Clinton’s Endorsement of Cuomo Is Grotesque but Predictable
Bill Clinton’s last-minute endorsement of Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s mayoral race is all too fitting: both men represent the corporate Democratic establishment, opposed by socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani, that has abandoned the working class.
Andrew Cuomo and Bill Clinton at a campaign event on October 30, 2014, in New York City. (Andrew Burton / Getty Images)
The Democratic mayoral primary in New York has included some shocking twists and turns. City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim democratic socialist who relentlessly focuses on bread-and-butter issues but also refuses to bend to the demands of centrist respectability on issues like Palestine, went from being the longest of long shots to being neck and neck with former governor Andrew Cuomo. As New Yorkers head to cast their votes today, multiple recent polls have Mamdani ahead of Cuomo.
One development that’s not particularly surprising, although it is grotesquely revealing, is that Cuomo scored a last-minute endorsement from Bill Clinton. The president who once infamously declared that “the era of big government is over” praised the governor who once withheld COVID vaccines from New York City as a “fighter” who “knows how to make government work.” The president who repeatedly attacked the rights of criminal defendants, first with the infamous 1994 Crime Bill and then with the even more civil liberties–shredding Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, said that Cuomo would “stand up and protect the people of this city” at a time when “basic right are under assault.”
Given that Cuomo is trying to stage a comeback four years after he had to leave office due to multiple credible accusations of sexual harassment, you might be forgiven for thinking he wouldn’t want the public backing of a former president who faced similar accusations from several different women and who was notoriously linked to the late Jeffrey Epstein. But the mainstream media and the Democratic establishment are more than willing to give centrist politicians a pass about such things to stop democratic socialists from taking office.
Even aside from the two men’s personal failings (and the accusations of serious crimes), this endorsement says everything about the choice New York voters face between the Mamdani and Cuomo visions of their city.
Clinton’s Record
Clinton positioned himself, going back to his time as governor of Arkansas in the 1980s, as a “New Democrat.” The difference between the old and new kings, he often said, was that while he was “socially progressive,” he was “fiscally conservative.” When he ran for president in 1992, he promised to “end welfare as we know it.”
Clinton kept this promise, signing a “welfare reform” bill in 1996 that replaced the New Deal–era Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with the far more restrictive Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). Cuts to government spending are often justified by the need to cut down on “waste, fraud, and abuse,” but in this case the change opened up whole new vistas for waste, fraud, and abuse.
Much of the money that would have been directly spent on aid to struggling families was now broken up into block grants for states, which they had wide discretion about how to use. Mississippi, for example, notoriously used some of this cash to pay former Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre to give speeches and to build a volleyball stadium for his daughter’s team at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Clinton’s “reform” of the federal welfare system also came with Dickensian work requirements, described in Christopher Hitchens’s book No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton:
Those who have been thus “trimmed” from the welfare rolls have often done no more than disappear into a twilight zone of casual employment, uninsured illness, intermittent education for their children, and unsafe or temporary accommodation. Only thus — by their disappearance from society — can they be counted as a “success story” by ambitious governors, and used in order to qualify tightfisted states for “caseload-reduction credits” from the federal government.
The women among them, not infrequently pressed for sexual favors as the price of the ticket, can be asked at random about the number of toothbrushes found in the trailer, and are required by law to name the overnight guest or the father of the child if asked. Failure or refusal to name the father can lead to termination of “benefits” or (even better word) “entitlements.” We were once told from the bought-and-sold Oval Office itself, that “even presidents are entitled to privacy”: it seems now that only presidents and their wealthy backers can claim this entitlement.
At the same time, Clinton was championing free trade deals that accelerated deindustrialization and crippled the bargaining power of major labor unions like the United Auto Workers. Even as he filled his speeches with pablum about a glorious “bridge to the twenty-first century,” his administration’s unmistakable message to poor and working-class Americans was that they were on their own.
Clinton, Trump, and Mamdani
As long as business was booming in the 1990s, the economic effect of all of this was somewhat muted in much of the country. Incarceration soared, cities like Flint and Detroit suffered, and even unionized workers who were lucky enough to keep their jobs had to accept increasingly bitter concessions, but “the economy” seemed good for many other Americans. Meanwhile, though, Clinton’s deregulation of the finance industry led to the massive consolidation of banks, making it easier for bankers to take the reckless gambles that would crash the economy several years later (before the banks themselves were bailed out on the grounds that they’d grown “too big to fail”).
The long-term effect of all of this was to supercharge economic precarity and anxiety and send an unmistakable message to working-class people in regions like the upper Midwestern “rustbelt” and Appalachia that the Democratic Party couldn’t care less what happened to them. Any liberal voters in New York who hate Donald Trump but are tempted to rank Cuomo anywhere on their ballots might want to pause to consider that these are the exact conditions in which Trump’s right-wing pseudopopulism was able to thrive. What does Clinton’s endorsement say about what they can expect from Cuomo if he becomes mayor?
Mamdani’s proposals are, in some ways, relatively modest. He wants to make public buses fare-free, which is to say that he wants New York City to do something many other cities around the world have quite successfully done, and which has produced good results in a New York City pilot program. He wants to experiment with some municipally owned grocery stores. He wants rent stabilization for already rent-controlled apartments. His has a solid program, but a relatively modest one. What he offers is a spark of hope for a city that would be a bit more affordable and a bit more oriented toward the needs of working-class New Yorkers than anything recent decades have led residents to expect.
That’s one option. The other is more of status quo and more of the kind of Democratic politics that created the conditions for Trump’s rise to power. For anyone who was alive in the 1990s and remembers half of what the Clinton administration did, the former president’s endorsement of Cuomo is all the reason New Yorkers need to vote for Zohran Mamdani.