The Contender

CHAPTER 1

The High Point

The governor was having a bad week.

It was early June 2011, near the end of Andrew Mark Cuomo's first session as governor of New York State. Everything had gone right—until now. He had done all the things that governors try and often fail to do, especially in the great but broken state of New York. Balancing the budget. Cutting spending. Capping taxes. Keeping the unions at bay. Both parties were awed, compliant, and not a little afraid. The governor would never have more political capital than right now, and he knew it. Best to spend it while he could, a lesson learned from his father. Before the end of the session, he declared, he would pass a same-sex marriage bill.

This was a huge and possibly foolhardy gamble. Nationally, the issue was teetering. A handful of states had made same-sex marriage legal, but others—Minnesota, Rhode Island, New Jersey—had blocked it, and California was mired in a legal battle. A prudent governor might wait before entering the fray, and there was cause to call Cuomo prudent, even cynically so. Yet on "marriage," as his small circle of top advisers had taken to calling it, that prudence was balanced by something else, something that made Andrew Cuomo a figure to watch: a flash of passion.

As the fifty-sixth governor of New York explained to the fifty-second governor, his father, Mario, all that other stuff was operational. It was a word Andrew had used in his twenties, when he was his father's top aide and did whatever it took to make the wheels of government turn, including brutal firings and generally instilling fear. Now, as governor, he had to do as his father had done: set a lofty goal and lead people to it. "Same-sex marriage is at the heart of leadership and progressive government," he told his father. "I have to do this."

The bad news that week came from Dean Skelos, the Senate Republican leader. The Republicans ruled the Senate, and Skelos would be the bill's gatekeeper to the Senate floor. Skelos wouldn't block a same-sex marriage bill, he declared with an unctuous play at bipartisanship, not if the Democrats were united behind it. But they were not. Of the thirty Democrats in the sixty-two-member Senate, at least four were on record as opposing same-sex marriage. Not a single Republican was for it. Why should Skelos send a bill to the floor that would obviously fail? It would be, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, déjà vu all over again.

That was hard to argue. Twice before, under Cuomo's predecessors, a bill for same-sex marriage had gone to the larger, Democratic-controlled Assembly, sailing through, only to be blocked by the Republican Senate. Despite months of lobbying by same-sex marriage advocates, the Senate, when it finally voted on the bill in December 2009, had shot it down 24–38, with all the Republicans and a handful of conservative Democrats piling on.

The Democrats in Albany's castlelike capitol building were convinced marriage had no chance. So were the capitol hill reporters, who filed their stories from narrow pigeonholes on the building's third floor, with its walls that seemed to be closing in, like those in "The Pit and the Pendulum." The wealthy libertarian Wall Streeters who had written six-figure checks to launch a lobbying effort for "marriage," and the legions of activists who had swarmed the nineteenth-century capitol's gloomy, high-vaulted corridors in search of wavering legislators week after week, held out little hope. Only one person in Albany seemed quietly confident that same-sex marriage would pass.

From April, when the campaign began in earnest, the governor held tight control over its many contingents. There would be no infighting among gay marriage groups and their patrons. The governor's top aide, Steve Cohen, would rule. Cohen was a former U.S. attorney who had startled the press corps by declaring that the new administration would have two speeds: "get along and kill." In private he could be a genial fellow. But when it came to promulgating his boss's agenda, there was no one tougher. Together, he and the governor changed the name of the cause. "Same-sex marriage" was now "marriage equality," with its canny appeal to justice and freedom, airbrushing away any hint of sexuality. On his own, the Catholic governor did what he could to calm his church and the lawmakers loyal to it. No same-sex marriages would have to be conducted in Catholic churches; the new bill would make that clear. With that, the governor got to work manning the phones from his second-floor office in the executive chamber.

To see Cuomo wrangling votes, coaxing one minute and threatening the next, was to see politics at its most elemental: carrot and stick. On the path from hatchet man for his father, to activist for the homeless, to a seat in President Clinton's cabinet, to New York attorney general, and now as the most powerful political leader in the state, Andrew Cuomo had made more than his share of enemies. He was brash, aggressive, often ruthless. But of all those who loathed him, none would deny him this: at the game of hardball, which was what this was, there was no one better. Now he was using those skills in the service of a cause he had come to believe in. Privately, on marriage, Cuomo figured he was a vote away, maybe two.

Of the four Democrats on record against marriage equality, Rubén Díaz Sr. of the Bronx was a hopeless cause. He was a Pentecostal minister, unbudgeable from his view that marriage was an institution established by God between a man and a woman. As far as Skelos knew, the other three Dems were no votes too. Hence his magnanimity.

Undeterred, the governor was pushing hard on those same three Democrats, one by one, with variations on a theme. "The only question is this year or the next," he told them. "And fifteen or twenty years from now, no one is going to understand lawmakers who voted no and put this off. Where in history do you want to be in this story?"

All three were downstaters, from outer boroughs of New York City. Before long two of the three would lose their seats amid corruption charges—a sorry tradition in Albany, and one that would soon grow more pronounced, threatening to tarnish the governor's record—but those misfortunes remained in the future. "You may worry about the politics of today and tomorrow," Andrew went on, "but you didn't enter into public life to be judged based on today."

The pitch was persuasive, but so was the "field." Activists had gathered overwhelming numbers of pro-marriage-equality signatures from each lawmaker's district. Field, they called it, as in field research. The lawmakers had been inundated with field.

By Monday, June 13, the governor had news to report. He called the press down from their pigeonholes into the Red Room adjacent to his office, with its crimson carpeting, mahogany wainscoting, and coffered oak ceiling. The room's ceremonial desk bore wheelchair marks from former governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, and a secret step that another former governor, the diminutive Thomas Dewey, could pull out and stand on to make his addresses. At six feet tall, more or less, Andrew could let the step stay hidden. There beside him were the three downstate Democrats, turned from no to yes. Making them go public locked them in, as Cuomo knew. It also pressured Skelos to honor his word that with twenty-nine Democrats united on marriage, he would let a bill go to the floor.

While Skelos absorbed the news, Andrew started phase two: wooing a handful of Republicans who might change their votes to yes if they thought the bill could pass. An hour later, he called the press back into the Red Room. More news, he announced, and went over to open the door of his private office. Out came James Alesi, Republican of Monroe County, to declare he would be a first Republican yes vote. Back in 2009, before his last vote on same-sex marriage, Alesi had been caught on camera with his head in his hands, distraught at voting no. That had been a "political" vote, he told the press now. This time he would vote from his heart.

With Alesi, the count was thirty yes votes to thirty-two no votes. Close, but not close enough.

Roy McDonald, a beefy, genial state senator from Saratoga who called himself a Lincoln Republican, was the governor's next target. His father had been a steelworker with an eighth-grade education. Patriotic and socially conservative, McDonald had worked his way up as a local banker. His three daughters were lobbying him, gently pushing him to change his vote. Cleverly, Andrew had one of his own three daughters with him when McDonald came to the governor's office. The family ties tugged, as intended. "I'm for being kind to people and letting them live their lives," McDonald said Monday. But he didn't say how he would vote.

That evening, the governor invited McDonald and other Republican senators for cocktails at the forty-room executive mansion that Andrew had reclaimed as the Cuomo home. All that gay couples wanted, he told the lawmakers, was state recognition that they were equal to anyone else. And weren't they? "Their love is worth the same as your love," he said. "Their partnership is worth the same as your partnership." McDonald liked how the governor framed marriage as a fundamental freedom. He also admired what he saw personally in Cuomo. This was a sizable political risk. The guy had guts.

Tuesday morning, McDonald stood before the cameras to say that he too would vote yes. "I'm not out to hurt some gay guy, gay woman—live your lifestyle. That's not my lifestyle, but God bless 'em—it's America." The press corps kept at him, asking if he might lose the next election because of his vote, until McDonald snapped. "I'm tired of blowhard radio people, blowhard television people, blowhard newspapers," he fumed. "They can take the job and shove it."

The count now stood at 31–31. The law was vague on whether the lieutenant governor could break the tie on a bill; Andrew wasn't banking on it. Anyway, if it did come to that, one of the converts might bail. From the start, the governor had insisted that even a one-vote margin wasn't enough. He needed a "spare tire." No Republican wanted to be the determining thirty-second vote and be blamed for the loss. The governor needed a thirty-third vote too.

Of the several Republicans the governor had been courting, Steve Saland of Poughkeepsie seemed the next best bet. A lawyer and the descendant of a prominent Jerusalem rabbi, known for his philosophical bent, Saland saw the virtue of marriage equality. He just preferred not to commit political suicide. The governor said he understood. "I need to know you'll be a yes for me," he told Saland, "but I know you want to be the thirty-third vote, not the thirty-second. Here is the deal. If I don't get that extra vote, I'll understand if you want to vote no." Saland agreed; the two shook hands.

Now it was time for the toughest prospect. Mark Grisanti of Buffalo, also a lawyer, had said flat out that he would vote no. But why? For Grisanti, an Italian Catholic lawyer in Catholic Buffalo, it was about preserving the right of the church to refuse to marry gay couples. As one Catholic to another, the governor said he shared Grisanti's concern. The new bill would have language giving priests legal protection. And so it did. The governor and Grisanti bounced the wording back and forth until Grisanti was satisfied. Now both Saland and Grisanti could claim to be the thirty-third vote, not the thirty-second. "I'll do it," Grisanti told the governor, as one of the governor's aides recalled. "I'll be there for you." And so they too shook hands. By the governor's count, the vote was 33–29. He had won—or so he thought.

The bill went to the Assembly on Tuesday, June l4. That evening, the governor went to Manhattan's legendary Palace Theater for an LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered) benefit at which the camp musical Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was performed. With him was his glamorous girlfriend, cookbook writer and food-show host Sandra Lee, whose thirty-one-year-old brother had come out as gay at the age of eighteen. "At one point this would have been considered a very racy play," the governor told his audience. "But given what's going on in politics today, it's pretty tame."

The next day, up in Albany, the Assembly passed the bill handily. There it stopped, while Skelos and his Republican senators anguished over whether to let the bill go to the floor after all. Skelos was trapped, and he knew it. He had urged his caucus to vote their consciences, and now two had done just that, very publicly. Not bringing the bill to the floor would be betraying them both, dooming them to almost certain defeat in their districts next election day.

That weekend, Mark Grisanti went home to Buffalo and gently suggested to his priest, among others, that he might vote yes on marriage equality. He came back shaken. First he met with Skelos and Tom Libous, the Senate's deputy majority leader. He had made a pledge to the governor. Now, he said, he just didn't see how he could keep it. It would kill him politically, he kept telling his colleagues. It would just kill him. The two were pleased to have his vote back, but breaking a pledge to the governor was serious business. "You better tell him yourself," Libous said. Grisanti blanched. "Will you go with me?"

Like a prisoner to his hanging, Grisanti went to the governor's office, accompanied by Libous. "I know I promised," he pleaded. "But I just can't do it. It'll kill me."

Cuomo darkened. "You were in my office five days ago," he said. "I looked you in the eye, you looked me in the eye, you said you were going to be with me. And now you're telling me you're not. And not because I didn't deliver the other thirty-third vote.

"You shook my hand," the governor thundered. "I'm from a world where your word means something. You made me a promise, I made you a promise. You're telling me more than about a vote. You're telling me who you really are."

Grisanti left the office stricken, with Libous in his wake.

For a long minute or two, the governor sat silent at his desk. Grisanti would vote no, so Saland would vote no. The vote would be back to a tie, 31–31, with Alesi and McDonald under such pressure that one or both might crumble. The whole marriage-equality campaign might crash for lack of Grisanti's vote. With it would go Andrew Cuomo's chance to change the history of civil rights, and perhaps his own history as well. Marriage equality would make him overnight a national figure—a presidential contender. He had time to plot another course. But this was a blow.

The governor turned to Steve Cohen, the top aide he'd put in charge of the campaign. Cohen was sitting quietly, waiting for his boss to speak. "Get me Saland," the governor ordered.

Saland appeared. He sat down. The governor looked at him intently. "Steve, we had a deal."

The Republican nodded uncertainly.

"I promised you if I didn't have the thirty-third vote, you could vote no if you wanted." The governor paused. "I'm sorry to tell you I don't have that other thirty-third vote."

There was a pause as both men pondered that.

"I think this bill should pass," the governor said, "and maybe I can get that thirty-third vote, but we had an understanding, so you should feel comfortable voting however you should vote. I will always appreciate that you were here when I needed you."

Saland had waged an internal struggle over same-sex marriage since his no vote in the senate in 2009. As a Jew, he had a sense of how it felt to be a target of bias. He had come to terms with the political cost of a yes vote. "Governor," Saland said, "whether you have the second thirty-third vote or not, I'll be there for you."

Andrew could have pressured the Republican senator. Instead, he'd invoked a sense of honor that appealed to the earnest lifelong Republican. This is how we act as public servants, serving a higher cause. By appealing to his better nature, the governor had won him over.

The governor had his three Democrats, and now his three Republicans. For a day, or perhaps two, he allowed himself to think he had won the vote. But he hadn't. Not yet. For now other Democrats were threatening to bolt.

One problem was money. Through the whole spring campaign, a lot of it had been raining down on possible yes-vote Republicans. The Democrats were furious. Here they were, loyally lined up behind their governor, and for what? To be taken for granted—and given none of that lucre from lobbyists and Wall Street hedge funders like Paul Singer and Daniel Loeb. Publicly, the Democrats' leader, John Sampson, was still banging the drum for marriage equality. Privately, he and a cadre of Democrats were now rooting for it to fail—a failure they would blame on the Republicans, in the hope that gay rights groups would redirect the marriage-equality money to them.

The vote on marriage, after a reluctant Skelos agreed to send the bill to the floor, was scheduled for Friday, June 24. This was already a stretch beyond the end of the state's quirky six-month legislative term. The day before, Sampson called Steve Cohen to say they had a problem: Carl Kruger.

Kruger was one of the three downstate Democrats who'd switched from no to yes. Sampson said Kruger was due in federal court on charges of bribery and corruption on Friday and Judge Jed Rakoff wouldn't excuse him for the vote.

Cohen reported this to the governor. If Kruger ducked the vote, one or both of the other two Democratic converts might as well. Once again, the vote's outcome was in doubt.

The governor was succinct. "Fix it," he told Cohen.

It was already after 6 p.m. when Cohen got the order—too late to call the court. Instead, he reached out to a deputy U.S. attorney in the district whom he knew. The attorney did some digging and called back bemused. Kruger was not scheduled to be in court, and in any event, his attendance at preliminary proceedings had been waived.

Cohen went back to Sampson, who seemed surprised. "Carl told us that," the Democratic leader said in his laconic way to Cohen. "I guess he was wrong."

Skelos had agreed to a vote on one condition. He didn't want a lot of Democrats giving speeches and taking credit for the bill when it passed. He would pull the bill, he said, if the Dems insisted. They did. Sampson told Cohen that no fewer than twenty-three of the twenty-nine Democrats would be giving floor speeches.

"But then Skelos will pull it," Cohen said. "The bill will fail."

"Then it's the Republicans' fault."

"No," he told Sampson. "That won't work. If Skelos pulls the bill because your members insist on speaking, I will personally talk to every reporter in this town and explain it was John Sampson who wrecked the marriage vote."

This was a fine example of what the governor liked to call the "failed tactic maneuver." Show your adversary you know what his plan is, then prove to him why it won't work.

Sampson went to his members and got their okay not to speak on the floor.

Then, and only then, did the Friday night vote proceed.

Above the senators in their ornate chamber, the mezzanine rows of public seating filled that evening with the most eclectic audience imaginable, from praying nuns to young gay activists. Among them was Steve Saland's wife: a good sign. Later, the rumor would pass that someone on the governor's staff had locked the doors to the Senate chamber to keep the Republican yes votes from ducking out.

First came Alesi's yes vote—expected, but still a relief. Then McDonald, and then Saland's deciding vote, to resounding cries. "My intellectual and emotional journey has at last ended," Saland declared. "I must define doing the right thing as treating all persons with equality in the definition of law as it pertains to marriage."

Finally came Grisanti, a yes vote after all. "I cannot legally come up with an argument against same-sex marriage," he said.

The final vote was what Cuomo had guessed from the start of these volatile twelve days: 33–29.

"New York has finally torn down the barrier that has prevented same-sex couples from exercising the freedom to marry," the governor declared. "With the world watching, the legislature, by a bipartisan vote, has said that all New Yorkers are equal under the law."

The governor signed the bill at 11:55 p.m. Thirty days to the minute later, it would double the number of Americans able to exercise that freedom, tip the national balance on marriage equality, and help nudge the president of the United States from his "evolving" view on the issue to full support. Andrew had taken a tremendous risk and made it pay off. Not coincidentally, he had also advanced, with that stroke of his pen, as a future contender for the Oval Office.

Four years and one reelection campaign later, Governor Andrew Cuomo remains, at fifty-eight, the most tantalizing Democrat of his generation, his slightest eye twitch or throwaway line seized on as proof that he is, at last, readying a presidential run. No one who knows him doubts the day will come. The only question is when.

Cuomo, after all, has crowd-pleasing politics: near the middle, with just the occasional tack to one side or the other to keep on course. He has a gruff charisma, enough to fill rooms and dazzle his listeners—enough that People has twice anointed him one of the sexiest men alive over fifty. Above all, he understands how to lead a legislature better than almost any politician in America: how to wangle votes, playing on needs and vulnerabilities, building alliances and getting what he wants, with a hard-edged savvy that recalls no one so much as President Lyndon Baines Johnson. With Washington, D.C., plagued by partisan gridlock, led by a president who seems to disdain the human give-and-take of politics, is there not a strong case to be made for a President Andrew Cuomo who can coax and muscle the parties into working together again?

At the top tier, politics is as much about luck and timing as aptitude and ambition, and so Cuomo awaits his opening, which at the moment means waiting for Hillary Clinton to startle the world by saying she won't run for president in 2016, or by watching her run and make mistakes: with Hillary, it's happened before. If she does run, and win, and even win a second term, that puts Andrew in the running again just shy of sixty-seven, still well within range, and with another eight years under his belt of running the most powerful state in the Union. That is, of course, in the calculus of politics, eight lifetimes, but stipulate to this: if a path appears for the shrewdest and most tactically skilled Democratic governor in the country, he'll take it.

The next chapter remains to be written, but the prior ones are in, and the shape they take is compelling. Line up a dozen American politicians, take the most colorful biographical bits from each, and knit them into a single narrative, the iconic story of the twenty-first-century American politician. With Cuomo, those bits are all there. His story is the iconic story of the American politician.

It starts the way so many American political stories do, with an immigrant seeking his American dream. Andrew Cuomo's grandfather comes from Italy, works brutally hard, and lives for his children's success. Son Mario is the one who triumphs far beyond his parents' dreams, a lawyer who runs for governor, and wins, and serves three terms.

Why, in a country that prides itself on the immigrant experience and up-by-the-bootstraps pluck, is the concept of political dynasty so compelling? Yet it is, and so the American political landscape is filled with Roosevelts, Kennedys, and Bushes, not to mention Romneys and Browns. From his father's first days as governor, dynasty for Andrew is a distant orb, hovering on the horizon. Waved off, joked about, but never quite out of sight, it beckons as the ultimate political triumph.

The Cuomo story is in many ways both typical of other American political stories and more extreme. So Andrew doesn't just work as a gofer in his father's gubernatorial campaign; he actually helps Mario win. He doesn't just marry well; he marries Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Bobby, putting the Cuomos on a par with America's reigning political family. For more than fifty years, every handsome young politician in America has been measured by how Kennedyesque he is. Marrying Kerry makes Andrew part of the clan, the two political dynasties intertwined.

Politics is public service: that at least is the idea, though it's populated at the local level by often grubby types guarding small pieces of turf. For Andrew, graduating from college in the late 1970s, it's an odd, almost quaint profession to enter. The smart ones go to Wall Street, or white-shoe law firms, or the new frontier of technology. Andrew wades in to help his father—both because his father needs him and perhaps because dutiful sons in middle-class families still apprentice to their fathers' trades. Later, his handlers will nurse a vision of Andrew the twenty-first-century Democrat, leading his party like Moses to a new, pragmatic future. But fundamentally, Andrew is old-school, steeped in New York City ward politics: his father's son.

The story of every son is the story of coming to terms with his father. For Andrew, Mario is mentor, role model, taskmaster, and moral judge. His son reacts accordingly—with a complex mix of emotions. The story of Mario and Andrew has fascinated Cuomo watchers for nearly forty years. It is, as Andrew will put it at one point, operatic.

Politics, of course, is as much about power as public service: you can't do one without the other. As his father's campaign manager at twenty-four in the watershed gubernatorial election of 1982, Andrew learns a lot about power. "The aggregation of power is essential to everything he's done," says a grizzled old pol of him.

"The difference between Andrew and his dad," says another, "is that he understands political power in a way his father didn't. He appreciates the use of political power. His father was reticent."

A third old pol, not a friend of the Cuomos, says it's more than that. "Andrew has learned from his father's mistakes, not his father's successes. He's very much a political animal, he has analyzed what went wrong with his father, and he's smart enough to plan his own strategies and not fall into those traps."

A young man with political ambitions works his first campaign, then confronts a dilemma. Which is the best way to elected office, public service or the private sector? Andrew tries both, only to jeopardize his future career in messy and questionable business deals. Just in the nick of time he pushes the private sector away and focuses on the issue he's chosen: the homeless overrunning New York City in the mid-1980s. How he makes himself a leader in the field is a textbook case for the young politician. What to do with that expertise is then the question. Run for office or seek an appointment? For Andrew, the choice is made by fate: Bill Clinton wins the White House in 1992, and Andrew, with a little lobbying from his father, lands in a high perch at HUD—the bloated, corruption-marred Department of Housing and Urban Development.