(AP file photo)
By Tom Precious
ALBANY – Most Senate Democrats in New York have avoided going to war publicly with Gov. Andrew Cuomo over his absence in helping them try to take back the Senate, but the flap is starting to get noticed beyond the inside baseball walls of the state Capitol.
The latest salvo against Cuomo for not pushing to help Democrats take over the Senate came this past week by MSNBC’s left-leaning host Chris Hayes, who took a series of shots against the Democratic governor and his supposed interest in running for president in 2016. Hayes told his national audience that Cuomo will be coming around the country to woo Democratic primary voters for 2016.
“You should remember this remarkably cynical display when he does," Hayes said of Cuomo’s help to keep the GOP from losing the Senate. Cuomo was also the subject of criticism over the weekend on the left-leaning Salon.com website under the headline: "Andrew Cuomo, fake Democrat.''
[The actual fate of the Senate is still not known. The process of counting paper ballots in one key race – a sprawling district that stretches along long parts of the Mohawk and Hudson rivers – is underway today in Albany County; when those outstanding 9,000 ballots will be counted in all five of the district’s counties is highly uncertain. If the Democrat wins, the Democrats could take the Senate, unless a group of four breakaway Democrats decided to help the GOP stay in control. If the Republican candidate wins the race, it will be enough for the GOP to keep its hold on the Senate.]
In his attack on Cuomo, the MSNBC host said, “We now know that Democrats cannot count on New York’s supposedly Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo as an ally and every Democratic primary voter in the entire country should know that too. We already knew that in the run up to the election, Andrew Cuomo, whose aspirations for national office are well-known, did essentially nothing to aid the Democratic Party in its quest to take back the state Senate from Republicans.”
