Andrew Cuomo (D)

New York Governor (D)

(NY Attorney General's Office)

Why He Matters

Cuomo's political timing has not always matched his grand ambition, but in 2010, he won the New York governor's post that he failed to claim in 2002.

He faced tea party candidate Carl Paladino (R), who came from behind to beat ex-Rep. Rick Lazio (R) in the GOP primary.

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After long eyeing the post being vacated by embattled Gov. David Paterson (D-N.Y.), Cuomo announced on May 22, 2010 that he would seek to replace him. "The New York State government was at one time a national model," Cuomo said. "Now, unfortunately, it's a national disgrace. Sometimes, the corruption in Albany could even make Boss Tweed blush."

As New York attorney general, Cuomo emerged as a major force in unleashing his power of subpoena on Wall Street giants, and his popularity in the Empire State soared during the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

Winning the governor's job caps an impressive comeback for Cuomo, who was once a rising star in the national Democratic Party, after starting his career as a brash and bruising political operative for his father, three-term New York Governor Mario Cuomo (D). In 1997, President Clinton tapped the younger Cuomo, then 39, to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development. After winning praise for overhauling the department, Cuomo was even mentioned as a possible running mate for Vice President Al Gore in 2000.

Instead, Cuomo returned to New York and made an ill-fated 2002 gubernatorial bid, withdrawing a week before the Democratic primary to avoid an embarrassing defeat. A messy divorce from the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy followed in 2003 and left Cuomo's political future in doubt. But Cuomo worked to rebuild relationships with state Democrats and set his sights lower in 2006, running successfully to replace Eliot Spitzer (D) as New York's attorney general.

Cuomo earned plaudits from both Republicans and Democrats during the first two years of his term, winning settlements after investigations of student-loan companies, Medicaid fraud and Wall Street credit-rating agencies. He fished for even bigger prizes, probing Wall Street titans ensnared in the financial crisis. With Spitzer out of office and Paterson struggling through scandals, Cuomo took the opportunity to make a second try for the state's governorship. This time, the timing was ideal.

More on: Andrew Cuomo (D)

At a Glance
Path to Power
The Issues
The Network
Additional Resources

Corrections?

Background

At a Glance

Career History: New York Attorney General (since 2007); Consultant, Island Capital Group (2003-2006); Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (1997-2001)
Birthday: December 6, 1957
Hometown: Queens, N.Y.
Alma Mater: Fordham University, B.A. 1979; Albany Law School, J.D. 1982
Spouse: Divorced

Religion: Catholic
Offices: Office of the Attorney GeneralState Capitol Albany, N.Y., 12224-0341,518-474-5481;120 Broadway, New York City, N.Y.,10271-0332, 212-416-8000
Email
Website

Path to Power

Cuomo was born in 1957 to Matilda and Mario Cuomo, a Queens lawyer whose rise to the top of New York politics began in the 1970s. Andrew got an early start in the family business working on his father's campaigns. Among Andrew's tasks as a teenager, Mario Cuomo later told a reporter, was "putting my posters up and pulling the other guy's down."

Andrew Cuomo graduated from Fordham University and then Albany Law School, but he remained his father's closest adviser. He ran Mario's winning campaign for governor of New York in 1982, and at 25, took a job as a $1-a-year senior adviser in the state Capitol. The younger Cuomo became known as the governor's enforcer, a role that brought him both influence and enemies. "I was my father's campaign manager,'" he told the New York Times in 2006. "When you do it right, you are by definition a lightning rod."

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Andrew Cuomo left his Albany post in 1984, the first in a series of career moves to strike out on his own and emerge from his father's long shadow. He worked as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan and then joined a private law firm, though he refused to allow "Cuomo" to be added to the firm's name.

While practicing law, Cuomo also developed a passion for the issue of housing. He started the Housing Enterprise for the Less Privileged, or H.E.L.P., a non-profit partnering government and private developers to build housing for the homeless. Cuomo began working for the organization full-time in 1988, a move that also allowed him to escape criticism that he had used his connections in Albany to attract clients for his law firm.

By 1991, H.E.L.P. had assisted in building 1,000 units of housing with an annual grant income of $30 million. New York City Mayor David Dinkins (D) tapped Cuomo to head a commission on homelessness, and in 1993, he moved to Washington to become an assistant secretary for Housing and Urban Development under President Bill Clinton.

HUD Secretary

Cuomo rose rapidly in the Clinton administration. He authored a federal report on homelessness and played a key role in the creation of empowerment zones in impoverished areas throughout the country. By the end of Clinton's first term, Cuomo had become part of the president's inner circle on urban issues while also forging close ties with Vice President Al Gore (D). Though living in Washington, Cuomo kept an eye on his home state and was considering a challenge to Senator Alfonse D'Amato (R-N.Y.) in 1998 when Clinton nominated him to replace Henry Cisneros as HUD. secretary in November 1996.

The new secretary, just 39 when appointed, embarked on an aggressive overhaul of a department that had become notorious for wasteful spending. Moving quickly to consolidate programs and restructure HUD, Cuomo won the largest budget increase in a decade, which was seen as a vote of confidence from the White House. By the end of his term in office, HUD had shed its label as a "high risk" agency by the Government Accountability Office.

2002 Run for Governor

Cuomo returned to New York after the Clinton administration with an eye on reclaiming the governor's post in 2002 that his father had lost eight years earlier to George Pataki (R). But before he could take on Pataki, who was running for his third term, Cuomo faced a divided Democratic Party. Many of the party's African American and Hispanic leaders had already rallied around state Comptroller H. Carl McCall (D) and took umbrage at the notion that Cuomo, in his first bid at elective office after living in Washington for eight years, would challenge a man seeking to become the state's first black governor.

The press flocked to the storyline of an ambitious son seeking redemption for his father's political failures. The similarities between the Cuomos were unmistakable, down to their deep voices and pontificating styles. The younger Cuomo would joke to reporters that "the greatest burden you carry being the son of Mario Cuomo is his nose."

The race did not begin well for Cuomo. He drew heavy fire for belittling Pataki's role following the terrorist attacks of Sept.11, 2001, saying that the governor had merely "held the leader's coat," in reference to popular New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (R). With the party establishment coalescing around McCall, Cuomo skipped the state Democratic convention in May 2002, and his standing in the polls dissipated over the summer. Facing defeat in the party primary in September, Cuomo withdrew a week before the election, bringing his first foray as a candidate to an embarrassing end.

2006 Bid for Attorney General

Cuomo slipped further in the public eye in 2003, when his bitter separation from Kerry Kennedy became tabloid fodder.The episode pushed him into the political wilderness for months, but he eventually eased back into the spotlight while working behind the scenes to repair his ties to the state party. Spitzer had quickly emerged as the likely Democratic nominee for governor in 2006 and Cuomo turned to the race to replace Spitzer as attorney general, which was crowded with Democrats but lacked a frontrunner.

Cuomo's closest competitor in the 2006 primary was Mark Green, a staunch liberal and former New York City public advocate who had previously made failed bids for U.S. Senate and mayor of New York. Green fought Cuomo hard, attacking his record as federal housing secretary and criticizing his experience as irrelevant to the post of attorney general. But carrying the party leadership support he lacked in 2002, Cuomo easily held off Green in the primary.

Cuomo faced a former district attorney of Westchester, Jeanine Pirro (R), in a general election that initially looked to be even more bruising than the primary. Though he and Spitzer had never been close, Cuomo linked himself closely to Spitzer's legacy as attorney general. One of his television ads showed supporters holding foot measures to demonstrate that Cuomo could fill the "big shoes" Spitzer was leaving. Ultimately, Cuomo cruised to victory, capturing 58 percent of the vote after Pirro became ensnared by the disclosure that she was under investigation for allegedly conspiring to wiretap her husband.

The Issues

Cuomo's political leanings fall well within the mainstream of the Democratic Party, although his influence is said to stem as much from the New Democratic politics of the Clinton administration as from his famously liberal father, former Gov. Mario Cuomo (D-N.Y.). He supports abortion rights and opposes the death penalty. During his 2006 campaign for attorney general, Cuomo voiced support for same-sex marriage, which drew criticism from some of his opponents who recalled that he backed only civil unions during his 2002 gubernatorial bid.

The Economy

As the housing and financial markets plummeted in 2007 and 2008, Cuomo launched far-reaching investigations into the mortgage and securities industry, whose heart lies in New York. He issued subpoenas to both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, later reaching a settlement in which the home-loan giants agreed to only buy mortgages from banks that met new and higher standards. He also forced the three major credit-ratings agencies to overhaul how they evaluated mortgage-backed securities.

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And in 2008, Cuomo announced a series of agreements with major Wall Street banks to recover billions from investors who purchased auction-rate securities. Cuomo's achievements in probing the housing and financial crisis won him wide acclaim, including from some Republicans. In the latter stages of the 2008 presidential campaign, GOP 2008 presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) floated Cuomo's name as a possible chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

But Cuomo's probe of the mortgage industry also drew attention to his role as HUD secretary in the Clinton administration. A lengthy 2008 Village Voice investigative article described Cuomo's involvement in writing policies that encouraged more home ownership and lower lending standards. The article asserted that actions Cuomo took "in combination with many other factors - helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments."

Bank of America

In February 2010, Cuomo and TARP Inspector General Neil Barofsky filed civil fraud charges against Bank of America, its former CEO Ken Lewis and former CFO Joseph Price. The suits accuse the bank of lying to investors about Merrill's financial troubles in the fall of 2008, when Bank of America was in the process of acquiring Merrill. Also, the charges allege that the bank misled federal officials when it threatened to pull out of the merger unless it received billions more in bailout funds.

AIG Bonuses

Although Cuomo supported federal intervention to save the American International Group, he soon emerged as one of its chief tormenters. The New York attorney general first demanded that the company repay executive bonuses in October 2008, following disclosures that the firm had spent lavishly on golf outings and a hunting trip after it had received a taxpayer-backed rescue. "A.I.G.'s belief is that they had the party, and the taxpayers will have the hangover," Cuomo said then.

In March 2009, Cuomo was back on A.I.G.'s case after reports of another $165 million in executive bonuses sparked a national furor. In addition to joining a chorus of elected officials demanding repayment, Cuomo threatened the company with subpoenas if it did not turn over a list of employees set to receive the bonuses. While some criticized Cuomo as overzealous, he also drew praise for his aggressiveness at a time when public anger was building over inaction by officials in Washington.

Student Loans

Cuomo launched his first major investigation as attorney general on the student-loan industry, expanding an inquiry that had begun at the end of Spitzer tenure as New York attorney general. Exposing a kickback scheme in which lenders gave money to colleges whose advisers directed business to them, Cuomo in 2007 forced major lenders to change their practices and sign on to a code of conduct to avoid prosecution.

The Network

While Cuomo has focused much of his political attention on building - and in some cases rebuilding - relationships in New York as he considers a second run for governor , he retains close ties to Clinton , his former boss, and to Gore . He endorsed then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, though he strongly supported Barack Obama after she left the race.

Additional Resources