Cuomo Continues to Enjoy His Untouchable Moment

Andrew Cuomo came within a hair of missing out on President Obama's now famous public nod the attorney general in Troy on Monday because he was insistent on taking his daughters to school that morning. Good thing Cuomo made it to his unofficial canonization by Obama or else his assistant may have had no use for the anecdote. Instead, it was shared with both local tabloids in their respective Cuomo coming of age bios in this Sunday's papers. When Cuomo learned they were running late for the big Obama greeting, apparently the state's most popular Democrat said, "Oh no. I’m dropping the kids off at school. It’s what I do. And if we miss the president, we miss the president."

Both papers focus on what a long road Cuomo has traveled on to turn around his career from the respective nicknames highlighted—"Prince of Darkness" by the Post and "Horror on the Hudson" by the News. They track his trajectory from beginnings that paint him as a genuine dirtbag, rumored to be the idea man behind the "Vote for Cuomo, not the homo” posters in his father's mayoral campaign against Ed Koch in 1977 to the man that Koch now openly praises by saying, "He doesn't hold press conferences to seek credit for what he's doing." As for the mudslinging from a political lifetime ago, Koch says, "I've called him on it, and he's apologized for not having done enough to stop it."

Word is that Cuomo is so confident by this point that he hasn't "thought about Paterson for a long time" and has been keeping a close eye on Rudy Giuliani for months in preparation for a possible 2010 matchup. The Post's piece on his "makeunder" reads like an eerie dig, desperately in search for leftover dirt on the attorney general. The best they can do is many vague, anonymous quotes with justification for printing them by claiming that Cuomo’s very good “at not leaving fingerprints.”