We’re talking climate policy at a seaside YMCA, seen as a symbol of local resilience since Superstorm Sandy ravaged the Rockaways. “It is bold common sense policy that other states are already exploring,” Cynthia Nixon crisply intones to an eager audience, introducing a slate of proposals to counter Cuomo’s middling carbon cutbacks. “New York should be the leader in getting it done.”
The crowd bursts into a hearty applause.
More than 60 Cynthiacs have gathered in Arverne on the Sea, on the eve of an Earth Day March on Albany, to hear the actress, activist, and gubernatorial primary candidate’s environmental platform.
Among its central planks is a pledge to transfer the state entirely to renewable energy sources by 2050. It’s a clean one-upping of Cuomo’s campaign promise to have New York 50 percent carbon-free by 2030. But it also reflects a goal long-held by environmental activists in the state, many of them former Cuomo voters who are moving quickly to Cynthia’s side.
Danny Ruscillo, a two-time Cuomo voter and native of Rockaway Beach, threw his hands in the air, fed up with the governor’s environmental policy. “She’s for clean energy all the way!” he said, after complaining that Cuomo maintains a soft spot for pipelines. “Most likely, I’ll be voting for her.”
Lisa Raymond Tolan of Brooklyn says she considered the sitting governor’s family name synonymous with liberal Democratic leadership right up until the 2016 presidential election turned her into a progressive activist. “I grew up in New York. Mario, his dad, was my governor as a child. Before 2016, I wasn’t really paying attention—I just thought, Oh, Cuomo, he’s our guy,” she told me after the climate rally, where she’d taken the podium to condemn Cuomo’s empty rhetoric.
With environmental activists swarming the state Capitol Monday, Cuomo has to answer for a different sort of multi-generational legacy. In her Rockaway speech, Nixon solemnly invoked her young son—who, she said, had clung to her wife while fearsome winds rattled their Manhattan windows during Sandy. She pivoted deftly to Cuomo’s inadequate climate policy: “These major catastrophic consequences can’t fall victim to business as usual in Albany and a political system that caters to the needs of corporate donors over the future of New York’s children.”
Cuomo, seeking his third term, had hoped he’d be teeing up for a 2020 presidential bid by now. Instead, he’s scrambling to reposition himself as a credible progressive, just to preserve his current seat.
With Nixon behind the podium at the Rockaway Y, Cuomo’s administration denied a permit for a pipeline many in Nixon’s audience had planned to protest. “He just denied this permit in the middle of her speech—which is great,” said carbon-conscious Brooklynite Wendy Fried afterward, another former Cuomo supporter. “But I wonder: If she hadn’t given the speech, would he have granted it?”
Ecological shortcomings aren’t the worst of his recent embarrassments. On Friday,Cuomo had misappropriated multiple identities with tone-deaf attempt at intersectionality, claiming undocumented status because of his Italian descent. “I’m an Italian-American, I came from poor Italian-Americans who came here,” he said, last week. “You know what they called Italian-Americans back in the day? They called them wops. You know what wop stood for? ‘Without papers.’ I’m undocumented.”
He was citing a fairly common false etymology for the slur. But even if “wop” meant what Cuomo and presumably many others think it means, his attempts at identity politics are reliably awkward—and offensive to the people they’re intended to appease.
Last year he tweeted, and read aloud at a press conference, a litany of intersectional identities, to which he lays no actual claim. “As a New Yorker, I am a Muslim. As a New Yorker, I am Jewish. As a New Yorker, I am Black. I am gay. I am disabled. I am a woman seeking to control her health and her choices.” Earlier this spring, he joined a gun control “die-in” in Zuccotti Park—lying on the ground in downtown Manhattan alongside student activists and a teachers union president—and gave a press conference afterward.
While issue-by-issue their politics are similar, Nixon’s proposals stand in contrast to Cuomo’s performative progressivism. In Far Rockaway on Friday afternoon, Heather McGhee, outgoing president of the progressive advocacy organization Demos, praised Nixon’s platform for prioritizing the same people with whom Cuomo awkwardly claimed solidarity: “40 percent of the investments will go into low income communities, communities of color—communities on the front lines of climate change.”
As primary opponents, Nixon and Cuomo speak in similar terms to reflect the leftward-shifting priorities of voters in their party. Nixon in her Friday speech said such things as, “Our state belongs to all New Yorkers,” and, “It’s time to treat the earth as our shared home”—sounding not unlike Cuomo when he embraced a ban on hydraulic fracking in the wake of his last sharply competitive Democratic primary. The difference, however, is that after Cuomo’s last eight years in Albany, voters know an echo when they hear it. And they know that a future Governor Nixon might actually keep the promises her candidacy forces Cuomo to make.
