Andrew Cuomo has a new ad out. It's called "Proud," and it seems like kind of a victory stroll. It continues the Cuomo M.O.: Repeat Eliot Spitzer's name as many times as possible, and let Jeanine Pirro stagger around in her strange land of public marital dysfunction until Election Day. Here's the script, all spoken by Cuomo:
"For eight years Eliot Spitzer’s set the standard as our Attorney General. So I’m proud to have earned his support. Eliot knows me and my life’s work. And that as Attorney General I’ll continue the important battle he’s started to get the illegal guns off our streets, to crack down on the bad banks, insurance and drug companies that rip us off. To restore honesty and integrity to Albany for a state government we can be proud of. I’m honored to have Eliot’s vote and I hope I’ve earned yours."
The funniest shot in the ad is the one of Andrew leafing through a legal tome in a law library. Like -- See, kids, I may have only been a junior prosecutor for 14 months 21 years ago, but since then I've spent every waking minute hanging out in law libraries because it's so much fun. Notice the little picture of him with one of his daughters sitting next to the law book. A real cinema verite touch.
As for the script, Cuomo has spent much of the campaign bragging about how great he was on guns and insurance companies and banks while he was Bill Clinton's HUD secretary, so this is nothing new. But, just for the record, after the jump we're reprinting two excerpts from a 2001 story Newsday did on Cuomo's HUD record.
The first is a recollection from Connie Chamberlin, a Virginia fair-housing advocate, about how unhelpful Andrew was -- except for his press releases -- when she was seeking help on suing a big insurance company for redlining. The second excerpt has to do with Cuomo's failure to ever file the lawsuit he threatened on his much talked about gun initiative at HUD, and the failure of the initiative to accomplish much of anything -- except generate press releases.
Excerpts follow from the August 23, 2001 story:
INSURANCE REDLINING:
Among the skeptics who think Cuomo was more interested in a high profile for himself than for the issue: Connie Chamberlin, who heads a fair-housing group in Richmond, Va., that registered one of the landmark fair-housing achievements of the Cuomo era when it won a $100-million 1999 verdict against Nationwide Insurance for discriminatory redlining in its sales of homeowners' insurance in the Richmond area. The case was later settled for $17 million.
The case had its origin in a complaint originally filed with HUD, alleging a national pattern of redlining by Nationwide. In 1997, the Justice Department settled the case for $13 million on terms Chamberlin and others thought were inadequate. As they tried to get the Justice Department to hold out for more, Chamberlin said, Cuomo was never heard from. When the deal was finalized, Cuomo issued a press release praising it.
Left to their own devices, Chamberlin's and other groups pursued cases in court. HUD played no part in the litigation - although one of its grants had funded some of the testing used to prove discrimination. When the $100-million verdict came in, Cuomo issued another press release lauding it.
Nationwide appealed, challenging the standing of Chamberlin's group under Virginia law to represent those affected by the redlining. Her group asked HUD for help in getting a "friend-of-the-court" legal brief from the government but was unsuccessful. The verdict was eventually overturned by a divided Virginia Supreme Court, and then - while a rehearing was under consideration - it was finally settled for $17 million. At that point, Cuomo issued another press release.
"The lack of support was sort of consistent," Chamberlin notes. "Except that I was certainly besieged with calls from his press office when we won. ... I think Cuomo's been running for office for a long time, and I think that had an impact on how fair-housing at HUD was run."
Cuomo's press secretary, Peter Ragone, however, said the Justice Department made the final decision about the requested brief after discussing it with a HUD official and said it was unfair to measure Cuomo's role in the fair-housing cases he publicized based on a single one out of thousands.
GUNS:
Early last year, foraging outside the normal range of a secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, one of Washington's hottest young politicians made a splash by taking a shot at one of the hottest issues on the American political landscape - gun violence.
Brandishing the threat of a HUD-sponsored class-action lawsuit against firearms manufacturers, Secretary Andrew Cuomo stepped into, and then took over, negotiations that states and cities pursuing similar cases had been conducting with the gun industry. Then, when revered Smith & Wesson of Springfield, Mass., unexpectedly agreed to a deal requiring safer design and more responsible marketing in return for escaping the lawsuits, Cuomo declared a landmark victory.
"This is a historic agreement that will save lives," Cuomo asserted in a widely covered March news conference, amid predictions that a domino effect and the pressure of lawsuits would cause the rest of the industry to fall in line.
Seventeen months after the fanfare, however, the deal doesn't look so historic. Instead of a domino effect, it sparked a firestorm among gun owners and distributors that threatened Smith & Wesson's sales. The company said it had agreed mostly to do things it was already doing, suggesting that HUD might be exaggerating its accomplishment. Smith & Wesson was released from only one local suit, and no other gunmaker signed on to the deal. And oddest of all, after refusing Cuomo's carrots, the rest of the industry never felt his stick: The threatened lawsuit that he used to get involved in the first place was never filed.
That outcome has left opponents of the deal as well as some gun control advocates feeling that the episode, in the end, was much ado about not much. "The deal didn't get Smith & Wesson out of municipal lawsuits, it didn't impact firearms safety or reduce gun violence, but it did get Cuomo his media exposure," says Bob Delfay, who resisted the deal as head of the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
"There was a lot of time pressure from the political side to come to a quick agreement to get the publicity," says Kristin Rand, legislative director at the Violence Policy Center, an anti-gun group in Washington, D.C. "We think it would have been more constructive to follow through on litigation opportunities than to concentrate on a negotiated settlement with one manufacturer."
Other gun-control advocates, in fairness, believe Cuomo's efforts set an important precedent, and former Cuomo aides say the threatened suit was stalled not by Cuomo's lack of follow through but by leery Justice Department lawyers and political concerns about the gun issue's effect on Al Gore's presidential campaign. But the outcome, and the skepticism it evokes in some quarters, nonetheless reflect the hidden liabilities that may lurk in Cuomo's current effort to use his HUD tenure as a springboard to run for governor of New York.
Cuomo himself declined to be interviewed for this story, but he was, by most accounts, a spectacularly activist secretary who did a lot at HUD - from taking on the thankless task of modernizing a moribund agency to grappling with a growing crisis in affordable housing and seizing center-stage on difficult issues such as guns, American Indian housing and predatory lending.
Both his accomplishments and his success in drawing attention to such issues will help him, say former aides. "As a cabinet member, you're given a bully pulpit," said former chief of staff Jonathan Cowan. "The responsible thing is to use it to put issues on the table and before Congress, or you are just a technician administering programs. If the HUD secretary doesn't speak up for poor people, who will?"
But at the same time, critics say a lot of what Cuomo did - on issues ranging from fair housing and civil rights to guns, affordable housing and job creation in upstate New York - accomplished less than his robust output of press releases suggested. Last year, for example, while he never filed the threatened lawsuit, he did put out more than 20 press releases about his gun-control efforts. That gave him a reputation as a self-promoter. And that may not help him.
"He did make progress," says Andre Shashaty, the editor of Affordable Housing Magazine, an industry newsletter. "But the biggest criticism of Andrew Cuomo is his ego. His incessant crusade for his own career and his own PR certainly clouded his success."
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