Michael Shnayerson - The Contender: Andrew Cuomo, a Biography

Politics is a game of human beings. It all comes down to hate and revenge.

Mel Miller, former Speaker of the New York State Assembly

The governor was having a bad week.

It was early June 2011, near the end of Andrew Mark Cuomos first session as governor of New York State. Everything had gone rightuntil now. He had done all the things that governors try and often fail to do, especially in the great but broken state of New York. Balancing the budget. Cutting spending. Capping taxes. Keeping the unions at bay. Both parties were awed, compliant, and not a little afraid. The governor would never have more political capital than right now, and he knew it. Best to spend it while he could, a lesson learned from his father. Before the end of the session, he declared, he would pass a same-sex marriage bill.

This was a huge and possibly foolhardy gamble. Nationally, the issue was teetering. A handful of states had made same-sex marriage legal, but othersMinnesota, Rhode Island, New Jerseyhad blocked it, and California was mired in a legal battle. A prudent governor might wait before entering the fray, and there was cause to call Cuomo prudent, even cynically so. Yet on marriage, as his small circle of top advisers had taken to calling it, that prudence was balanced by something else, something that made Andrew Cuomo a figure to watch: a flash of passion.

As the fifty-sixth governor of New York explained to the fifty-second governor, his father, Mario, all that other stuff was operational. It was a word Andrew had used in his twenties, when he was his fathers top aide and did whatever it took to make the wheels of government turn, including brutal firings and generally instilling fear. Now, as governor, he had to do as his father had done: set a lofty goal and lead people to it. Same-sex marriage is at the heart of leadership and progressive government, he told his father. I have to do this.

The bad news that week came from Dean Skelos, the Senate Republican leader. The Republicans ruled the Senate, and Skelos would be the bills gatekeeper to the Senate floor. Skelos wouldnt block a same-sex marriage bill, he declared with an unctuous play at bipartisanship, not if the Democrats were united behind it. But they were not. Of the thirty Democrats in the sixty-two-member Senate, at least four were on record as opposing same-sex marriage. Not a single Republican was for it. Why should Skelos send a bill to the floor that would obviously fail? It would be, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, dj vu all over again.

That was hard to argue. Twice before, under Cuomos predecessors, a bill for same-sex marriage had gone to the larger, Democratic-controlled Assembly, sailing through, only to be blocked by the Republican Senate. Despite months of lobbying by same-sex marriage advocates, the Senate, when it finally voted on the bill in December 2009, had shot it down 2438, with all the Republicans and a handful of conservative Democrats piling on.

The Democrats in Albanys castlelike capitol building were convinced marriage had no chance. So were the capitol hill reporters, who filed their stories from narrow pigeonholes on the buildings third floor, with its walls that seemed to be closing in, like those in The Pit and the Pendulum. The wealthy libertarian Wall Streeters who had written six-figure checks to launch a lobbying effort for marriage, and the legions of activists who had swarmed the nineteenth-century capitols gloomy, high-vaulted corridors in search of wavering legislators week after week, held out little hope. Only one person in Albany seemed quietly confident that same-sex marriage would pass.

From April, when the campaign began in earnest, the governor held tight control over its many contingents. There would be no infighting among gay marriage groups and their patrons. The governors top aide, Steve Cohen, would rule. Cohen was a former U.S. attorney who had startled the press corps by declaring that the new administration would have two speeds: get along and kill. In private he could be a genial fellow. But when it came to promulgating his bosss agenda, there was no one tougher. Together, he and the governor changed the name of the cause. Same-sex marriage was now marriage equality, with its canny appeal to justice and freedom, airbrushing away any hint of sexuality. On his own, the Catholic governor did what he could to calm his church and the lawmakers loyal to it. No same-sex marriages would have to be conducted in Catholic churches; the new bill would make that clear. With that, the governor got to work manning the phones from his second-floor office in the executive chamber.

To see Cuomo wrangling votes, coaxing one minute and threatening the next, was to see politics at its most elemental: carrot and stick. On the path from hatchet man for his father, to activist for the homeless, to a seat in President Clintons cabinet, to New York attorney general, and now as the most powerful political leader in the state, Andrew Cuomo had made more than his share of enemies. He was brash, aggressive, often ruthless. But of all those who loathed him, none would deny him this: at the game of hardball, which was what this was, there was no one better. Now he was using those skills in the service of a cause he had come to believe in. Privately, on marriage, Cuomo figured he was a vote away, maybe two.

Of the four Democrats on record against marriage equality, Rubn Daz Sr. of the Bronx was a hopeless cause. He was a Pentecostal minister, unbudgeable from his view that marriage was an institution established by God between a man and a woman. As far as Skelos knew, the other three Dems were no votes too. Hence his magnanimity.