Mayoral candidate Eric Adams has come out swinging against Gov. Andrew Cuomo following his Democratic primary win.
Barely hours after his victory in the Democratic mayoral primary, Eric Adams did something that might seem unwise: go hard after Gov. Cuomo.
Mayor de Blasio has battled Cuomo for more than seven years, and almost always lost. But Cuomo is weaker than he’s ever been — and Adams can take advantage of his own goodwill with the public and with lawmakers to gain the upper hand early.
First, Adams had an aggressive response to Cuomo’s $138.7 million “office of gun violence prevention.” In response to Cuomo’s threat — er, pledge to “do with gun violence what we just did with COVID,” Adams snarked: “what took so long . . . watching these babies die, year after year after year? . . . No one seems to care.”
(Adams half-walked back these comments, but in a casual way — showing it’ll be his choice whether to bestow criticism or kindness.)
Next, Adams hit the MTA — read Cuomo — hard on Thursday afternoon’s torrential subway flooding. “This is what happens when the MTA makes bad spending decisions for decades,” he tweeted, wondering why it’s taking so long for the state to implement congestion pricing. “This cannot be New York.”
Adams isn’t a native tweeter — and he had plenty of time to prepare an answer to the gun question. Neither of these remarks was off the cuff.
So what’s doing?
Adams is well aware: New York can only have one powerful, prominent elected Democrat. Cuomo demonstrated this nearly eight years ago, when he crushed de Blasio’s plan to raise taxes on the rich, a key campaign plank.
Even when de Blasio was right about things — it was the mayor, not the governor, who correctly raised concerns about bail “reform” two years ago — Cuomo easily won.
Having just slayed the progressives in a citywide election, Adams can be that powerful, prominent Democrat. His win proved that people want crime to go down, and that white urban “defund” proponents don’t matter citywide at all.
Cuomo knows that Adams is a threat, and his natural instinct is to do everything he can to quash Adams — not despite his weakened state, facing multiple investigations into sexual harassment, self-enrichment, and poor COVID governance, but because of it.
Adams is right, then, to stay on the very public offense — playing nice won’t get him far.
He’s right, too, on the merits. He’s going to have to start making the point — over and over — that Cuomo’s bail “reform” still needs reform, as does state supervision of parolees. He can direct his Police Department to compile regular, credible statistics on those fronts.
On the MTA, too, Adams has a strong position. Cuomo badly mishandled his attempt to oust current MTA Chairman Pat Foye and split the chairmanship in two, leaving the authority leaderless at the end of this month.
The governor can appoint an interim chairman — but by early next year, he’ll need Senate confirmation of a permanent chief.
De Blasio never seemed to understand Albany — but Adams, a former state senator who is good at the legislative machine, can make sure the city gets a real voice in who that chairperson is.
Among other things, New York City needs firm deadlines on congestion pricing, rather than leaving it as a Cuomo whim. The city also needs reform of the congestion-pricing law itself, to give Gotham a say in it.
As written, Cuomo’s congestion-pricing law gives the MTA — that is, the governor — near-full control over New York City’s streets, with no money to go back to those streets.
Adams was also smart in crafting his smaller-scale priorities. He wants the state to enact a bigger earned-income tax credit, a cash rebate to poorer workers. Expanding this tax policy is far more constructive than never-ending attempts to hike taxes on the wealthy.
(He also wants the City Council to freeze the commercial-rent tax for two years, helping Manhattan businesses — a good attempt to keep the council from straying too far left.)
In nearly 12 years in office, Cuomo has been the master of political attention, with his quirky slide shows, riffs with his brother and (odd) opinions of his daughter’s beaus. But the act has worn thin. Adams, too, is good at getting attention — getting his ear pierced to keep a campaign promise is just the latest example.
He can use that attention to do some good — before his honeymoon wears off, as Cuomo’s did.
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post