CORRUPTION

No one does it better than the Democratic Party. Nor for as long. Nor as obviously as now.

ONCE UPON A TIME Bernie Sanders ready to begin a political career after growing up and being educated in Brooklyn took a long look at the line waiting for a nod from a Democratic Boss and took off for the green, languid forestland of Vermont.

Some years earlier we had taken a long look as well but those were the power years of Carmine DeSapio and Tammany Hall where you could not only see the corruption but smell it.

Following years of the vicious control of the Irish-based Westies, the Italians took over and knew exactly what how to gain and manage control of a city through its politics.

So we did the sensible thing. We followed our desire for decent government, for opportunity and fairness for everyone, stayed in Brooklyn and got involved with the Liberal Party. It was easy. The leadership was older on many levels and looking for young people who wanted to learn and wanted to lead.

By the time Bernie and Chuck Schumer had graduated from college, the Liberal Party had fulfilled a goal of trying to make the Democratic Party honest. We helped elect Robert Wagner, as Mayor of NYC and that broke the back of DeSapio and Tammany. Unfortunately, those few years of relatively decent government did not last.

And so the District Attorney in NYC and the hand-picked State Attorney-General can ignore clear elements of questionable behavior regarding mismanagement, the misuse of funds and even accomplishment by both the Mayor and his wife. So free are they from concern, so aware of how control is complete, that the Mayor now wants to name his wife Chair of an important new committee examining how to improve the lives of people of color in New York…and with it a sizeable but as yet undetermined budget. This after she led a committee to improve mental health for two years and spent tens of millions of dollars without any record of how that money was spent or what might have been accomplished.

Not a single Democrat in all of New York forced an examination of this blatant mismanagement.

And when the Mayor’s wife decides to run for Borough President of Brooklyn no investigation will slow her ambition.

Today the two single-most obvious examples of corruption in New York are NYCHA and the MTA – people in the know call what goes on there ‘cherry-picking’.

But wait, there is more.

The New York State Democratic Party, led with no questions asked by Governor Andrew Cuomo, has cancelled the Presidential Primary due in June by first dropping Bernie Sanders’ name from the ballot and then claiming that with no contenders in the primary New York doesn’t want to spend money on a beauty show. Joe Biden gets all the NY delegates…just like that.

Now it is true that Bernie has taken himself out of the race but it is also true that he has kept his name on ballots in States across the country which have not yet held primaries. He wants leverage at the Convention, now to be held in August, to try to get some of his ideas into the program of presumptive candidate Joe Biden.

But this is also true: if Biden gains 1991 delegates before the convention his nomination is secured and the Convention is no more than a political show.

THE MECHANIC

There are those in this country – and we are among them – who believe Joe Biden cannot defeat Donald Trump. We have said so elsewhere in this space.

We believe that the Democratic Party could act for all America by drafting Andrew M. Cuomo as its candidate.

But clearly as in 2016, the Democratic Party leadership wants to remain in control of the party, no matter what.

Cuomo, who we have criticized for years as a man who will not end the corruption in New York, has presented himself brilliantly during the war against Covid 19. His carefully designed presentations seven days a week have captivated all of America to an extraordinary degree.

His careful use of language, his calm determination to do things right, his careful words about Donald Trump, his very human concerns about his Mother and TV personality brother have made a stunning impression.

Copying his Dad, Andrew is not known as a ‘nice guy.’ He plays hardball until it hurts. If anyone can handle the self-deluded, motor-mouth Trump it is another guy from Queens, NY. Not a nice guy from Delaware who has clear communication deficits.

We believe that Cuomo is a brilliant politician – in the game close-up since he was 13 years old. He has single-handedly played the Republican Party in New York until it is practically out of business. He knows how to play with and play the other side. He is a centrist but can act progressive with no strain: he propelled marriage equality and gun control as no other Governor in America.

Knowing of his love of automobiles and his ability to work on them, we call him the Mechanic because he totally understands government and can lead it.

But once again he is faced with a decision which puts his own career against the public good; a decision which poses the right thing to do vs political control which amounts to corruption.

When he reads that his friend Joe Biden is working hard to find a woman to be his Vice President. He knows that the Democratic Party is pressing the need for an African-American woman even though not a single one of those mentioned has the experience that Biden has established as the parameters of his choice. What does this say to a guy as smart as Cuomo.

Does he wonder if Biden is like Al Gore who ran for President but whose heart was never in it. Gore who selected an Orthodox Jew as his running mate. This is America. What could Joe Lieberman of Connecticut ever have done to get votes for Al Gore?

What we see is this: Those who control the Democratic Party want very much to regain a strong foothold within the African-American community. Selecting a black woman to run on the ticket will say a great deal to them, whether she can win votes from that community or not.

Biden at 77 indicates his Vice President ‘has to be ready’ if something happens to him. Another example of a man who is running without a sense of the supreme confidence necessary to defeat a man who simply runs on nothing but supreme confidence.

Here is an important fact about Andrew Cuomo. In 2002, he returned from running HUD and made a strong bid to become Governor of New York. He entered a primary against NY State Comptroller Carl McCall. About then he was going through a difficult time with wife Kerry Kennedy and was pressured by NYC’s Black Caucus to drop out of the race so that McCall would become the first African American in NY to run for Governor. He did so with the understanding that this leadership group would be behind him from then on.

We think that Cuomo decided not to make a run in the Democratic field because his political IQ told him not to run against an incumbent: at 62 he has time.

Now we see his decision to help the Party establish Biden as the winner before the Convention by cancelling the NY primary as a decision to avoid making that run as the choice in a draft.

Control in politics is worth everything. Just look at what the Republican Party is doing to support a man who has said that if he ever ran for a political position he’d run as a Republican because they are “stupid”. A man who believes that a mail-in vote is automatically a vote for a Democrat. Trump is no more a Republican than he is a socialist…but the Republican Party clings to him like glue…because control is its true master…the aphrodisiac of politics.

Elizabeth Warren said over and over again that there is a fundamental corruption in our political system. It is best on display in New York. In fact, in many ways New York is the Empire State of corruption.

Sadly there seems no end in sight.