Transcripts For CSPAN2 Michael Shnayerson On The Contender 20240622

What is on your Summer Reading list . Book tv wants to know. Good evening and welcome i am director of the matt mcauley author series. I am pleased you are here aware of this beautiful building in the phenomenon institution that host a series. I dont know about you but there is no place i would rather be except on governor,s trip to cuba that he is not on that trip anymore. Im happy to be here. In the presence of andrew was latest. According to readers and reviewers most accomplished biographer. One of the most accomplished political biographers in a long time. Someone else who has also follow the governors career since long before he was governor is National Affairs and political reporter bestselling author columnist, and Television Commentator jonathan alter. Able sit down together or are actually sitting together to talk about michaels knew book hash out many of the issues and questions the fascinating portrait that is research reporting, research, reporting, and understanding of human character has made possible. The 1st publication of that for he was interviewed by the new yorkers a journalist a journalist who has massively studied cuomo for decades and in person. Even he was dumbfounded by michaels historical and psychological cuomo feel your. What is the contender about . Who might the contender be . In our story it begins with Michael Shnayerson had to contend with the vision for the biography and then trying to sweet talk him out of it. The government published the government published his own quirky biography which sold 7,000 copies. Now now that we sense that andrew cuomo will not be a president ial contender for a while if ever who racy as a contender in michaels biography . A boy, a young man who crave the approval of his distant, stern command primarily absent father an obvious Political Science to questions such a future even as he strove to succeed in the rough, tough, corrupt world of state politics and with all of the figures enjoy a a man who contended for another father figures attention, bill clinton, and got it making him the youngest cabinet member ever which meant heading up a disintegrating department of housing and urban development which he turned around husbands to the kennedy and ill fit into that family and was soon drowned out by his own flyers and the flames of marital scandal. Then according to michael a daily flights his personal demons comes across as tough vindictive, yet one of the can is politicians around. A husband and a 2nd marriage has worked hard or created a happy, beloved family. A fascinating contender for our every interest. As for the conversation i had in my head about the author series everyday that we express it out loud as huge thanks to those who helped make it possible. In the lead the dean and new member of the team she was time back communications and Media Relations manager. And to Mcauley College itself where you will find some of the most brilliant and interesting young people in new york. Now i invite you to listen to them talk and think about questions for the q a. Thank you pt to the perfectly. This was really such a great book on a few different levels. Original reporting and insight and has a very deep understanding of human and political nature which are the same and intertwined and at odds so have having said that we dont have any cuban cigars. He apparently claimed to have smoked one for the 1st time the other day. But he didnt and now the debate over what he called the Marriage Equality of. Sure, you may know this phrase jonathan. Writers talk about the money chapter. You want to get it right because people go by the book. In this case it was clear to me that that effort on the part of the governor in his 1st year as governor was his finest hour and also the one that showed us what a clever political strategist is and also maybe showed a touch up with compassion. The governor gets beat up a lot these days. I have done my share of these past weeks. One of the things that almost is just assumed about him as he has no political passion and that everything is cynical. I think with that 1st chapter shows i would like to think what it shows i am not in his head but he saw this was the right thing to do had a chance to get Marriage Equality past at a time which was very risky. Only a handful of states have done it. California was teetering. President obama was talking about his evolving view of the issue. In the middle of that andrew decides that he has got the vote even though no one else thinks he has the votes to get a bill passed the legislature that we will pass Marriage Equality in new york state. Have we did that over a week is fascinating. I would never have gotten the inside track without the help of the top advisor in the administration was essentially assigned to be my mind or if you will. There is a larger story of how the governor did not really cooperate but was savvy enough to know that it made sense to have someone who could both lead me a bit where you want me to go and also keep an eye out what i was doing. This fellow one day sat down and told me the story. It went from going after this one to seeing what has possible interest in passing the bill was how if you get this one you would have to get this one. He has this phrase spare tire. In a Republican State Senate theyre are 325 at that time there were 62 counties 62 senators. You needed like 32 votes but he knew that and it was close, by the way. He knew that if he had one extra republican it would never work. What what he needed was a spare tire, 33rd vote, two republicans new line to commit. Understanding the way that he thought and seeing how he carry that out was dramatic and set up. Why do you think that it was so passionate . I know his girlfriend has a brother who is gay. Was that it . It is usually when there is passion there is some kind of a back story or is this something that people just dont know about him . When it comes to certain rights issues he really is his fathers oldfashioned passionate thats a great question. There are there are so many answers that come to mind. He is his fathers son. They like to see themselves as progressive. Much more pragmatic, but when he sees an opportunity to be socially progressive you will take it. He did that having just spent the 1st several months of his time doing a fiscally conservative thing with completely infuriated the democratic side of the party but perhaps helped tilt the state back on course as a way of compensating. Another answer is that he had National Aspirations which was a National Issue something that as governor he could do to become a National Figure and it did you know give him a lot of ink. In fact, it got him a lot of predictions of being a contender for the presidency. In that sense of a smart. Ill give you one more answer which i can prove but as a storyteller like. When he was helping run his fathers may oral campaign in 1977 in the last weeks of the campaign very close. And suddenly overnight placards started appearing on queens boulevard saying vote for cuomo, not the home of. You know the whole liberal wing of the Democratic Party but these being put up night after night until finally he went and persuaded him to take them down. There has been bad blood ever since. And you know, there are those who believe that one of the guys drawing is posted every night was andrew cuomo. Maybe this was his way of atoning for that. That was a famous story in those days. Was it . You know, i think it is very unlikely that cuomo who was 18 18 or 19 would have done this on his own. However, it is quite possible that someone who worked for marriott either got the nod passively with the by the director. Things did not happen on his campaign without him knowing about it. He was a micromanager. Its fair to say he did not do it on his own was at the very least probably aware of it. I like that. It. So as part of that and really throughout the book you do give credence to a comparison between he and lyndon johnson. Do you think that he is potentially in that week . You also compare have to richard nixon. I think that johnson was more the comparison i had for the 1st couple years i was working on the book and next came into my mind during the end. No he has not yet proven himself. In league with lbj. It is really more to they can in this with which each man worked the legislature. Does anyone outside of the tight circle. Their tendency to be very suspicious of all journalists and to be very things and into the rate of journalists if they write things they dont like and to have a kind of enemies list as nixon did. You can use either one. It was a far more graceful person as we all know the great orator. Andrew doesnt have those things. He likes to call himself the operational by. His father could read the fancy philosophers andrew would be there in the trenches. So as far as the knicks in comparison and the weariness of other people in the skepticism. I knew him better than andrew and i could see that people would think that comparison but i always found that he had a sense of humor. When he would come after you as a reporter that was laced with humor, sometimes aggressive humor. Does andrew have that . Im not sure. A couple examples come to mind that i talked to from those early days. One said he remembers getting a call and he said how could you write this . Injury on the thing to say. When i would get that kind of call from him i found it exhilarating. I think if i had been on the receiving end of mixing know, there probably wouldnt have been much. As long as we are on the subject of comparing with other president s do you think that these legislative skills if barack obama had them would have made a difference nationally in the last few years . I would like to think so. One thing i say as i go from that business making the case for why this book and why you should read about it is that. Tell me what you just said. Blood would have gone through that didnt go through because obama i guess i dont know. Maybe nobody can say for sure whether obama could have gotten down into the mosh pit of the senate and schmoozed within. There were a lot of critics that would say its one of his great flaws and that we didnt have the terrible partisan gridlock that he has. Its to say which bills he might have pushed through if he had been more like andrew or lbj. What would it be like if we had in andrew as president rather than president obama who seems not only to be to me to be disinclined to that sort of arm twisting but also to disdain and feel he is above it. I heard when people gather for social occasions at the white house, he will literally make an appearance for five or ten minutes. She comes out and then goes back to his private quarters. They would probably know every senators weakness and knowhow to manipulate them. And in that sense it could be a good president. There are ways i would be a little worried if he was president and we can talk about those. Lets talk about those. What other qualities, darkness and secrecy or the arrogance that he sometimes shows. The one thats most important is the moral condition. Last year this was the point at which i had been working on the book for two and a half years and i was going to try to finish the book last june and i was very glad i held it open and kept following the events. To try to counteract the seemingly endless parade for one ethical breach or another. Its a dramatic thing the dramatic thing that happened is he set up these 25 prosecutors all over the state, told them to investigate as they wished and then they started doing so and he said later minute because they were starting to look into areas that worried him. They issued a subpoena to the Democratic Party and to companies he had done business with himself as the candidate and of course meanwhile she had Shelly Silver and dean saying we hate this and we want to shut it down. What did he think was going to happen . If he was manipulative and farsighted did he think they were not going to issue a subpoena . E. Have formed an awful lot of commissions. Ive talked to some of the people on the commissions. They are set adrift. Theres a there is a press release in a press conference to start them off. Some wellknown person from private life is put in charge of them and then they tend to just drift off and then he would either let them were end up killing them. Im not the only one to suggest this he just sort of got confused. Maybe it was because he had people around him who are not giving him good advice but he seemed to feel this was a commission on like any other. And he could form and disband it and in fact it was a different kind of commission because there were 25 prosecutors conducting criminal investigations. As they famously said a month before they said i am the government which is a sort of interesting statement. Also nixon said if the president does it not doesnt not illegal. So there was a little bit of humor but also he felt he could get what he needed in the budget to go around in return he would get a few ethics rules and it was a different kind of commission. At any rate i thought it was fascinating to watch that play out and it showed a side of him which would not be particularly reassuring. Actually the last Campaign Season they went to see how many seconds he would expose himself to the crowd and was like eight seconds, 50 seconds so he actually could say in the stories he hates it or whatnot and then when the administration called him up he said ive got it here. Does he not like people . Its hard to be a politician if he basically dont like people. Its hard to be a politician and not like people. In fact he its one of the mysteries about andrew raising the question i question might do to get into politics in the first place, and we talk about that. I talked to one of the politicians in the state and i will just tell you who they all are. Its Chuck Schumer schneiderman, the attorney general, become troller i wrote them down. And of course the mayor. One of them said to me that andrew was the most mistrustful person but he never met in politics and this person just couldnt understand why andrew was in the business at all. I put it in the book that way because he will never figure out who sent it because they all feel the same way and he has had particular battles with you think each of them. I dont know about gillibrand but he certainly butted heads with the attorney general and the comptroller and its all because they are all democrats. They could all be his ally. This is perplexing to me on the one hand he strength and weakness of the politicians and manipulates them and on the other hand he makes them not like him and its hard to do business with other politicians if they dont like you. Thats true i guess i could say that those statewide politicians or different from the legislators whose actual votes we need but you raise a good point. Its contradictory. Maybe its because they are pawns for him and the others are rivals and hes more comfortable dealing with lesser. Its someone he can kind of squash or throw a bone whereas the attorney general could be threatening and the irony is that he does all this and closes the commission to bring on himself the one person he has no power over. But to go back the attorney for the district of the commission nailed it that he let it die as a sort of thought if you will to make the budget established by the deadline. Snyderman was a state senator and didnt endorse him when he was running for his first time in elected office for governor. Imagine that. He helped his father run for office hes been the cabinet secretary but hes never run for office and then he runs for governor. Anyway snyderman did not endorse him and its pretty clear and remembered that. By the way we can all pursue he didnt win the race in 2002. We will get to that but then when he loses and his marriage is also ending and it looks like he is just dead politically he reaches out to a woman named Jennifer Cunningham has been a lobbyist and consultant and often cold the most powerful woman in new york state and the private sector very close to the unions are together we 99 healthcare workers and if you get the endorsement of 1199 before well underway so she gets it for him. Interestingly shes the exwife of derek snyderman and theres a lot of talk i found in my reporting that andrew and jennifer had been more than friends. So you have a triangle going on and by the way i did that thing reporters have to do to go to them and see that you have an affair with so and so and jennifer denied it so i always say its out there and the gossips about but it may not be true. Theres an emotional connection between them and he dare i say as a sort of italian man was confronted by the lingering presence of derek snyderman because jennifer was so copacetic that he counseled his Campaign Even as she counseled andrew. Isnt the larger point that he doesnt want anybody even bill who he has been close to politically. Anybody that is a potential rival isnt willing to share power with. Someone that worked for bloomberg said it is zerosum and i think thats true. So to carry this one step further, he then runs for governor in 2010 and heres that 1199 is going to endorse him. Bad news they are also going to endorse the attorney general. Hes serious and according to the one guy that i interviewed was on the record about this, he said he sat in the room as he just berated him and said he is going to ruin everything im trying to do. And he said not once in the 45 minutes did his voice lowered from a shout and theres a lot of stories about him acting this way. I want to get into that. About what youre saying is right he cannot rivals and its also true that he of course undermined as the attorney general undermined or we might even even save a ship shiv in the back of Eliot Spitzer so when andrew becomes governor he knows how powerful the attorney general can be. People forget about the scandal but tell us quickly its made it somehow sort of criminal behavior. But did he do anything terribly wrong in that period . The headlines suggested that they had done a terrible thing to. Were those the products of weeks from the office . It did call attention to the fact that he was taking the state plane or helicopter putting in ten minutes of business and in fact the newspapers did get on that story but it was like a ricochet because almost within 48 hours he was saying where did this come from . The Governors Office is leaking this to the press when they didnt ask for it and it became the ricochet that he was much more interested in covering and in fact the report that came out rather than framing him he landbased him for ostensibly unethically leaking. Looking at all these headlines it is denunciations and i thought wait a minute what is wrong with the governor raising questions about the Senate Leader taking state claims . So the bottom line is they play very rough personally but on some issues we talked about he takes a pretty gutsy stances that true . The this was the tragedy in connecticut that was in december of 2012 i think and within hours he was calling the lawmakers trying to get them back from their vacation to pass the law right away and he didnt succeed in that pretty soon he passed the safe act which did tighten up gun safety mechanisms and did some other things which might help and in the process he gave at least half of the state. Its a Democratic State so they are not terribly strong in new york but theres a lot of gun owners and they were good. That caught him by surprise. He meant to be somewhat politically courageous and spend a little capital. I dont think he realized how angry the blowback would be and is still. Since he was in washington during the election where they lost a house in large part do you think that is what helped down the totals when he ran last year . I think it was a combination of things. I think it is larger then anything that may be more the democratic side. They were very angry at him through that. I think the way that i felt following this myself when he ran for governor again, i felt sort of sour by the way that he does with his rival and by the way that he sought the endorsement of this working Families Party. He wanted desperately to win with more than 64 of the vote. Why . Because that was the margin of victory in the campaign of 1986 and everything about that relationship is about andrew both admiring and wanting to outdo his father said he was sent on that and in order to do that, because he was slipping a bit he needed to the endorsement of the working Families Party has most of you know a Progressive Party on the left side of the Democratic Party, he hated them but he needed them and the whole scenario for that endorsement saying you need to be tougher and guarantee that you will help get them back in the majority of the state senate he did it and he got the endorsement and almost immediately began undermining the working family party by forming something called the win one in the Quality Party which was going to chomp various measures for Womens Health and abortion rates etc. But he was encouraging people to vote through without party and it was confusing. Its like planning somebody with the same name. There is a saying that if you are a little party you must produce 50,000 votes were you basically go out of business. Is being vindictive towards people who havent done him any harm. And then despite that, he decided to run in the primary against him and he went to court to try to get her taken off the ballot because she hadnt lived in new york state as a resident for four for four years. Lets open up the record before he went into politics. His program for the homeless which in a kind of got the way he extended into Westchester County which made a lot of resistance and later his performance where he became secretary and a champion for her called enterprise zones so what are the longterm benefits, not political but the substantive benefits of the work he did for all those years . Doesnt have any kind of a permanent place and im glad you raised that point because he showed get credit. He does certainly in my telling get a lot of credit for starting this series of shelters and centers in the mid80s when first appeared as a problem. There were 11000 people or so on the streets every night and into early 50,000 now. But that isnt his fault. So he did these things and he did extend to westchester. That whole operation is running today with quite a few centers and actually one of his sisters is the head of it. I think that he also gets a lot of credit for extending internationally. I dont know if he came up with it but he used the phrase called the continuum of care and the idea was you dont just give people a bed at night you have to look at their the problems maybe they have a drug addiction, alcoholics, maybe they are depressed or bipolar. Whatever it is you have to treat all those things and it costs a lot more money to do that but you tend to have more success and he really brought that philosophy to washington and clinton let him run with it and he gets credit for that. One question, which i am sure people are wondering about the breakup of his marriage to kennedy the hell did that affect how did that affect him and did you think it contributed in a wave in his later political success that he faced adversity which most successful politicians have . And i think it absolutely did and thinking of the politicians that you admired how many of them did have some idea and have to come back from it. Its george w. Bush from alcoholism or jack kennedy shortly this was his little moment and nobody thought he would come back from it. There were two things in his case for losing losing the governorship and the marriage. Frankly i dont have a lot of sympathy with him because the reporting when you go back back at all depicted him as the villain of the story. She had an extramarital affair. Why do we know this . Because his lawyer announced it to the world and what could have been a oneday story became a tabloid inferno for we. I didnt talk to Kerry Kennedy but i did talk to people in her world and i got the distinct impression that the two sides of the marriage and then andrew had been, as a father had been a sort of stern father leaving kerry with their daughters and pretty self absorbed in those years. I would hasten to add that what i heard from the camp is he became a good father and i certainly hope thats true but he wasnt for a while and i wont go was told you one story thats kind of fascinating to me , so the marriage is going off the rails and its been announced or is about to be announced that kerry had a affair fair and there is a meeting campaign. Mario astaire and andrew and chris and a couple other people who were advisers into the question is what to do about this. We see that he had an affair or not and he says yes absolutely because thats the way to way the kennedys act in what people are expecting and if we see anything else that is going to hurt andrew politically to which chris reportedly says but what about the daughters . They are your granddaughters and he says whose side are you on . As a storyteller i found that kind of fascinating. I think at any rate it was a tough marriage and one doubles and a lot of fun for either of them most of the time. We could go on about that but lets open up for questions. I always thought he would run for president at one point and i was wondering what you see as his considerations into strategies in making those decisions. I hoped he would run for president when i started writing this book. A lot of people believed he was. Everything from Time Magazine on down was predicting that he would be the strongest candidate obviously next to. The question is always of hillary. I decided to call the book the contender thinking he might run but thinking if he didnt run he was still a contender. He could be very well positioned to run for president if lets say he wins in 2016. He is a contender. Why has he not a contender for the simple reason that hillary just insisted on being. It haunts him and infuriates him that there is only one person in the country that could stop him running for president but there she was. What do you suppose that he thinks. They go on meet the press and go out to iowa and brassica and so on. It is a fascinating relationship and im sure that he feels that he has infuriatingly gone way off the reservation and did so from the beginning because i feel from the universal pre k. If a thing the thing is he could never squashed the policy of because he needed him for that working family Party Endorsement and he never would have gotten that without talking them into giving it to him. I think that he thought it would be just fine. He would have the power of the governorship and they worked together as the as you know it was all going to be fine until he won 73 of the vote in the area of the stronghold. So here is the guy thats popular among his voters which changed the dynamic and it made the ongoing between them even more fascinating to watch. And he outfoxed the policy along the Charter Schools and rally in albany and it got the better of him but now this postdates your book he seems to have alienated most of the teachers in the state of new york over his views on the teacher evaluation and the number of parents are also upset thats a lot of voters. I rather admire him for trying to do something about the education system. He asks if there is power and its good for him to try to introduce some balance here. For student improvement on the tests should be one factor in the teacher evaluation but to say how much it should count, but somehow he has an educator knows it should count 50 instead of saying im interested in the principle that should account for something whether your kids actually learn something should be connected to a measurable way connected to your promotion thats why does he think or is it arrogance or what that would lead him to bb that he would know how much which is a different question. That is a good question. Im not sure. Theres no way to look back on these months and say he was playing a game that only now becomes clear. It was a mistake. I am not sure that this is on by the way. This was an interesting complex person and discussion and i appreciate it. I am a member of the team myself but i voted for him and diabetes they did not on the education part that you are bringing up about the evaluations and so on i dont appreciate the things hes tried to do for raising minimum wage and other things. I disagree on the education policy and a lot of that has to do with this evaluation business so here i was protesting against the education policy while having voted for him for governor. So what would you do if you ran for the reelection . Id go to all my life from that day that i turned 18. But i dont know. It would depend who would be running and so on. Im inclined not to but that is a rigid point. I feel very deeply on the teacher evaluation i worked with special education teachers as well as elementary, high school, junior high, every part of it both teaching and counseling. To come up with that number is outrageous. Youre working with children and ive worked with those in the south toxin heartlung. Thats most of my rear and not that they cant learn everywhere but they come with a lot of issues. In the specialeducation in the teachers evaluation of the 50 for students pay to me is absurdity. It seems arbitrary and certainly if a teacher loses her job because 50 rather than 40 its crazy but i would say theres a lot going on in the education measures and one of them was to not let teachers have tenure until after four years rather than the three. We could talk about this but there is a balance. I agree with you im mostly on his side and the idea of trying to quash the Charter Schools that have 90 Graduation Rates but its almost like he doesnt know when to stop. And there is a quality to his leadership that is both pragmatic and also selfdestructive. I know that his advisers work almost above all else to keep him from speaking extant radius by. And that goes back to the famous quote running for governor and its 2002, 9 11 is in the Rearview Mirror and he says to a bunch of journalists while he is on a bus he did the job of leadership. That basically destroyed his campaign. Hes been haunted by the comment ever since. The question is why does he say things like this and there is a kind of slacker and a sort of petulance that hes worn to. We talked about some of his issues. Do you think that his issues will change now that hes tied . The i actually make that last sentence of the book. I was working on the book frantically over the Christmas Holiday and i have my another eight days and when i was getting ready to turn it on the on the last time he died. It was like a sign from heaven. Poor fellow, but he did and if he was going to come it was the right time because i could get it in and write that last page and as a storyteller i felt that it apart the story for circle because i think this is a father son story. So i would have to the leave that andrew does feel a certain sense of liberation. Again he gave best speech of his career was the eulogy, very moving and terrific. It gets overlooked that he may not be his father but he is a pretty good writer and another thing that gets overlooked is that he can be pretty funny but its one of those things that gets overlooked. I think that he can throw off that sense of competition and the fact is he has done more in his first term whatever faults defined with one issue or another hes done first to more in his first term. We love him and be ordered for and we remember the Democratic National Convention Speech but the fact is hes not a great manager and didnt push through a lot or accomplish a lot. The joke about the three terms is that he passed a seat belt law. Its not that bad and its not that great. He has every right to offset daddy looking over his shoulder. The governors participation or the lack of participation with its going to be on the major issues that are coming up on june 15 based on your knowledge of him. June 15 is for much legislation. The book really closed when i finished so i frankly dont know. Somebody has a question. Based on what ive heard you say that knowledge is fairly extensive dc and truly able to run for president in having a good chance of winning if he does. First there is a level of issues and whether hes running on things like teachers education thats going to hinder him from running national. Then theres also the personality issue. I find him a compelling charismatic figure in a dark way but im not sure that americans in iowa are going to feel the same. He still has a brooklyn or queens accent. Why doesnt he just get out of that . Its along with that accent and unwillingness and politicians on the National Need to do a lot of smiling and they need to enjoy. I dont think that he come days that they are running the campaigning and what he loves is the power of the office ostensibly to do the things that need to be done to make the state run better. Of course running for president you need to do an awful lot of the retail stuff. Its unlikely that he can do it and when. Very interesting conclusion combination of the will to power and some limitations as you indicated. Thank you so much. [applause]