Michael Goodwin: Pushover Hochuls pile of failures and blunders are no match against Trump
It is dawning on more and more New Yorkers that Gov.Hochul is in over her head.
Halfway through her fourth year in office, she’s piling up a collection of failures and still making rookie blunders. The most fundamental one is that her policies are at odds with her stated goals. She says she wants safer streets and subways, but won’t fight the Legislature for big changes in the criminal justice system, which favors criminals over their victims. The same mismatch is clear with her economic goals.She says she wants to make New York more affordable, but keeps raising taxes and spending, which are driving the cost of living higher and higher. How does she not understand such basic things? The policy mismatch might be fixable if her politics were clever and first rate, but they are also incoherent.She’s seen as a pushover in Albany and is invisible in the city, raising questions about what exactly she does all day. Most important in the dog-eat-dog world of politics, nobody is afraid of her. Which brings us to the governor’s handling of congestion pricing, which is shaping up as the single biggest blunder of her troubled tenure. She’s so deep in the weeds that she apparently believes she can out-negotiate and outsmart President Trump, an attitude that is almost certain to fail and alienate him from the city that he loves and that desperately needs his help. He’s already the target of Dems in New York’s congressional delegations, with Sens.
Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand trying to stir up a lame resistance movement over his early actions, which happen to be very popular. Typical of the animus was the speech that Rep.Jerry Nadler gave in a House committee hearing Tuesday, where he railed against Trump’s plans to end waste and fraud in the bloated federal budget. “Elon Musk and his band of near-teenaged accomplices are undermining the rule of law and shredding the Constitution along the way,” Nadler said. This is nuts on stilts.
Trump...