carefully mapped out a path to reelection and national prominence by tacking hard to his left on social issues (gay marriage, guns, abortion) and hard to his right on economic ones (“Governor 1%” in WFP’s pungent phrase). Wrong.

For Cuomo, it was a bad two days as the WFP met last weekend to choose its nominee. He lost control, people weren’t scared of him and he had to walk back his support of tax cuts for the wealthy, vow to take sides in reinvigorated state Senate primaries and mortgage his political future to a bunch of left-wing activists. The immediate results are a shotgun divorce from his Republican and Independent Democrat state Senate partners, and a chaotic legislative session.

The long-term consequences are of national significance. Cuomo’s back-pedaling proved, again, that tax cuts no longer automatically equal votes. The governor should have seen this coming, if only because Mayor de Blasio blazed the path just a short year ago. There’s a real political appetite for a true progressive focused on income inequality and a living wage. Cuomo missed it.

The WFP had a chance to provide that candidate. Instead, their raw trading turned a successful progressive crusade into a conventional deal. In exchange for Cuomo’s vague promises to turn the state Senate over to Democratic control and increase the minimum wage, the party smacked down its activist base and rejected the chance to make a truly progressive case with an attractive candidate with the unlikely but memorable name of Zephyr Teachout. She is linking Cuomo’s tax cuts for the wealthy with his $33 million war chest and the bizarre shutdown of his Moreland Commission investigation into political corruption in Albany. The WFP rank and file loved it.

Instead, the WFP embraced a candidate whose economic policies are everything they oppose. The party’s labor supporters are old hands at political deals. But until now, the party itself had avoided the fate of the defunct Liberal Party. After a series of insider deals, that party died unmourned and remembered, when at all, as “not liberal and not a party.” The Cuomo endorsement is going to require some explaining and some immediate results.

This kind of stuff doesn’t sit well with regular people, the ones who finally decide elections. In Europe last week, established political parties got their clocks cleaned by third parties on the left and right. Voters want no more deals by political elites, no more corrupt bargains and no more austerity and tax cuts for the wealthy.

In New York, both sides emerge alive but badly damaged. Cuomo is seething at a rare public humiliation, including a bizarre back-and-forth with party leaders when he repeatedly tried to change the agreed-to deal in his recorded acceptance speech, and then loud boos when the final version of the video played. The WFP has an internal civil war. Teachout is likely to run in the Democratic primary with broad activist support, and the remaining month of the legislative session is in chaos.

To be sure, both Cuomo and the WFP have redeeming qualities. The governor has been an active and effective chief executive, who has successfully managed a progressive social agenda. The party has been a muscular and principled political force on the left. Both will have to fight to keep their images intact.

For those who can see beyond the political theater, there’s a lot at stake. There used to be one big economic idea in American politics: Cut taxes and spending. Now, there is a second contender: Tax the extremely rich and invest in human and physical infrastructure.

Voters are responding to that new message. Pols across the country should heed the lesson of Andrew Cuomo: There’s a political price to be paid for pushing supply-side tax cuts for the wealthy and cuts in education and health care. Who said a weekend in Albany was boring?

First published by the New York Daily News on June 2, 2014

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/cuomo-rancid-wfp-deal-article-1.1814405#ixzz33b2aWbAy

Hon. Richard Brodsky,Esq., a former assemblyman from Westchester County, is a senior fellow at the think tank Demos.