You Heard it Here First

We have noticed that after a supine period of Olympian insouciance, New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo has awoken, flexed his muscles and started ‘governating’.

He recently moved to heal factional rifts in the NY Democratic Party and then swooped to carry off a key piece of education policy from the hands of hapless NY Mayor, Bill de Blasio, leading to one of the New York Post’s typically urbane headlines: “Daddy’s Home.”  (OK, so it’s not as good as “Ford to New York: ‘Drop Dead'” but still quite satisfyingly pungent.)

We just hope that somewhere along the way Mr Cuomo has learned something about economics.  After all, he does stand implicated in the sub-prime mortgage crisis, having badgered mortgagees to lend to folks whose chances of meeting their re-payments were approximately nil. Big governments can palliate market failure (if it be failure, rather than life in general) but they can’t appropriate it without doing harm elsewhere.

The Varnished Culture does not pose as a master of political science, but we sense the stirrings of a run at the Presidency in 2020 by the Governor, who will not, we think, shy away from the fight like his famous father did.  In any case, as we picked Mr Trump as a potential winner fairly early on, we think you can say “you heard it here first.”