Andrew Cuomo for Mayor

Not Just Anti-Mamdani

A long time ago, when I was the political columnist for New York magazine, I got a phone call from Andrew Cuomo. He was just a kid, then. His dad, Mario, was governor…and I wasn’t being very nice to Mario. (“You have a father and son relationship with Mario,” Andrew once told me. “That bad?” I replied).

Anyway, on this particular occasion, Andrew called to criticize me for making fun of his dad. “Why don’t you ever write about programs that work?” He asked. It turned out to be a question that changed my career.

“Like what?” I snarked.

Andrew said he’d pick me up in a half hour and show me one—and sure enough, there he was, in a monster black SUV. We went up to the South Bronx, where he introduced me to a housing program he’d started, called Project Help—but it was more than a housing program. It provided social work support, job training, day care assistance and temporary housing for welfare mothers who were homeless. It was a great program. And I felt a certain satisfaction writing about it; there was moral value to snark-free columnizing. Indeed, I made it a practice to find programs that worked and write about them—not all the time, but often enough. Sometimes snark was called for, but so was positive wonkery. It became my cynicism-prevention regime.

So I owe Andrew for that. But more, I admire the way he goes about his business. He’d make a fine mayor of New York.

We continued to talk when he became Bill Clinton’s HUD Secretary and I admired his practical turn of mind: “Mario asks why, I ask how,” he once said. We lost touch after I left New York Magazine and began to write for national publications, so I didn’t follow his time as governor very closely—although he did some things that improved my life markedly, like transforming LaGuardia Airport from a near-slum to a state-of-the-art masterpiece. He was brought down by MeToo# allegations; I don’t know whether they had substance or not, but I do know that at a certain point MeToo became a disaster for the Democratic Party—the presumption of male guilt fit too neatly into the toxic male meme that came to dominate the over-feminated progressives. Over time, it cast an electoral pall over the Democrats for many men, especially young ones…of all ethnicities, as we saw in 2024.

It is time for Democrats to move away from that—and electing Andrew Cuomo mayor of New York would be a step in the right direction. More important, he would be a mayor who concentrated on the “how” of politics, the practical steps that need to be taken—constantly—to keep New York City afloat. This is in sharp contrast to Zohran Mamdani who is the candidate of kindergarten “whys.” Like, why don’t we have state-run grocery stores? (Because a great middle class grew out of New York’s family owned fruit stands and butcher shops and dry goods stores and bodegas, which still could use some love from the municipal government—all small businesses could, a reality that too often eludes Democrats.)

Zohran Mamdani is political poison. He supports the Hamas terrorists, unwilling even now to call for them to disarm. His history of anti-police rhetoric is disgraceful and will have consequences. His housing policies would be counter-productive, as they’ve proven to be in the past. His opposition to gifted-and-talented education programs is classic socialist twaddle: mediocrity, not excellence, is the goal—and mediocrity is rarely achieved by socialists because it requires economic incentives to work. You need to pay better teachers more than the mediocre ones…and seniority doesn’t equal better; sometimes seniority is just another word for burnt-out.

Worst of all for the future of the republic, a Mamdani victory would become an open question, an open wound, for every last Democrat running for office nationally. It already is. Do you support what Zohran Mamdani is proposing for New York? A killer question, which politicians will try to avoid—and when they avoid it, they will seem weak. Dems are weak enough as it stands.

But that is not why I’d vote for Andrew Cuomo. It is because I’m a native New Yorker—from Queens, like Cuomo—and I’ve spent most of my life here and I love the place for all its rude splendor and terrible sports teams. Governing it is a high-wire act under the best of circumstances. In my lifetime, only Mike Bloomberg did it well.

I think the why v. how question is crucial for a New York Mayor. Andrew Cuomo would be very much on the how side of that divide. He will try to make things work, which is about as good as New Yorkers have a right to expect.