Kathy Hochul has seven months to govern, campaign, and tell New Yorkers what, if anything, she believes in. nahmias reports
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It had taken ten minutes for Hochul to get from the diner’s entrance to a booth in the far back corner — stopping to shake hands and take selfies with servers, the manager, an older couple who had just moved here from Texas, a college student. She compared notes on waitressing with the waitress, assessed the Bills with a lady who had a cat tattoo on her arm, and reacted in no discernible way when a patron told her, “You’re a lot prettier than the last governor.
Nice, empathetic, and collegial may top the list of the least Cuomo-like attributes, but they don’t tend to describe people who win knife fights in New York politics. Hochul is so unintimidating that she’s already facing five likely challengers in the Democratic contest set for June — the state’s first competitive primary for governor in 40 years and a once-in-a-generation opportunity for an outsider to seize power.
Hochul was born in 1958 to Jack and Pat Courtney; she was the second of six kids in a big Irish Catholic family living in what had once been the tenth-largest city in America. Her grandfather, father, and uncle all worked at the once-mighty Bethlehem Steel plant, but by Hochul’s early childhood, Buffalo was entering an economic decline. “The only escape out of here was generally an education,” Hochul told me.
Curiously, when she got there in the fall of 1976, this daughter of firebrands began to stake out a small-bore approach to politics. As a prominent and well-liked member of the student government, she led a boycott of the school’s bookstore over its high prices, with the Daily Orange newspaper noting approvingly that she “would not take no for an answer.” The shop yielded, cutting 11 cents off the average sticker.
In September 2007, making appeals to dignity, safety, and lower insurance costs, Spitzer announced a plan to let undocumented immigrants obtain driver’s licenses. Hochul, who was about to face an election, didn’t just come out against the measure — she promised that if it were implemented, she would report any applicants to federal authorities. She was reading the mood of the state: Polls taken just before the election showed 72 percent of Erie County Democrats in opposition.
People who know Hochul well say she isn’t an ideologue. Instead she’s a small-d democrat with almost no fixed positions — a cipher, essentially. Hochul has defended her malleable politics by arguing that she’s fulfilling her mandate as an elected representative. She’s a vessel for the will of her constituency, which for years was in a conservative part of the state that has more in common with northwest Ohio than New York City.
After slamming Hochul on immigration and guns, Wu edged her out for the New York Times’ endorsement, which cited her “deeply troubling record on health reform, gun control, and environmental deregulation.” Cuomo and Hochul enjoyed a fund-raising advantage in the millions and the institutional support of nearly every labor union in the state, but Teachout and Wu managed to capture more than 30 percent of the primary vote.
By 2020, as Cuomo made plans to seek a fourth term, he tried to get her off the ticket again — reportedly by offering to secure her a plum job in the Biden administration, perhaps as ambassador to Ireland. According to the Washington Post, White House officials signaled that a role inside a Cabinet agency was more realistic.
Some of Hochul’s accomplishments are the low-hanging fruit of simply not being a raging asshole. Lawmakers and other figures who had been treated like mortal enemies of the Cuomo administration — including Assemblymembers Ron Kim and Dick Gottfried, State Senator Mike Gianaris, and Cuomo’s former primary opponent Cynthia Nixon — have suddenly found themselves embraced by the governor.
“Transformative change” will be a difficult banner to hang on someone who was — her nose-against-the-glass protestations notwithstanding — Cuomo’s loyal deputy for seven years. The historic energy in the contest is already with Letitia James. She has been attorney general for only three years, but it’s a job so frequently used as a stepping-stone to the executive mansion that New Yorkers joke that AG stands for “aspiring governor.
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