Hochul's easy part is not being Cuomo
Kathy Hochul is sworn in as the governor by Chief Judge Janet DiFiore on Aug. 24 in Albany, while her husband William J. Hochul Jr. looks on. Credit: Getty Images/Michael M. Santiago
Gov. Kathy Hochul may find that changing the prevailing tone on the Capitol’s second floor becomes her easiest task. She’s already lowered the heat in the executive chamber just by being someone other than Andrew M. Cuomo — who had a hard-wired interest in sticking people he transacted with in a pressure cooker.
Manners and personal conduct do count. Cuomo’s base quickly eroded because gradually alienated Democratic players had enough of him as their party boss. Months before Attorney General Tish James stamped toxic-workplace charges against Cuomo as credible, both the state’s U.S. senators and most state and federal lawmakers were demanding his resignation.
Slowly, members of the dominant party did collectively what they might not have dared to do alone. Party consensus was accomplished, not on ideology, but on a very big personnel decision. They voted him off the island, in effect.
Honeymoons don’t last. The wind of reform felt palpable when Eliot Spitzer swept into the job in 2007. Soon Spitzer became known for stormy, sanctimonious tantrums and threats. When he imploded and Lt. Gov. David Paterson succeeded him, Albany had a short era of relative good feeling before that administration went south (with then-Attorney General Cuomo’s incidental help).
Every transition differs. Hochul seems to know a couple of important things coming in. Like any vice president, she was elected as a backup who would complete, not upend, the executive’s term. But because she has hit the ground campaigning, declaring herself a candidate for governor next year, Hochul faces the complicated trick of trying to show she is not burdened by Cuomo baggage.
Hochul announced a simple, visible and mostly superficial change by officially acknowledging 12,000 more deaths in the state than reported under Cuomo. That sounds like a rebuke, but she’s in no position to go much further and trash Cuomo’s entire role in the pandemic emergency last year, the source of his 2020 stardom, especially with COVID-19 a continuing crisis.
None of which speaks to how she will lead state government or where she might tilt in the party’s ever-cited but vaguely defined divide between "progressives" and "moderates." We won’t know that for a while at least.
A pile of legislative bills and projects approved with Cuomo in office offer Hochul an array of limited ways to choose between staying the course and cutting a new path.
Her selection of Sen. Brian Benjamin for lieutenant governor reflects internal party politics. Balance is always an issue. Just as downstater Cuomo chose an upstate man and then an upstate woman for running mates, the formerly pro-gun-rights congresswoman from Buffalo has picked a Harlem Democrat for the post who happens to be close to former state party co-chairman Keith Wright. Hochul said she wanted an "inclusive ticket."
Life sometimes imitates comedy. The writers of HBO’s sitcom VEEP satirized this kind of situation back in 2015 by giving their main character Selina Meyer the meaningless presidential slogan: "Continuity with change."
Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was widely mocked when he soon used, in real life, the equally insipid "Continuity and change" as a way of distancing himself, but not too much, from his ousted predecessor of the same party.
Hochul’s phrasing will need to be different, but the tensions and pressures she faces sound similar.
Columnist Dan Janison's opinions are his own.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
