Cuomo and the Rural/Urban Divide

I’ve been having some nice correspondence with some readers here. For this post, I’m inspired by my back-and-forth with reader R. He grew up in a rural area, too, and he sees the same things I see: the Democrats once being viable in certain circumstances, but no more due to Fox News and unified Republican propaganda. The loss of young voters to that same propaganda that blames the hollowing-out of rural areas on the urban Democrats and the vast evils of the city.

As someone who’s lived in rural and urban areas, I want to tell a bit of a story before getting to my point. My first political act was handing out McGovern stickers in 1974 at a Fourth of July parade. I was 11 years old. I worked registering voters, collecting absentee ballots, going door-to-door and generally trying to get Democrats elected. I also attended the state convention as a delegate. We didn’t have a lot of conflict between candidates — our hardest job was often finding someone to run for state office, and it was even harder to find someone to run for the legislature or local offices.

When I moved to the South Side of Chicago for graduate school, to say that things ran differently is a gross understatement. My first memory of seeing anything about my local Member of Congress was on a grainy poster that looked like it had been printed in 1950 (it wasn’t — my surmise in hindsight is that some printer had an “in” with the Dems and did all their printing, shittily). When I went to vote, I received a palm card that would tell me how I should vote as a loyal Democrat.

This was my introduction to machine politics. It was incomprehensible to me. There was little to no campaigning. The work that candidates did mostly happened out of public view and consisted of being a good solider so they would get promoted. It is very telling that the only election Obama lost was to US Rep. Bobby Rush in 2000, in a redistricted district that contained the South Side. Rush said that Obama was “blinded by ambition” and “moved too soon.” This is the refrain of machine politicians when someone tries to jump the line on the machine. Everything is too soon and too fast.

Rochester, where I lived for more than 25 years, also has machine politics in the city. There’s a black machine and a white machine and they have their territory (basically, the city and the suburbs). The white machine has the county executive’s office and the black machine sometimes had the mayor’s office, and sometimes a non-machine candidate would win.

Machines aren’t what they used to be, but they still exist. I’ll fully accept that I am not giving a fair shake to machines, or have a deep understanding of them. And it is natural to have power blocs in politics, groups of like-minded politicians who work together to get each other elected and keep each other in office. What distinguishes machines from power blocs, at least in my view, is that once a politician pledges loyalty to the machine, he or she will be protected at almost all costs by the machine. A power bloc will cut someone loose if they’re involved in a scandal or aren’t pulling their weight in some other way.

This brings us to Andrew Cuomo’s long-awaited announcement that he’s going to run for Mayor of New York. Let’s get this out of the way: Cuomo is awful for numerous reasons. The ones everybody knows about are the sexual harassment, toxic workplace, and the nursing home deaths during COVID and the subsequent cover up. Less attention is paid to the “three men in a room,” where Cuomo, the Majority Leader of the Senate and the Assembly Speaker would meet to decide which bills would pass. This was at a time when the Senate was gerrymandered to have a tiny Republican majority, aided and abetted by some turncoat Democrats from Downstate. Until redistricting made the Senate majority Democratic, Cuomo used the three men to stop marijuana legalization and anything else he deemed too progressive. This was all while claiming he was really for all those things, which is something you need to remember about the guy — he campaigns as a liberal and governs as a conservative.

Cuomo is a white Italian Catholic guy from Queens. He’s deeply and tribally a Democrat. I doubt if he would switch parties, if someone has that on their NYC Mayor bingo card.

Anyway, my interest in Cuomo’s nomination is the machine’s inability to get itself off the dime and do something about Adams because of the Cuomo threat. The machine that I’m talking about here consists of the black politicians allied with Hakeem Jeffries and Jeffrey Meeks, with Al Sharpton in the mix. There’s no real secret that it exists — when the possibility of Adams’ ouster by the Governor through the completely legal means afforded in the New York City Charter came up, there were a lot of stories in competent political media about meetings happening between Kathy Hochul and Meeks, Jeffries, Sharpton and others. In fact, the junior members of the Brooklyn branch of the machine sent a letter to Hochul telling her not to get rid of Adams. AOC has also skeeted that people should call their city councilperson and ask them about Adams, and that they’d probably be surprised at the answer (i.e., they’re supporting him.)

Kathy Hochul’s role in this is that she’s from Buffalo, as far upstate as you can get, and she needs to win in New York City to win as Governor. Since she replaced Cuomo, she’s dead to him and his white allies in NYC. So, she must ally herself with the black machine in NYC. Since they don’t want to get rid of Adams, her hands are tied if she wants to get re-elected, which she seems to do.

AOC’s role in this is an outsider, as is Jumaane Williams, the guy who would replace Cuomo if Hochul removed him. Neither of these two have ties to the machine. They're progressives who the DSA helped elect.

Robert Kuttner has a piece in the American Prospect arguing that the reason that Hochul and the machine don’t want Adams removed is that they think Cuomo and Adams will split the primary vote and this would allow another candidate to make it through. My response to this is that there are multiple progressives in that race who will still split the vote even if Adams stays in the race, and even with ranked-choice voting, this means that Cuomo will probably come out on top.

My take is still that the machine is being even more short-sighted. They don’t want Jumaane Williams to be mayor for any period of time, even though Williams is throwing his support behind another progressive, Comptroller Brad Lander. He’s an outsider. Since they don’t have a candidate in the race other than Adams, they are fine with the outcome of either Adams winning or Cuomo winning as long as a progressive doesn’t.

AOC, Williams and other progressives are as much or more an enemy to them as Cuomo or any Republican. AOC and Williams would disrupt their order. Cuomo would respect their order and deal with them. In the words of Bobby Rush, the progressives are “moving too fast” and “blinded by ambition”.

This is machine politics. It produces status-quo politicians who are inflexible and unimaginative. It’s damaging to our party and our nation.