Michael Goodwin’s Wednesday column must have hit a nerve with Gov. Cuomo, who took the unusual step of putting out a press release attacking it — while ignoring what Goodwin actually said.
Goodwin cited the way then-Mayor Ed Koch reached out to then-candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980 and later reaped big benefits for the city: “several major budget items, including fast approval of $600 million in remaining federal loan guarantees and the removal of costly mandates covering everything from handicapped children to sludge removal.”
He then slammed the way New York politicians have attacked President Trump at every turn, “putting politics ahead of what’s good for the people they ostensibly represent.”
Cuomo didn’t even take the biggest hit, as Goodwin mainly noted how he’d signed the bill letting Democrats in Congress access Trump’s state tax returns. Yet the statement from the gov’s communications director was a blizzard of distractions and distortions.
It’s pretty rich for the office of a governor who infamously told “extreme conservatives” that “they have no place in the state of New York” to lecture about Goodwin’s “hyper-political, hyper-partisan agenda.”
Especially when Goodwin is a lifelong Democrat, albeit one who (like millions of Trump voters) is appalled by his party’s sharp turn to the left. Heck, his columns during Cuomo’s first term routinely supported the governor on issues like charter schools and the Moreland Commission probe of state corruption.
Meanwhile, the supposed evidence that the gov has tried to play nice with the prez boils down to requests for federal money for projects like the Gateway Tunnel, La Guardia renovation and the Second Avenue Subway.
Sorry, Governor: Begging isn’t outreach.
An even bolder lie is this claim: “Proposed budget cuts to Medicaid, education, transportation and housing have been devastating to New York.” Um: Proposed cuts can’t devastate anyone, and these never actually materialized.
Then there’s the return of Cuomo’s regular gripe about the elimination of the state and local tax deduction — which (in the context of the larger tax reform) only dinged high-end earners, and then only because New York’s taxes are so high. Nor has it had the doomsday impact on state revenues that the gov predicted.
We’ll grant that the governor hasn’t been as obsessive a Trump-basher as some other local pols, but he takes too many gratuitous shots at the prez. If Cuomo is furious, it’s because Goodwin’s commentary struck true.