When boxers suit up for a heavyweight title bout, the fight is almost never over in the first round.
But that’s essentially what has happened in the heavyweight matchup between Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo over how to pay for expanding prekindergarten.
While de Blasio won the mayoral election in a walk, and earned his landslide with a bold platform of taxing the rich to expand pre-K, his heady victory obscured a stubborn fact: The power to decide this issue doesn’t reside in Gracie Mansion. It resides in Albany.
And the chief power in Albany — that would be the governor — has a vastly different political imperative than does de Blasio.
De Blasio wants to appeal to the city’s voters and progressives across the country, two groups that embrace his tax-the-rich plan.
But 2014 is an election year for Cuomo, one in which he hopes to improve on his healthy margin of victory four years ago.
This margin won’t be determined by the one-third of New York State residents who reside in the city, who already support him overwhelmingly, or by the one-third of voters who live upstate.
It will hinge on the one-third of voters who call affluent Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester and Rockland counties home. For them, raising taxes is a less-palatable sell.
That’s why the solution that Cuomo offered, to use existing state revenues to fund the pre-K expansion, was tactically brilliant. It allowed him to embrace the noble and progressive goal of pre-K for every New York child and also enabled him to avoid the potential electoral pitfall, in his mind, of raising taxes in an election year.
Once he announced his plan — to the Daily News — the match essentially was over.
At this point, de Blasio should stop spending political capital on a losing fight, declare victory by taking Cuomo up on his offer of a blank check, and focus on running the city.
If the governor doesn’t live up to his funding agreement, de Blasio can return to Albany and demand approval of his plan.
For those who still have their money on de Blasio in this heavyweight matchup, I suggest moving it over to Cuomo — fast.
Lis Smith, who was spokeswoman for Bill de Blasio‘s mayoral campaign and his mayoral transition, is a Democratic strategist.
