Well, someone already is, and he’ll probably keep his job. But if Andrew Cuomo (class of ’79) manages to lose, New York’s Jesuit university will still be represented. His Democratic primary opponent Zephyr Teachout is on the faculty of Fordham’s law school, while Republican challenger Rob Astorino is a 1989 graduate.
Fordham has noted the connection (“We’re pleased, if not surprised that our alumni are represented in the governor’s race,” says Fordham spokesman Robert Howe), and a group of students had already tried to raise support for a debate among the candidates on campus. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out—though even the candidates are learning, firsthand, how aloof, to put it politely, Cuomo can be: just watch the brush-off Teachout gets from the governor at the weekend’s Labor Day parade in the video below. Not very collegial!
Ducking debates isn’t all that uncommon a maneuver for incumbents, though Cuomo’s defense—that they’re “a disservice to democracy”—is new. One could reasonably counter that the governor’s unilateral, premature dissolution of a commission he formed to investigate political corruption performs a similar disservice, whether or not that investigation might have led in the direction of the governor (which it did, and now there is a federal investigation into possible obstruction of justice). It was a move that cost Cuomo the presumptive endorsement of the New York Times and helped win Teachout the outright backing of, among others, the state chapters of the National Organization for Women and the Sierra Club, the Public Employees Federation, and The Nation—which compares her progressivism favorably to Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s. Even if, as likely, Cuomo wins Tuesday’s primary, that progressivism could still find representation in Albany via Teachout’s running mate Tim Wu (McGill ‘95, alas): the lieutenant governor is elected separately in New York, and Cuomo’s choice, former congresswoman Kathy Hochul, is not quite the lock that he is. Regardless of what happens, writes John Cassidy, Cuomo will emerge “a diminished figure." Even a respectable finish for Teachout, The Nation says, “could illustrate the strength of the progressive base and keep the proposals that Teachout and Wu have been fighting for alive.”
Oh yes – Astorino. He won elective office even before graduating Fordham, taking a board of education seat in suburban Mount Pleasant, New York, and he’s held a number of other offices since, including, currently, Westchester County Executive. But did you know he was the first program director at the Catholic Channel on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio, where he also hosted a weekly radio show from St. Patrick’s Cathedral with Cardinal Edward Egan and, later, Timothy Dolan? "I think it's a great opportunity not just for the archdiocese but for the Catholic Church as a whole to reach out to people across the country with a message, and have a two-way conversation," Astorino said in a 2006 interview about the Catholic Channel. If (let’s say when) Cuomo and Astorino meet in the general, perhaps the governor will by then have reconsidered what constitutes a disservice to democracy and agree to have a two-way conversation in the form of a debate, if not several. It’s the least he could do for a fellow alum, not to mention fellow New Yorkers.
