‘I learned long ago never to wrestle with a pig,” George Bernard Shaw said once upon a time. “You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.”
It’s a sentiment apparently shared by Gov. Cuomo, who’s decided to ditch his annual State of the State address in favor of six regional speeches. This way he gets his say and avoids rasslin’ with the 213 little piggies of the Legislature.
Usually, all that excites Albany is US Attorney Preet Bharara serving subpoenas. But this year is different: The Legislature wanted a pay raise; it’s odds-on not to get one — and for this it correctly blames Cuomo.
(Score one for the governor!)
So the risk of public rancor is high, which Cuomo apparently wants to avoid. (His practice is that he dispenses rancor; he doesn’t experience it.)
So instead of the constitutionally mandated annual message to the Legislature, the governor is taking his PowerPoint projector on the road.
But as is always the case with Cuomo, things are more complicated.
This has been a dreadful year for him. The rapidly approaching Trump presidency will be a blessing for Cuomo — providing no end of opportunities to change the subject whenever the need arises. Otherwise, though, not much happened in 2016 to give comfort to the Cuomo administration.
Bharara’s public-corruption indictment of the governor’s erstwhile alter ego, Joseph Percoco, was not only a personal humiliation; it also underscored the all-but-fatal fissures in Cuomo’s signature upstate economic-development initiatives.
Specific crimes must be proved, of course, but if bribe solicitation, payoffs and related self-dealing reside at the center of your program, then it’s probably a failure functionally as well.
And nothing underscores the latter more dramatically than last week’s news from the US Census Bureau: Out-migration from New York, virtually all of it from upstate, outpaced immigration, virtually all of it to New York City, for the first time since Cuomo became governor.
That is, New York’s decline on Cuomo’s watch is more than metaphorical. It’s real.
True, it’s not yet crippling. The foreign money pouring into New York City seeking safe haven in a darkening world has Gotham’s economy chugging like a steam engine.
Upstate’s different. Decline that began decades ago is accelerating...
Read the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Bob McManus is a contributing editor of City Journal. He retired as editorial page editor of the New York Post in 2013 and has since worked as a freelance editor, columnist, and writer.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post