With just two weeks to go before New York’s Democratic primary, two-term incumbent governor Andrew Cuomo debated his challenger from the left, actress-activist Cynthia Nixon, in their first and only face-off. It started at 5 p.m. Wednesday afternoon on a closed stage at Hofstra University and, though televised two hours later, aired live nowhere.
“He’ll have to watch his personality,” said Columbia professor and political scientist Ester Fuchs in an interview shortly before the debate began. “He’ll have to stay away from being snarky. She’s going to bait him,” Fuchs predicted. Given Nixon’s inexperience, “That’s her only strategy.”
Asked, in the afternoon’s first question, to defend her capacity to govern, Nixon took aim at Cuomo’s pettiest reflexes: “I’m not an Albany insider, like Governor Cuomo, but I think that experience doesn’t mean that much if you’re not actually good at governing.” But he didn’t take the bait.
Much like the delayed timing of its televised airing, the way the candidates sat opposite each other on the stage was planned for Cuomo’s advantage, Fuchs said, given the likelihood that he might otherwise “get in her face.” Even seated, and displayed on an awkward split screen for the viewer at home, his body language seemed aggressive: Nixon’s team counted how many times he wagged his finger at her.
Their exchange on the subject of the MTA—the deterioration of the subway during Cuomo’s tenure being one of his gravest weaknesses, and therefore the Nixon campaign’s greatest strength—was the hour’s most obnoxious. Explication of the state’s role in city transit devolved into bickering over who’d lied about what and who’d interrupted whom.
He went after her for incorporating her assets—as actors and other well-paid creatives commonly do—saying rather cornily, “There’s only one corporate Democrat on this stage!” There were no questions, meanwhile, about education policy, which is Nixon’s one area of substantial experience.
And on Albany’s infamous corruption, another low point for the governor given his closest staffer’s recent conviction, Cuomo managed to telegraph personal dismay.
Projecting a semblance of humanity is one sort of win. It was a strong performance for political novice Nixon’s first public debate, but there was nothing in Cuomo’s performance to alienate a voter not already in Nixon’s camp.
Cuomo—apart from a few minor missteps (he said “millions” instead of “billions” in answer to a budget question)—didn’t stumble. He’s trouncing Nixon in every poll, and he has vastly more experience in public office: He learned to operate Albany at his father’s knee, served in Bill Clinton’s Cabinet, and last agreed to a public debate the year—2006—that he was elected attorney general of New York. His showing up at all on Wednesday was a superfluous hat-tip to democracy, a last-ditch play for style points. Because he will, in all probability, win a third term as governor. And sharing a stage with Cynthia Nixon only clarifies his well-known shortcomings. She projects personal warmth and powerful sincerity. On this stage, for one brief hour, she had the edge.
