The Cuomo Way

Heavy is the head that wears this crown. 

- Chris Smith

Governor Andrew Cuomo asks the pilot to swing the state helicopter around so he can have a second look. About 1,000 feet below us, in a patch of Atlantic Ocean two miles south of Shinnecock, Long Island, a cargo ship equipped with a crane is lifting massive iron trusses and dropping them into the sea. The operation takes discarded material from one of the governor’s pet infrastructure projects—replacing the Tappan Zee Bridge—and uses it to expand two of his other initiatives, environmental protection and tourism, by creating an artificial reef. ¶ As the helicopter tilts and turns to give Cuomo a prime overhead view, a campaign pitch starts to unfurl. “They’ve been talking about doing these things for so long, since when I was a kid,” he says. “And it was always, ‘Everything’s complicated.’ The Tappan Zee Bridge: ‘Wellll, the federal government, wellll, the local, wellll, the state …’ We’re actually doing it!”

Now the city is beneath us. Down there, things are messier for Cuomo: The subways are crumbling, and he’s being blamed. A federal trial is exposing the greasing of contracts for the governor’s signature upstate-redevelopment project. And a pesky primary challenger, Cynthia Nixon, is calling him a fake Democrat.

I ask Cuomo, if he’s so focused on action and results, whether he should have moved faster to overhaul the subway. Delays doubled between 2012 and 2017; the crisis escalated last year with derailments and chronic overcrowding. Cuomo argued that the city owned the subway and that Mayor Bill de Blasio needed to pay for half of the repairs. De Blasio pinned the blame on the Metropolitan Transit Authority, a state agency controlled, for all practical purposes, by Cuomo.