Dawidziak: Great first act, Governor!

Michael Dawidziak is a political consultant and pollster.

They could say, "The son also rises," or "All hail, King Andrew the First," or they could just shout an expletive that can't be printed on this page. Any way they want to say it, political analysts are shaking their heads in wonderment at Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's accomplishments in less than six months in office.

And it's not just what he's done, but how he's done it.

First of all, like a high jumper setting the bar at an impossible height, he announced to the world his ridiculously ambitious agenda. No political expert worth a damn would have advised him to do that.

Going against his own city-centric party, he put a property tax cap on the list. "He'll never get it passed in the Assembly," the pundits cried. He put same-sex marriage on the agenda. "He'll never get it passed in the Senate," the experts avowed. In a town that had specialized in making ethics reform a nonstarter, he added that to the list, too. "He'll never get that past anybody," they howled.

Look at the scope of the issues Cuomo chose. Analysts say that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were masters at the art of triangulation -- a strategy in which politicians co-opt their opponents' best issues. Cuomo could teach those presidents a doctorate-level class on the subject.

First, with the budget battle earlier this year and now with the property tax cap, he made himself an arch fiscal conservative. Polls say loud and clear that fiscal issues dominate the concerns of voters on the right. With same-sex marriage, he made himself a hero to voters on the left, who are more concerned with progressive social issues.

Ethics reform resonated across the political spectrum, but particularly with moderate swing voters in the middle.

As a Democrat for fiscal sanity, a Roman Catholic for same-sex marriage and an Albany insider for ethics reform, Cuomo outflanked everybody.

The governor was already getting credit with the various political persuasions just for advocating for their issues. As of last week, before the key legislative votes, a poll done by my company had his approval ratings on Long Island at 74 percent. That's the upper stratosphere, folks. In political polling you find that three out of 10 voters are ideologically grounded liberals, and another three are hard-line conservatives. That means 30 percent will hate anybody right off the bat -- and it's why breaking the 70 percent approval barrier is so unusual.

But Cuomo wasn't content to simply advocate and watch the votes fail. So he initiated an extremely aggressive lobbying effort -- and he then proceeded to run the table, getting them all approved. This is literally unheard of in the give-and-take of legislative-executive politics. The story just never ends this way.

But this time it did.

How did he do it? First, let's recognize that by the time he became governor, Cuomo was one of -- if not the -- most Albany-savvy people ever to hold the office. Second, he had the political capital he needed to horse-trade. Third, he coordinated brilliantly with the advocacy groups pushing for his agenda items.

Fourth, and maybe most important, he let everybody look good in the process. Our last elected governor infamously described himself as a " ---- steamroller." Cuomo might be a bigger and more powerful steamroller than Eliot Spitzer ever was -- but in politics perception is everything, and he was smart enough not to be perceived that way.

In the end, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver comes out looking good, as someone who compromised for the good of the state. Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos also looks good, as someone who let representative government work by allowing the same-sex marriage vote to come to the floor while delivering on the property tax cap.

But no one comes out looking better than Andrew Cuomo. Of course, he does have a problem now: Having set the bar at an impossible height and sailed over it, how's he going to top it?