Hochul, an Ineffective Political Chameleon

Back in 2014, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D-N.Y., chose Kathy Hochul as his lieutenant governor. He did so not because she was a prominent Democrat, or a public policy expert, or a great orator.

No, he chose her because she was from Western New York, an economically depressed region, whose voters believed they were being ignored by the state government.

Hochul’s resume was thin. She served on the Hamburg Town Board, as Erie County clerk, and spent 19 months in the U.S. House of Representatives after winning a special election in 2011.

Oddly enough, when running for office in the Buffalo area, she positioned herself as a right-of-center candidate.

She even accepted the New York Conservative Party’s nomination in one of her races.

While county clerk, Hochul led the opposition to then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s plan to permit undocumented immigrants to secure driver’s licenses.

She also accepted the NRA endorsement in her losing race for Congress in 2012.

But her "conservative" past is long behind her.

Hochul, a political chameleon, has reinvented herself as a leftist, claiming she has "grown."

Since assuming the office of governor in 2021, Hochul has also proven to be a weak and incompetent governor.

She lacks the ability or drive to use the immense power of her office to tame a reckless state Legislature dominated by radical leftists.

Hochul has surrendered, time and again, to tax and spend legislators and greedy public employee unions.

The result: spending is up by an astonishing 35% since the 2019 pre-COVID-19 $175 billion spending plan.

She has permitted spending to grow at an unsustainable rate despite an anemic economy that grew by only 0.7% last year versus 2.5% nationally.

Then there are her ideological blunders.

Hochul continues to support ludicrous "sanctuary city" laws and has stiffed aid to New York City to fund the cost of that policy — which is hitting $4 billion annually.

Unable to come to grips with the migrant invasion, municipalities in general and New York City in particular, are racked with pain. The Big Apple’s tax base, its economy, its tourist business, its public schools, and its quality of life, are declining thanks to Hochul and her leftist captors.

Here are two unpleasant facts:

• The City’s office building vacancies have doubled since COVID, from 8% to 16% in Manhattan. Owners are petitioning the City to lower commercial real estate taxes or are defaulting on loans to banks.
• Tourism is down. "Through May," Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute has noted, "annual attendance was 12.3 million, nearly 17% below the 2018-2019 level of 14.8 million. Revenue is down 16% to $1.5 billion."

The reasons for this dismal data: First and foremost is Hochul’s failure to fix the lax bail laws that triggered the surge in crime and disorder.

The increase of crime on the streets and in public transportation facilities has frightened office workers who prefer to work at home.

This phenomenon has caused employers to downsize office space as leases expire, thus sparking the city’s commercial real estate crisis.

Next, Hochul’s mishandling of the illegal migrant crisis has discouraged tourists from visiting New York.

Hotels that have traditionally catered to working-class tourists are now catering to illegal migrants. Recent reports have indicated that with 10,000 hotel rooms occupied by migrants, the average cost of a hotel room is now north of $300 per day.

Over 120 hotel owners have signed on to government deals that pay $250 a room per diem for migrants and guarantee 100% occupancy.

This has led to a noticeable decline in the City’s quality of life, with migrants hanging out on hotel sidewalks, gangs wandering streets committing crimes.

On June 3, for example, an illegal who had been the City’s guest at a LaGuardia Airport Hotel, allegedly shot two police officers during a chase.

As for cultural issues, Hochul is completely off the rails.

The governor, a "baptized" Catholic, is obsessed with the abortion issue even though the state has the most egregious abortion laws in the nation.

Abortions are permitted even at the moment of a baby’s birth.

In a 2022 press conference, Hochul blurted out that Republicans and pro-lifers should "… just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong. Ok? Get out of town. Because you don’t represent our values."

I guess she wants the Archbishop of New York, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, to leave town. (At a meeting with the New York Catholic bishops led by Cardinal Dolan, the governor called them "Neanderthals" because of their opposition to killing unborn children.)

In a tirade on CNN in late May, Hochul referred to the 10,000 Trump supporters, who gathered peacefully at a rally in the Bronx, as "clowns." In other words, she is writing off as deplorables the 3.2 million New Yorkers who cast their ballots for Trump in 2022.

Gov. Kathy Hochul is a political lightweight.

Her inability to manage the staggering cost of government and destructive quality of life policies is destroying the Empire State fiscally, economically, and culturally.

George J. Marlin, a former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is the author of "The American Catholic Voter: Two Hundred Years of Political Impact," and "Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy." Read George J. Marlin's Reports — More Here.