Strong Men

What separates Cuomo’s New York from Putin’s Russia

I just spent a week in Moscow. I was struck by the enormous differences and similarities of the politics of New York and Moscow, and how individual strong men can come to dominate, for better or worse.

Richard Brodsky

It’s easy to joke about the similarities between Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, but the differences fascinated me more—because they show what really separates New York from Russia.

Immigration, corruption versus honesty in elected officials, the 99 percent versus the 1 percent, and stimulating the economy are the leading issues…in Moscow. Russians see them through the prism of presidential elections set for March 4 and the overwhelming presence of Putin.

Power flows to the center in Russia, and Putin is seen as a symbol of stability at a time when the pieces seem ready to fl y off. Recent street demonstrations, largely by disaffected middle-class voters, have everyone uncertain about what comes next; recent parliamentary elections were marred by vote tampering, but no effective political opposition has arisen. (Vladimir Prokhorov, owner of the soon-to-be Brooklyn Nets, is a leading candidate for president—so Donald Trump doesn’t stand alone.)

Putin’s strengths are his steely countenance and his control of the apparatus of government. Call it stability or repression, Putin’s power and willingness to use it are the dominant fact of life. It’s not exactly clear what he wants to do, but it’s his.

The facile comparisons to New York politics are too easy to make—but there are insights to be gleaned from thinking about it.

New York’s governors are among the most powerful in the United States. That can cause problems when a governor uses the state apparatus to undermine political opposition—not a far-fetched problem when you think of Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s use of the state police.

But the extraordinary powers given to New York’s executive branch, although well within the rule of law, are also problematic for both policy and politics. And Cuomo is a master of the exercise of political and legal power, with profound consequences for every New Yorker.

Part of Cuomo’s strength is personal; he dominates conversation and the agenda by force of personality. Part of it is his shrewd judgments about the public mood and his willingness to pivot when events move past him; see: December’s switcheroo on the millionaires’ tax. And part of it is the esoterica of New York’s constitution.

Join me, for a moment, in the complex details of how this state is governed. Gov. George Pataki discovered and used a provision of the state constitution that has elements of authoritarian regimes. It permits governors to add language on any subject to budget proposals, and bars the Legislature from changing it. For an extreme example, a governor could put language into his budget to repeal all state traffic laws. The Legislature is powerless to remove it and powerless to amend it. That’s not the textbook explanation of how laws are made; we’re taught that the executive proposes and the Legislature disposes. But not in New York. It is also the key reason why budgets have been late for the last 25 years—the Legislature delays the budget vote rather than confront the limits of its power. This year that imbalance is at work as three key issues are included in Cuomo’s budget—privatizing the pension system, consolidating state agencies and changing teacher evaluations.

The governor has presented all of these in ways that threaten but do not use the nuclear option of imposing them on the Legislature. Like an affable businessman who shows up at a negotiation all smiles with a pit bull on a leash, he holds out the threat but doesn’t quite use it.

Moscow and New York both have real strongmen at the helm. The difference is that in New York the rule of law remains the essential and unanimously embraced limit on executive power.

We rightly believe that the remedy for most problems comes through mostly honest elections and the rule of law. Neither of these exists in Moscow. The result is a kind of cultural confusion that can only be resolved by a Russian embrace of the rule of law, which hasn’t happened yet.

In Albany we’ve avoided most of the consequences of concentrated power because of the smart way in which such power has been exercised. But in Washington, Albany or Moscow, it is the people’s responsibility to make sure strong men don’t overreach.

Richard Brodsky is a Senior Fellow at Demos, a NYC-based think tank, and at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service. He served in the Assembly until 2010 and chaired the Corporations and Environmental Protection committees. He appears regularly as a contributing editor on WRNN-TV and on Fox Business Network.