Ironically, Andrew Cuomo and Trump have a lot in common
Claude Solnik
Long Island Business News
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Ronkonkoma, NY 11779-7348
Home > LI Confidential > Stop scratching on holidays
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo took to the stage at his third inauguration to express his horror at President Trump, which is pretty funny when you think about it: The politician Trump most resembles is . . . Andrew Cuomo.
Cuomo attacked Trump on New Year’s Day for sowing discord. “America’s only threat is from within,” he said. “It is the growing division amongst us.” But wasn’t it Cuomo who, in 2015, said that pro-life and pro-gun conservatives were “extreme” and “have no place in the state of New York”?
He is their governor too.
Thirty-two percent of New Yorkers identify as pro-life. A majority of upstate voters in 2015 opposed new gun-control restrictions. Do these people “have no place in the state of New York”? And just who in this case was responsible for widening the divisions between us but this state’s governor? Doesn’t this make it sound like Trump was taking lessons in how to divide us from . . . Cuomo?
Trump doesn’t like being investigated, as we know. Neither did Cuomo when he was an official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the 1990s.
He hated the independence of his department’s inspector general, Susan Gaffney, especially after she had the temerity to examine a program under his direct purview for playing favorites with Democratic constituencies. Cuomo pursued her with a Javert-like intensity for years.
Trump surrounds himself with yes-men of dubious character. So it is with Cuomo. Trump’s onetime campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was convicted of money laundering. Cuomo’s right-hand man, Joseph Percoco, was convicted in March of soliciting bribes and committing honest-services fraud.
Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, is going to jail for three years due in part to lying about a real estate project in Moscow that never got off the ground. A Cuomo administration real estate project dubbed the “Buffalo Billion” was designed in part to push state money to big Cuomo donors; its handpicked-by-Cuomo director, Alain Kaloyeros, was convicted of wire fraud and
conspiracy in July and will be going to jail for three-plus years.
conspiracy in July and will be going to jail for three-plus years.
When Cuomo attacks Trump, in other words, it’s the world’s biggest pot calling the world’s biggest kettle black. Perhaps this will be Cuomo’s implicit pitch to Democratic voters, should he decide to run for president: Set a Trump to catch a Trump.
But in his speech Monday night, Cuomo also sounded a surprisingly interesting note in his denunciation of Trump’s divisiveness, a message that might resonate with voters in 2020 whether it is Cuomo who attempts it or someone else in his party. That message is “unify and grow.”
Cuomo: “Our official state seal proclaims us the ‘Great State of New York.’ The question before us is how do we define great? Now in New York we define great by the size of one’s heart and the depth of one’s character. . . Our credo is not only ‘I love New York,’ but ‘New York loves you.’ That’s what New York is about. That we reject the path of divide and conquer and we accept the path that says unify and grow.”
I was struck by this paragraph, because Trump is betting his presidency on the idea that polarizing the electorate is the path to success. In so doing, he may have opened up a major space for Democrats on the theme of national unity and growth, not as a reality but as an ideal to be pursued.
Even more, “growth” has long been a Republican mantra to describe the economic policies the GOP wishes to pursue. But the word “growth” has many connotations, including the idea that the nation itself can and has grown not only economically but also morally.
Setting up a contrast between Trump’s America, in which you are either with the president or against him, and an America that will encompass all views and all kinds and all approaches might be the kind of message that will pull those suburban voters who abandoned the GOP in 2018 to continue moving in the Democratic direction in 2020.
Forget for a moment whether the message honestly describes what Cuomo or any other Democrat might actually do in office. After all, Trump isn’t exactly making America great again — not unless you count Wednesday’s retroactive endorsement of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan a mark of American greatness rather than what it was: a moment of moral and historical illiteracy almost unparalleled in White House history.
Wednesday, January 2, 2019
Sunday, April 21, 2019
| Track Code | Track Name | Entry | Scratch | 1st Post ET | 1st Post Local | Time Zone | Stakes Race(s) | Stakes Grade | T.V. Indicator |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GG | GOLDEN GATE FIELDS | 48 | 24 | 3:45 PM | 12:45 PM | PDT | |||
| LS | LONE STAR PARK | 72 | 0 | 3:35 PM | 2:35 PM | CDT | |||
| SA | SANTA ANITA PARK | 72 | 24 | 3:30 PM | 12:30 PM | PDT | |||
| SUN | SUNLAND PARK | 168 | 0 | 2:30 PM | 12:30 PM | MDT | |||
| WO | WOODBINE | 72 | 48 | 1:00 PM |
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