The Sunday afternoon news conferences to denounce overpriced breakfast cereal are a thing of the past. So is edging colleagues out of jobs and camera shots with elbows as sharp as a sushi knife.
The rest of the article, on Schumer's new, central Senate communications role, is about right, but the notion that he's given up his old ways is absurd. I ran into him this Monday on the steps of New York City Hall, where he was holding a press conference on bus safety, pegged to the bus crash that had been all over the previous day's tabloids.
The federal government isn't doing enough to make low-cost buses like the one that crashed Saturday safe, Sen. Charles Schumer said Monday.
So it was Monday morning, not Sunday afternoon. But it was the same old Schumer, a dominant figure on a local issue, flanked by a largely silent House member who didn't make it into the shot:
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has proven particularly adept at keeping his party at line and labor unions at bay and off the airwaves while he pushes for budget cuts.
But there are some signs of cracks in support in his own party emerging today, as a source forwards on a letter sent by 42 local Democratic elected officials to the governor. At issue is Cuomo's decision to let a tax surcharge on income over $1 million expire, a tax that many Democrats had hoped to use to plug the budget gap:
"[S]ome of Governor Cuomo’s budget policies are neither balanced nor well conceived," write the signers, led by Robert Jackson, a New York City Councilman, and Catherine Fahey, a local Albany official. "According to the Governor, this is what it means to be a 'new Democrat.' ...If this is what it means to be a New Democrat, and if this is what it means to be progressive then something is very wrong."
The signers don't include any members of a state legislature whose members know that they cross Cuomo at their peril, but it's a sign of restiveness in Democratic Party ranks.
Maggie Haberman reports that New York's Republican Party may shift to a proportional from a winner-take-all primary system, the sort of early tweak that could have consequences down the line in a Republican primary.
In particular, a proportional systems favor a candidate with the resources, organization, and preparation to slug it out through a long primary, and to pick up delegates -- as Obama did in 2008 -- on the margins.
On the other hand, Romney -- who benefits in the abstract -- might prefer that Northeastern states like New York stick to winner-take-all.
Liz Benjamin reports on an inquiry into a prominent abortion-rights advocate and New York ally of Hillary Clinton:
Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. has launched an active criminal investigation of former NARAL President Kelli Conlin, who allegedly misappropriated nonprofit funds for personal use, two sources briefed on the DA’s probe confirmed.
As we reported exclusively on CapTon last night, a forsenic audit uncovered thousands of dollars worth of questionable expenses by Conlin between 2008 and 2010.
POLITICO's Maggie Haberman emails that she's solved a lingering mystery from the now-nearly-forgotten summer storm around a planned Islamic center in Lower Manhattan.
Robert Mercer, the co-CEO of the giant hedge fund manager Renaissance Technologies, appears to have financed the ad campaign entirely himself, through a $1 million contribution on July 26 to the New York State Conservative Party, according to a filing today by the party's housekeeping account. Conservative Party Chairman Mike Long confirmed to Haberman that Mercer was the source of the ad money.
Mercer had maxed out to the account of Rick Lazio, but the Conservative Party's ads firmly attached the issue to Lazio and kept it top of mind in August in New York.
The account also shows a $40,000 payment to Arthur Finkelstein, Lazio's consultant.
Mercer's contribution is peanuts by the standards of Renaissance, which claims it manages $15 billion, but it's a large political contribution by any measure -- particularly to a longshot candidate in a primary fight -- and it was by far his largest of the cycle. Mercer's other effort of note was reportedly a $300,000 effort to unseat Rep. Pete DeFazio of Oregon, who wants to regulate the controversial high-frequency trades that are part of Renaissance's business.
Regulating Wall Street wasn't a central issue in the New York campaign, but Haberman writes that some hedge fund figures were worried that the state would intervene in trading, and the ad buy could have been a signal to Andrew Cuomo of their willingness to spend millions attacking him over the issue.
The campaign of Carl Paladino made an issue of the "secrecy" in funding the ads, but a source familiar with the buy insisted that Mercer aimed simply to support Lazio and wasn't "anti-" anyone.
"This year is not ending the way I would have preferred, but it's still been a good year," he said this morning on his radio show. "Nobody has a career that goes straight up."
He added that the city's failure to clear streets days after the blizzard was "character building."
Stephen Goldsmith, the former Indianapolis mayor who's now a Bloomberg deputy, seems the likeliest executive fall guy in the aftermath of a mishandled storm. He was in Washington for the actual event, and Twittered unfortunately on Dec. 26 about how well everything was going.
Now, he seems to have Twittered — Cory Booker-style — that residents should direct message him their snow issues, and then thought better of it, and deleted it. (This may be because you can only receive direct messages from people who you follow, and he only follows 318 people —more a misunderstanding of the medium than anything else.)
But should Goldsmith really be blamed? Having covered Bloomberg's City Hall for a few years, and still talking pretty regularly to people who know it better, the real issue seems to be the structure of the administration. Bloomberg had, until recently, had deputies whose jobs were, basically, running the city. When Marc Shaw and then Ed Skyler left, Bloomberg filled the slot of deputy mayor for operations with Goldsmith. But Goldsmith is a policy intellectual whose real charge was thinking deep thoughts, not keeping his finger on the pulse of the Sanitation Department. Going down the list, another deputy, Patti Harris, is the longtime keeper of Bloomberg's personal and social power; Robert Steel is an economic development dealmaker; Linda Gibbs runs social services; Dennis Walcott serves as a kind of diplomat and manager of political crises; an Carol Robles-Roman has never had a broad managerial portfolio.
That means that, as Bloomberg has looked nationally over the past year, he's allowed the management of the city to slide back into the bureaucracy a bit. Nobody who reports directly to him, even, has his or her hand on the actual levers of running the city. And while much of the bureaucracy is quite competent, the key gap in the response to the storm seems to have been the urgent push from the top.
Former Treasury official, Bloomberg confidant and financier Steven Rattner has reached an agreement with the attorney general and Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo and state of New York over pay-to-play allegations. From a release by Cuomo's office:
Mr. Rattner will pay $10,000,000 in restitution to the State of New York and be banned from appearing in any capacity before any public pension fund within the State of New York for five years. The agreement today will end the two lawsuits previously filed against Mr. Rattner by the Attorney General’s Office in New York State Supreme Court relating to the circumstances surrounding $150 million in investments in Quadrangle from the New York State Common Retirement Fund (“CRF”).
Attorney General Cuomo stated: “I am gratified that we have been able to reach an agreement in this case, as it resolves the last major action of our multi-year investigation. The state pension fund is a valuable asset held in trust for retirees and supported by taxpayers. Through the many cases, pleas and settlements in this investigation, I believe we have been able to help restore and protect the integrity of the state pension fund.”
The huge fine appears to remove threat of perjury charge.
"We did not do as a good a job as we wanted to do or as the city has a right to expect,” said Bloomberg about snow removal.
As POLITICO's Maggie Haberman suggested recently, the pounding Bloomberg has been taking on the snowstorm and a corruption scandal may have something to do with press and popular irritation at his wandering eye and perennial flirtations with a national bid.
The state’s top ethics watchdog slapped Gov. Paterson with a whopping $62,000 fine this morning for accepting free World Series tickets last year from the New York Yankees....
"The moral and ethical tone of any organization is set at the top," Commission Chairman Michael Cherkasky said. "Unfortunately the Governor set a totally inappropriate tone by his dishonest and unethical conduct. Such conduct cannot be tolerated by any New York State employee, particularly our Governor."
The $62,125 fine comes less than two weeks before Paterson is slated to handover the Executive Mansion to Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.
Governor-elect Andrew M. Cuomo's transition team interviewed outgoing Assemblywoman Dierdre K. Scozzafava last week for an unspecified position in the Democrat's new administration.
Ms. Scozzafava, a Gouverneur Republican who did not seek re-election, told the panel she'd like to help streamline state operations.
A striking feature of Andrew Cuomo's campaigns has been his tight, personal control, the sense that nobody can speak for the campaign, or have an independent profile, other than the candidate himself.
Capital New York's profile today of Drew Zambelli, Cuomo's pollster and a rare political consultant who's gone out of his way not to be written about, is representative:
According to the official description provided by the governor-elect’s office, Zambelli "will serve as senior adviser to the governor and be responsible for the oversight and strategic integration of the communications, intergovernmental, legislative and constituency efforts of the Office of the Governor.”
Insiders would read all that as something like "handler in chief."
In the words of Fred Siegel, scholar in residence at St. Francis College and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute: "“That’s an extraordinarily important position. It’s someone with continuous access to the governor, someone who’s at the governor’s side.”
The heavily mustached Zambelli — he's known to his associates as Drew, and has a habit of twirling his facial hair when thinking big thoughts — is in many ways typical of Andrew Cuomo’s inner circle. He’s a Mario man who has known the governor-elect for decades; he has very little name recognition and no apparent appetite for it; he’s smart, savvy, Italian-American and, of course, unavailable for an interview.
In an interview utgoing governor David Paterson expresses remorse for the way that his staff treated Caroline Kennedy in an interview with The AP:
“Caroline Kennedy was insulted and castigated by people who worked for me,” Paterson said in the latest of his interviews in the final days of his administration. “It was outrageous. ... All the people who were potentially involved should have been immediately dismissed. Like, immediately.”
The governor, of course, had nothing to do with it.
Liz Benjamin reports on a bitter break in New York State's labor movement (the name Benedict Arnold is being thrown around) over the fact that the president of the umbrella group representing building and trades unions will serve on the Committee to Save New York, a real estate industry-financed vehicle to support Andrew Cuomo in a coming budget fight.
The official, Gary LaBarbera, told the Times that "at times there will be competing interests between public- and private-sector unions" and this goes to the heart of Cuomo's strategy, which is to isolate the unions representing state workers.
The move is a logical consequence of the public campaigns against public-employee unions and plays on a real divide within labor, though many unions — such as SEIU — play heavily in the gray area of industries, such as health care, that are only quasi-private. If Cuomo's gambit works, other governors may well emulate it.
The Times has a great story this morning on a prosecution that has also become a blood feud between Andrew Cuomo and Steve Rattner, a story in which Cuomo's escalates the case after a leak of meeting notes:*
The notes reveal a previously undisclosed 2007 meeting in which Mr. Rattner first provided his account to Mr. Cuomo’s investigators about how his private equity firm, Quadrangle Group, had obtained a $150 million investment from the pension fund. That account, investigators said, was later undercut by Mr. Rattner’s own e-mails, enraging Mr. Cuomo, who had extended Mr. Rattner deference and immunity from criminal prosecution.
“He lied,” Mr. Cuomo, 53, said in an extensive interview with The Times. “The word is lied.”
The "found" emails show Rattner playing an active role in the extremely-difficult-to-explain investment in a B-movie distinguished only by the fact that a state pension fund manager's brother was producing it.
Cuomo leaves office at the end of this year, and will be replaced as Attorney General by Eric Schneiderman, a liberal Democrat with no particular relationship, as far as I know, with Rattner. He has no particular love for Cuomo, who tried to take him out in a primary, either, however, and won't feel obliged to carry on Cuomo's grudge.
New York recently reported that Rattner's strategy, at this point, is simply to wait Cuomo out; Cuomo's doing his best to destroy Rattner in his final month.
*UPDATE: An earlier version of this item suggested that Cuomo had leaked the meeting notes. Two people close to the case said there was a third party at the meeting: Lawyers for Quadrangle, Rattner's old firm, with which he is now feuding bitterly. Quadrangle certainly had the motive and opportunity to hand the notest to the Times.
Despite press attempts to breathe new life into the controversy (a 60 Minutes feature, the mosque backers requested government money, a bank suing the developer), none have had any “legs”. Every story about the mosque since the end of summer has been a one or [two-day] story that nobody has really cared about.
Hooray for cynicism!
I'd add, less cynically, that it became increasingly clear both that the project's backers don't have the wherewithal to build it and that the government has little right to stop it, shutting down some of the moving pieces.
I moderated a pair of roundtables at The New School in New York yesterday in which top staffers to statewide candidates talked more or less candidly about their strategy and tactics in the recent election.
One particularly instructive glimpse at the granular working of politics came from Blake Zeff, a former spokesman for Hillary Clinton who was a consultant to Eric Schneiderman, the state senator who was elected to replace Andrew Cuomo as Attorney General.
Cuomo had preferred -- and worked behind the scenes to help -- Schneiderman's chief rival, a Long Island prosecutor named Kathleen Rice, on the theory that a female district attorney from the suburbs would provide better balance to his ticket than a liberal Manhattan legislator.
Schneiderman, Zeff said, had polled the impact of Cuomo's endorsement. "The polls showed us that specifically, that if Kathleen Rice got Cuomo’s endorsement, that we were done," he said.
A central aim of the campaign, then, became to keep Andrew Cuomo on the sidelines, and the method was a superficially mystifying obsession with Rice's more moderate stance on the punitive Rockefeller Drug Laws. The laws had already been softened, and had nothing to do with the post of Attorney General.
But, Zeff pointed out, Cuomo had rehabilitated himself after an abortive, racially-charged 2002 gubernatorial bid by campaigning with Russell Simmons and other black leaders for the repeal of the laws.
Schneiderman's focus on the issue -- conducted largely through minority surrogates -- was an effort to raise the cost of endorsing Rice and keep Cuomo on the sidelines, one that seems to have worked.