Toward the end of his campaign book and announcement video, Andrew Cuomo lays out the core theme of his campaign.

“There was a time when New York State government was a symbol of integrity and intelligence and a source of pride,” he says, the edges of a smile creeping into his cheeks. “There was a time when this state led the nation in job development and new economies, a time when we dreamed big and acted smart, and a time when we believed in us.”

The rest of the book was written by his policy wonks, but that introduction and that line are as pure a representation of the man whom all signs point to as being the next governor of New York.

Cuomo studies elections carefully, poaching tactics that have worked and the tacticians who designed them. The result, going into this year’s campaign is a hybrid: the soul-churning social justice rhetoric of his father, the triangulating and bring-it-to-the-people politics of Bill Clinton, the government 2.0 mentality of Al Gore, the surrounding by a loyalist cadre of his own ’02 and ’06 campaigns, the ultra-Rose Garden and partisan-bending imperviousness of Michael Bloomberg.

Most overwhelmingly, though, is his 2010 update of Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America,” by way of Barack Obama’s substance-free but overwhelmingly inspiring “Hope” and “Change.” At this moment of deep-sea cynicism about government overall and especially about the Albany morass, what Cuomo is offering most people is a simple promise: pride.

He uses the word constantly in his speeches, in his off-hand comments, in just about everything he does in life. Those who work for Andrew Cuomo have gotten used to his hectoring on the importance of well-shined shoes and even the occasional necktie label check. Those who endorsed him in 2006—especially those who endorsed him early—spent the last three-and-a-half years being greeted by him at events with one question: “Am I making you proud?”

At its core, his gubernatorial campaign is built on the premise of re-instilling pride and using that to power the changes he is pursuing in state government.

That, he insists, is why his administration will suddenly be able to crack all of Albany’s intractable problems. Speaking to reporters shortly after his convention acceptance speech, the answer to how, Cuomo said, is “because we believe—because we were founded on the premise that we can unite people from different places. That’s what this is all about. That’s what the American experience was all about, that’s what New York was all about.”

As for the Cuomo operation, though, the defining theme is caution—from the secretive circle that quiet prepared his roll-out and generally refuses to do anything publicly but stand on the edges of his press conferences, to the stage managing of even the smallest details of every appearance (entering and exiting at the Democratic Rural Conference through the kitchen, presidential style, or a dog sweep of the ballroom at the Rye Hilton ahead of his acceptance speech, mystifying organizers as to the reason), to the extensive vet and leak-proof week-and-a-half long preparation of Bob Duffy’s roll-out. Nothing happens by accident, no word is out of place, no comment—to the extent that there are comments—fails to mention how hard-working he is. Kicking back briefly in Westchester after the convention was done, the staff was not celebrating getting the nomination—that, of course, had been a foregone conclusion for a very long time. They were celebrating how closely the reality between his Saturday afternoon announcement and his exit from the reception after his convention speech in Rye conformed to their plans.

Cuomo himself displays none of this. In front of the cameras, in front of the voters, his old intensity has been transformed into a jokey presence, all smiles and relaxed shoulders where once there were intensely staring eyes and the coiled pre-pounce hunch. Sure, he blasts state government and keeps reaching for the rhetoric heights of his father in his formal speeches, but he does it with a relaxed confidence, half-studied and half-natural, of a man who has nothing to fear between now and November. He has lost weight, trained himself into living life according to the maxims and aphorisms—some from Sun Tzu, some that he comes up with himself, like “Day one is too late”—which he collects in his private quotation book. Instead of a dynastic marriage to a Kennedy, he is in a motorcycle riding relationship with a blonde bombshell Food Network cook who has inspired his fascination with the slow-cooker in the kitchen of his Mt. Kisco home.

The product of this new approach is a campaign centered around his New NY Agenda, conveniently packaged for reporters and others in book form. For all those preparing to slam him for running purely on the strength of personality, here was a 250-page book for his supporters to brag about—complete with footnotes!

Except that it is actually 224 pages, not counting the introduction that repurposes the text of his video announcement. Not counting the space used by those 206 footnotes, it is 173 pages. Without the 33-page summary of everything that has just been presented, it is 140 pages, complete with wide margin and flagged points set apart from the text, beneath little shaded outlines of the state map.

The Cuomo campaign says it intends to release more details on many of the sections of the book, and even some new plans. That hardly seems the point: throughout the reborn stage of his career, Cuomo has run hardest against the things people say about him, deliberately searching out attention-grabbing moves that let him publicly play against type. Though he has transformed Steve Cohen and Ben Lawsky, the top lawyers in his office, into the guardians of his political operations as well as his government work, neither of them came from a particularly political background. This was a deliberate, anti-type move as well.

“When he became attorney general, some people thought he was just a politician,” said Stephen Younger, the incoming president of the state bar association who served as co-director of Cuomo’s 2006 transition. “He wanted to show he could put together an all-star legal team that was not recommended by the local political leaders, but that was made up of the best lawyers around.”

He has used the New NY Agenda as a tool in the latest bit of conventional wisdom quashing: for anyone who was ready to dismiss him as a candidate running solely on an insurmountable lead in the polls and no real argument for winning, Cuomo said, here was the plan. For anyone who said he was just a slave to old-style Democratic orthodoxy or the special interests who propelled his attorney general campaign, here were pages of conservative proposals seemingly custom-designed to incite their anger.

Perhaps the most major aspect of this strategy has been Cuomo’s careful avoidance of the media while in office. And not just by refusing to return to the NY1 studios since the 2006 incident when producers bucked the 20-minute time limit they had been given by locking him in the studio until they had asked all their questions. His attorney general press operation of late amounted to conference calls with reporters, many of whom are already frightened of saying an off word about him, and terrified of a future with what they expect will be a totally scri pted, completely inaccessible governor.

There is no public schedule of the campaign. His government office has refused to provide one for years. Even the advisory of his campaign kick-off arrived on just a few hours’ notice, and his announcement of Duffy’s selection gave the political press corps just a few hours to haul back to the midtown Sheraton from the Democratic convention in Rye.

“If I were advising somebody in preparation for a run, I don’t think I would have come up with that strategy. I would probably be more traditional,” said Howard Rubenstein, the public relations impresario who has grown increasingly close with the attorney general in recent years. “But yet I think it was a brilliant strategy.”


For basically his whole life, Cuomo has seemed to be living out of a scri pt. If the lore is to be believed, this is a man who spent his nights during law school in an apartment with his father, then the lieutenant governor, talking policy late into the night. He had his Icarus moment in 2002 and then 2003, complete with the plot twist of his wife being the one to cheat on him. And then the charmed, Nixonian-level comeback that has the whole state and its political establishment now rushing to lie down at his feet.

So now this: Andrew Cuomo, the strong-willed attorney general en route to a landslide victory for governor on a promise of tearing up Albany, will let New Yorkers get a second chance at what they had voted for in Eliot Spitzer, the last strong-willed attorney general who won a landslide victory for governor on a promise of tearing up Albany.

“It’s quite eerie the similarities here: a popular attorney general with a lot of money who’s perceived as heading toward a coronation,” said Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy, who in 2006 endorsed both Spitzer and Cuomo but this year clawed his way toward being the leader of the Cuomo opposition.

But Cuomo is not Spitzer—not by biography (son of an up-from-the-muck philosopher politician vs. son of an up-from-the-muck mini-real estate tycoon), not by education (Fordham and Albany Law vs. of Princeton and Harvard), not by biography (political operative vs. prosecutor). The bottomless ambition they share, and the chatter already in full swing for a presidential race six years out is just as much underway.

The comparisons begin to fall apart after that. If Cuomo is headed to a similar future as governor, it will not be a radical change from how different he has been from Spitzer as attorney general. Spitzer’s office was a national phenomenon, a legal revolution of flexing the unearthed Martin Act to claim his badge as sheriff of Wall Street, or digging up a local public health statute to prosecute a Thai sex tourism business. Cuomo has taken a much more traditional approach, both to the law and his own role within the office.

“Eliot Spitzer, whether you like him or not, was a heck of a lawyer. His whole lifetime perspective was one of lawyering,” said James Tierney, a former attorney general of Maine who is now director of the National State Attorneys General Program at Columbia Law School. “Andrew Cuomo is more like Jerry Brown in California, who kind of guided the policies, but wasn’t in there writing briefs.”

Which helps explain how the student loans investigation, started but essentially ignored under Spitzer, became so central to Cuomo’s first year in office and time since. For all the “big shoes” commercials and talk of wanting to continue Spitzer’s work during the ’06 campaign, Cuomo came in hungry for less esoteric cases. Student loans gave him an opportunity to get right onto people’s kitchen tables, mix him up in their lives, and land cases naming schools and lenders that which were sending their children into debt.

Cuomo announced some student loan prosecutions, but his heart was never really in them. Spitzer got his thrills from the kills, from rounding up lawbreakers harming society in ways that most never realized and seeing them raked through punishment until public outcry forced them to change their practices. Cuomo went for more comprehensible problems and got excited by squeezing success out of his strategy of using the prosecutions as building blocks toward settlements, and then legislation for the state and federal government to pass, gift-wrapped with most of the major players on board.

“Expose the problem. Understand the problem. Understand the number of scams, because 35 [cases] is a large enough universe that you understand the depth of the problem. And then come up with a new policy that would stop it from happening in the first place, and then institutionalize that policy,” Cuomo told The Capitol in 2008, in the only extended interview the suddenly press-averse politician granted to any outlet over his time since his election as attorney general, discussing the strategy he had developed via the student loans. “Now you did something. Now you really did something. Now you make government work. You saw a problem. You exposed the problem. You figured out how to solve the problem and you actually got the solution implemented. Beautiful. That’s what government is supposed to be.”

Cuomo and his top aides talk about the student loan case as having gone almost too perfectly. Within six months, the attorney general’s commitment to what at first seemed like a bizarre way of picking up Spitzer’s legal legacy had lassoed many of the nation’s top lenders and universities.

In the months that followed, Cuomo reconceived the office: its mission, put simply, was fighting corruption, either corporate or government. Just as his staff used a simple chart to ensure that he was circulating the state in his appearances at the rate they wanted, he used this informal system to make sure the prosecutions they pursued fell into one column or the other. At the same time, he built his own way of managing the office: a small group of staffers with access to him who radiate authority out to a largely autonomous administration of division heads and bureau chiefs—though they nonetheless became accustomed to sometimes picking up their phones to hear the attorney general himself on the other end, checking in on their progress. People in the attorney general’s office have known exactly who they are working for, in large part because he has made it very difficult for them to forget.

“He’s brought a broad vision to the office, a driving force to the office,” said Bob Abrams, the former attorney general, who is supporting Cuomo in his gubernatorial run. “He has inspired the troops by virtue of not only his leadership, but his own involvement, hard work and savvy in dealing with these matters.”

Spitzer ran the governor’s office like a prosecutor, leading many people to criticize him in hindsight for coming unprepared. Cuomo, meanwhile, has essentially been preparing for the next job since he was sworn into this one.

“His office,” said Tierney, the attorney general expert, “was structured like a governor’s office.”



The plan, though, had been for the preparations to go on a little longer.

What they uncovered during Troopergate and the barrage of criticisms from Spitzer in the aftermath of their report was a turning point, but the mood really started to change that winter, when Spitzer’s behavior during a feel-good appearance at Cuomo’s birthday party fundraiser left them with a queasy sense that the governor was unraveling. Three months later, he was gone, and just as the Cuomo circle was starting to sort out the relationship with Paterson and its effect on their political plans, the drawn-out process of appointing Hillary Clinton’s successor in the Senate began. Cuomo had opted out of the original race to replace Pat Moynihan, but his message to Paterson, as his side remembers, was clear: he would take the seat if asked, but he would not lobby for it.

A few dizzying months later, with Paterson pummeled in the polls and Kirsten Gillibrand flying quickly away from the man who had appointed her, Cuomo’s march toward inevitability had begun.

“During Spitzer’s tenure, there was never talk of challenging Spitzer—we assumed Spitzer would be governor for at least eight years,” is how one Cuomo insider remembers it. “I can’t chart when it happened, but it was less ‘I want to do this,’ and more a function of things developed in such a way that Andrew became the candidate.”

Not that this actually happened by chance. While Cuomo was swatting away questions about politics after Paterson’s last State of the State in January, his staff was bumping into Carl McCall one floor up, arranging a meeting between the two old primary opponents. While he was pointedly refuting the idea that his platform-heavy address to the Democratic Rural Conference in April was a campaign speech, his fundraising staff was counting the money from his two separate events that night, all while the remnants of his ’02 and ’06 field and operations team were parked in the back of the room, watching intently.

Cuomo also spent the ’06 race making policy speeches and releasing white papers, dropping them about once a month, generally along with a major endorsement or other announcement from the campaign. He started in mid-February with a health care plan which would have instituted a temporary moratorium on political donations from people in the health care industry in advance of legislation institutionalizing new rules, along with cash rewards for DAs who won Medicaid fraud cases and a new statewide database of Medicaid vendors. In March of that year, he was out with a good government proposal to end all gifts from lobbyists, extend the mandated waiting period for those looking to get into lobbying to three years and make the State Ethics Commission fully independent. April was the month he spoke about sweeping campaign finance reform, including following the New York City public financing model and closing loopholes on soft money, corporate contributions and imposing new limits on political party contributions. May focused on domestic violence initiatives like improving orders of protection and ending housing discrimination. By August, in the closing weeks of the primary, he was pitching a new senior citizen protection unit.

Some of this got done during the last three-and-a-half years. Many of them did not, though as the Cuomo campaign justifiably points out, Spitzer and Paterson and the Legislature are to blame for the failures on campaign finance reform and other new laws he supported. Several, such as adopting the New York City campaign finance model, have been revived in the book and the gubernatorial campaign. So have a few standard stump lines, like those which contrast the schools on one side of town with access to the internet to those on the other side of town without even basketball nets, or those which have the best computer processors to those which feature metal detectors as their most sophisticated piece of technology—the same words in both his 2006 and 2010 convention speeches (and in a way, an update of his father’s famous two cities keynote from the 1984 Democratic National Convention).

Cuomo has always demonstrated an innate mastery of politics, but his experience in government, aside from his time at HUD, has been through structuring relatively low-risk deals in a position that has allowed him to stay behind the scenes and in a political environment where no one had the capital to refuse him. He has turned himself into a plotting, plodding strategist who now hopes to steer that battleship mentality into an unquestioned dominance over Albany.

Post-election day and a standard honeymoon into the beginning of next year, that ground will inevitably start to shift. Legislators are already starting to dig in, beginning to mutter their defensive “the Legislature is an equal branch of government” line. Thanks to Spitzer’s flameout and Cuomo’s reputation, they tend more toward fears of speaking openly about their current nominee than the messianic feelings they had about Spitzer four years ago. Getting Steve Rattner, Denis Hughes, Hank Aaron and Ivanka Trump to the same big-ticket fundraiser at the Waldorf Astoria is one thing. Uniting the different factions of Albany is another.

Right out of the gate, Cuomo had the legislators grumbling for being tarred as the source of Albany dysfunction. Nearly none of them have read the book, and several are still trying to sort out whether Cuomo counts them as enemies for not agreeing with one or two points of his pledge, but Democrats are universally horrified by his suggestion that he might campaign against their candidates in the fall.

State Sen. Jeff Klein, one of the top members of the Senate Democrats’ campaign team, said he felt confident that in fact, Cuomo would be devoted to helping the Democrats retain and expand their majorities, especially in his chamber.

“As the Democratic standard bearer, our future governor, I’m sure, has a vested interest in making sure the Democrats control the Senate,” Klein said, echoing Cuomo’s call for bipartisanship—starting the day after the elections.  

Cuomo has set the bar high. Not only does he now have a pledge that he will need to get people to sign, but he has to, in this national, if not statewide, Republican year and with enough proposals to bleed out his base, get enough votes in the fall for the chattering classes to let him govern for a few months without calling him a loser from the outset.

And already, his establishment-bashing has been answered with the establishment beating back the first real push of his campaign: the Cuomo operation left little question in most minds that it wanted to leave the convention with just Nassau DA Kathleen Rice on the ballot for the attorney general race and a strong challenger for Tom DiNapoli in the comptroller race. Combined pressure from party activists, editorial boards and other political forces stopped that from happening, but not before the supporters of those who were on the short end of his attempted ticket balancing were swearing vengeance.

Plus, at least for now, Bill Samuels is holding firm to his plan to run for lieutenant governor, threatening to pour a million dollars into a primary that will raise questions about Cuomo’s sole definitive public choice about governing so far and scramble Cuomo’s attempt at full message control.

For all of that, almost no one believes he will lose. Though he can now no longer hide behind the confidentiality shield of the attorney general’s office, three-and-a-half years out of practice does not seem to have left him rusty on the stump. The Republicans will try to provoke his famous temper and circulate evidence of his role in the sub-prime crisis while at HUD, or selling real estate for Island Capital in Dubai, searching for the last bone fragments leftover from the old skeletons from his closet.

And so the incumbent Democratic legislators, at least for now, express cautious optimism.

“Look at what he did with the consolidation legislation, which is not necessarily in an attorney general’s basket, not necessarily something he would do. A lot of people thought a governor couldn’t get it done. But he got it done,” said Assembly Member Joe Morelle. “Imagine what he can do as governor, when he has all the tools and powers at his disposal.”

As Bloomberg did in New York City in his last two elections, Cuomo is hoping to win the November elections on the argument that the self-propelled nature of his candidacy lets him come in owing nothing to anyone. He will seize control as a governor in a time of crisis, and get credit for the economy that will almost certainly start to improve just as he is stretching his legs in the Executive Mansion.

To people like Howard Rubenstein, the old family friend who hosted a private dinner a month before Cuomo’s announcement at which the soon-to-be-candidate presented his ideas to a  20-person cross-section of business and civic leaders, that has had a positive effect on his development.

“Politicians previously in all my years would be reluctant to make the assumption that they would win—they were all looking toward starting January 1,” said Rubenstein, praising Cuomo for coming forward with a blueprint six months out from the election. “He put that aside, and his effort to come in early and strong with a new approach that I haven’t seen before, I think resounds very effectively in New York.”

Alternatively, there is the fear of Cuomo not owing anything to anyone, keeping his own counsel and perhaps letting some of his remade self get unmade when he finally achieves the office he has so long sought. Becoming governor has turned men with much less of a history of ego, temper and power-mongering. And his logo already has his name wrapping itself around the state.

Either way, get ready for a major change. The Cuomo people say they have their sights set on nothing less.

“We’re all idealists,” joked one of the people involved with developing the many complicated, radically restructuring proposals in the New NY Agenda. “It’s a four-year plan.”


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Adding Up The Agenda

At the center of the supposedly 250-page book Andrew Cuomo kicked off his campaign by issuing are 140 pages of occasionally bold, often common sense solutions to problems he lays out in stark, simple terms.

The New NY Agenda includes plans to reform and restructure government at the outset, to the broad appeals for action on hate crimes and improving the welfare society in its closing. These are wrapped around the most specific plans, those for economic development, which have Cuomo looking to centralizing new powers in the governor’s portfolio, as well as annexing the Legislature’s authority to distribute capital funding—the executive branch, his book explains, is “the only branch of government with an economic development infrastructure capable of effectively managing economic development decisions.” These include a $300 million tax credit program for companies that hire unemployed New Yorkers, replacing the Empire Zone program with more tax incentives for companies that remain in the state to employ residents, creating a state “infrastructure bank” which will coordinate funding for new projects and revamping the state’s job training programs. He even includes a section on agriculture, getting extremely specific with a glancing plan to create a major wholesale farmer’s market at Hunts Point in the Bronx and strengthening the price-protection Milk Income Loss Contract.

What the plans lack, though, is any explicit sense of how they will be funded. Though the book is full of tables and other info charts, it lacks any economic models to support the proposals. Aside from two footnotes buried in his property tax plan which calculate annual savings of $1 billion from halving the growth rate in school personnel salaries (or peeling $2 billion from projections by freezing them entirely), the book lacks any numbers to show where Cuomo would get the money that he has outlined plans to spend. Cuomo’s hopes for government consolidation, already being greeted with some skepticism by those who say he may have overstated the extent of the problem, and, consequently, the benefits of any solution he might be able to get through the Legislature, seem to be one source of new cash flow. More, theoretically, would come from new surpluses thanks to the property tax and state spending caps he says he will make happen, though how politics would enable him to achieve either or economics would enable him to achieve both are already causing some head-scratching around the state.

But those are just guesses being made by the people who have read the book. Cuomo has been characteristically evasive on these points, weaving away from requests from reporters after his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention to name a single item in the current budget which he would cut or eliminate. Repeated requests to produce any further models or verification to demonstrate the feasibility of the central policy planks of the New NY Agenda were turned down by the Cuomo campaign.

Combined with the lack of clear savings on the state’s looming liabilities in Medicaid and pensions, which also get only glancing treatment in Cuomo’s book, many budget experts around the state are reading the released Cuomo plans to date warily.

Among them is E.J. McMahon, a state budget and tax expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute.

“If you carve away the acceptance speech from the beginning and the repeating rhetoric from the middle, what you’re left with is some pretty interesting stuff in some areas and then a great deal of vagueness,” McMahon said. “I’m not saying at this stage that they should have their whole plan out, but I’m just saying that if this is all they’re going to offer, they can’t call it a plan.”




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The Cuomo Campaign Cabinet

Andrew Cuomo is his own senior advisor, political consultant, campaign manager, communications director, advance director. He sets the agenda, the tone, conducts his own Socratic-style interrogations to determine every avenue pursued, handpicks his top people and some of the lower ones as well, either reaching out personally or dispatching one of the few people with actual access to his mind to do so.

“There are politicians who are willing to sit back, let their staffs work and raise money. Andrew’s not that person,” explained a Cuomo insider. “He’s deeply engaged in everything and enormously hard working.”

Still, there are those he has come to trust. They fall into roughly three categories. In the first group is Michael Del Giudice, his father’s chief of staff; John Marino, state Democratic chair for his father; and Jennifer Cunningham, the political consultant and former labor strategist whom his father helped recruit to guide the 2006 attorney general campaign. Cuomo speaks to them regularly, usually on his own, synthesizing their ideas—like Del Giudice’s conception that the success of campaigns and administrations is determined by how well they achieve the coordinated strength of a chief of staff, communications director and strong counsel. Drew Zambelli, his father’s old communications director, is the bridge between this group and the day-to-day team that have over the past three-and-a-half years run the attorney general’s office by day and while meeting in various spots around Lower Manhattan at nights to plot his politics. That group is Joe Percoco, Cuomo’s elusive longtime body man/advance man/political director/special counsel who has an encyclopedic memory of faces, favors and slights; Steve Cohen, whose father’s childhood exploits inspired his brother’s book, Tough Jews, and left a private law practice which often had him sparring with Spitzer’s office to become Cuomo’s chief of staff; and Ben Lawsky, who despite never meeting Cuomo before being hired in late 2006 and a previously full-on legal career as a Judiciary Committee counsel for Chuck Schumer and an assistant United States attorney, has become the nexus of power in the land of Cuomo. Recent additions to the second group are Phil Singer, the unassuming until provoked communications consultant; Paul Francis, the Spitzer budget director who joined the Cuomo campaign to translate many of the candidate’s ideas into policy, and was primarily responsible for writing the campaign’s policy book; and Josh Vlasto, recruited from six years fielding press for Chuck Schumer. Hank Greenberg, Cuomo’s top man in the attorney general’s Albany office, sometimes joins the group, as does Bill Eimicke, Mario Cuomo’s former housing czar.

“It’s a small group,” as one of those within it said, explaining how Cuomo has maintained the plodding, plotting progress without, to date, much of the internal and external drama that tends to characterize high-profile campaigns, “and we really do get along.”

Others, like Charlie King, Cuomo’s 2002 running mate whom Cuomo installed in April as the executive director of the state Democratic Party, or Jeremy Creelan, the man who wrote the Brennan Center’s landmark 2004 report forever ensconcing the word “dysfunction” in every discussion about Albany, are among those in a third group around Cuomo that gets to chip in ideas and help shape some of the less central aspects of the campaign.

Then there are the shadow advisors, the ones whom even people close to Cuomo will not name. They are in Albany and New York, and also in Washington—current and former government and political pros whom Cuomo has collected over nearly 40-year top-flight political career on the assurances that one day, despite the delays and disasters, he would get to the point where people would be talking seriously about his possible future in the White House. They are there now, providing thoughts and help, making calls, securing favors and commitments. And they will be there should he win, like sleeper agents, at the ready to move the gears for him.

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above right: Andrew Cuomo still draws some inspiration from his father and counsel from several of his father’s old top staffers, but he has built his own very small, very tight circle of advisors.

Photos by Andrew Schwartz