Whatever it was that Gov. Kathy Hochul did to get The New York Times on her case, you gotta believe she’s regretting it.
The newspaper is a formidable force, especially when it lays its agendas aside, and two recent cut-to-the-bone examinations of the Hochul administration shed damning light on the chaos now passing for governance in New York.
Not that the chaos is any secret.
Nor the reason for it, which would be Hochul herself.
She’s not up to the job, and that has been obvious since the day she took office.
But details matter, and these the Times has delivered:
- It reported Wednesday that administration policy has largely been in the hands of a Colorado-based wannabe political operative who couldn’t be more removed from the concerns of everyday New Yorkers if he moved to Mars.
- This followed by two weeks the news that Hochul & Co. secretly hired outside image-polishers to craft fundamental public policy — and to write two state-of-the-state messages — at a cost to taxpayers of more than $2 million.
Taken together, the stories help explain the clueless detachment that led Hochul to within a hair’s breadth of electoral defeat in November — and her obvious inability to govern coherently thereafter.
The hiring of outsiders to define policy and write speeches betrays a poverty of ideas, an absence of principles, a (probably warranted) lack of confidence in existing staff and casual contempt for taxpayers.
But this is not unprecedented in New York — and in context it doesn’t count for much.
The presence in Hochul’s orbit, however, of aspiring political power broker Adam C. Sullivan of Leadville, Colo., is altogether different.
Sullivan, according to the Times, is a consultant with a single significant client: Hochul.
He lives in very, very rural Colorado and occasionally drops by Albany to offer advice — most of it, upon examination, remarkably ill-advised.
Sullivan persuaded Hochul to select a Manhattan Democrat with a shady background — not to be redundant or anything — as her first lieutenant governor.
That was former state Sen. Brian Benjamin, who everybody save Sullivan and Hochul seemed to know was under federal investigation — and presently the fellow was forced to resign.
A rookie mistake, you say? New York should be so lucky.
Sullivan also was the bright light behind Hochul’s selection of Hector LaSalle as the state’s top judge — a nomination that led to a progressive rebellion in the state Senate and then to a humiliating confirmation defeat for the governor.
The aftershocks from that debacle continue.
And while the list of Sullivan-inspired miscalculations is long, at its top clearly is his successful insistence last year that abortion be elevated over crime as a Hochul campaign focus.
This nearly cost the governor her job, and its consequences also are still being felt.
Abortion, to be sure, moves votes in New York. But as many as crime? It’s doubtful.
Abortion achieved protected status in the Empire State in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade, when Nelson Rockefeller was governor.
Today only newcomers and naïfs fear being denied one, no matter what happens at the federal level.
Fear of crime in post-de Blasio New York, however, is both rational and near universal.
This may not have been obvious to Sullivan, who lives 1,880 miles from the city’s subway platforms, yet it certainly should have been clear to Hochul; she may be from Buffalo, but still.
And her refusal to focus on crime until the closing days of last year’s campaign took a toll: Running against a Donald Trump-aligned Republican with a tough-on-crime message in uber-progressive New York, she barely won.
This was obvious the day after Election Day.
Not so clear is the long-term effect of the misguided Sullivan-Hochul strategy.
That is, had the governor run strongly against the state’s progressive criminal-procedure laws, she could have built a mandate for moderating them.
She didn’t, and New York will continue to bleed as a result.
Also, a clever governor might then have parlayed that mandate into support for mainstream policies generally, especially in public education.
But Kathy Hochul is not clever, so no dice there either.
Now the question is whether she’s educable — whether she will learn from her mistakes.
Ditching Adam Sullivan would be a hopeful sign, but what are the odds on that?
New York historically has been blessed with good governors and cursed with bad ones — but it’s never before been governed by an apparition.
It’s going to be an experience.
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