Governor Cuomo has a new TV commercial, praising himself for supporting the $15 minimum wage. Make no mistake, this is a good thing. But it's not an accurate thing. In fact, NYC workers will not have that wage until the end of 2018, and workers in the rest of the state won't see it until July 1, 2021.

The restaurant industry has chafed at these decisions. “We continue to say that we think it’s unfair that they singled out a single segment of our industry,” Melissa Fleischut, the executive director of the New York State Restaurant Association, said.

They have a point, actually. The raise applies only to fast food workers in chains with 30 or more outlets.  So if the Donald opens 29 Trumpburger outlets, too bad for the folks who work there. And if you're working at Target, well, too bad for you. Perhaps this will cause more competition, or perhaps the best people will be working at burger joints. No more will you ask for extra pickles and find olives instead.

But Cuomo is disingenuous as always. He isn't getting $15 anywhere for years, and he isn't getting it for everyone. Worse, Cuomo is a miserable representative of working people. If he cared about us, he would not be at war with teachers and taking millions of dollars from enemies of public education. He would not be talking about taking control of schools away from communities, particularly poorer communities whose children earn low test scores for the apparently unforgivable offense of being impoverished.

In fact, if Cuomo were to be a champion for working people, he wouldn't have mustered the audacity to compare himself to his dad--Mario Cuomo took a principled stand against capital punishment, a stance that likely cost him his job, while Andrew took one against the millionaire's tax. While it's a pretty nice thing Andy did for his wealthy contributors, it hardly helped working people, who would have to cover the difference. In fact, the same Andy Cuomo who boldly fought for the 15 bucks an hour some people may get in a few years, if this thing stands,  came into office as a Democrat wanting to go after unions.

For those of you unfamiliar with history, and for all the flaws in UFT, NYSUT, and AFT leadership, unions negotiate better wages for working people. The more this happens, the more other employers have to compete. Union membership has been declining since Saint Ronald Reagan came into office and broke PATCO, the only union that supported him. And if you don't think Andy Cuomo has a knife as big as Ronald Reagan's to stick in our collective back, you haven't been paying attention.

This is Andy Cuomo's big liberal calling card, his attempt to present himself as a champion for working people. The only working person Andy Cuomo is concerned with is Andy Cuomo, and the only reason he does any work at all is for the advancement and preservation of Andy Cuomo.

Sadly, this commercial may persuade some New Yorkers of his good intentions. And should that happen, it will only go to show that there's a sucker born every minute.

One of the brilliant ideas of Revive NYSUT was the hashtag #CluelessCuomo. I guess name-calling feels good. Certainly there was an awful lot of it directed at President George W. Bush. He was a buffoon, a moron, and he would never accomplish anything. Yet here we sit, in the still-smoldering debris of his education programs, and Barack Obama, no one's fool, has placed them on steroids and made them considerably worse.

Cuomo is no fool. He's ruthless, calculated and cunning. He has his goals and will stop at nothing to achieve them. He grew up in the shadow of his father Mario and watched him fall, likely as not a victim of his own principles and conscience. Andrew lets neither principle nor conscience get in his way, ever.

We can certainly argue that Cuomo's policies will not improve public education. Indeed, merit pay has been around for over a hundred years, and it has never worked anywhere. Sure, it feels good to say some teachers suck and shouldn't get a raise. The whole teacher-bashing thing has wide appeal, what with racism not half as chic as it once was. Hateful morons can't even indulge in gay-bashing anymore, so they need a target. Why not us? Works for Andrew Cuomo. Anything for a vote.

It's entirely possible Cuomo doesn't know that there is no scientific basis for the value-added nonsense he wishes to inflict on us. That appears to be the assumption of Revive NYSUT leaders. But really, that's of no importance whatsoever. Whether or not Andrew Cuomo knows his ideas are baseless doesn't matter one way or the other. The fact is he gets millions from donors who favor this stuff, and he couldn't care less if this stuff works for schools. It works for Andrew Cuomo, and that is the only thing in this universe that matters to him.

Cuomo's dad Mario, may he rest in peace, took a principled stand against capital punishment. It costs more to give someone the death penalty than life imprisonment. Most developed countries have discarded it as barbarism. If we make a mistake, like we did in this case, and the prisoner has already been executed, what do we do? Issue a posthumous apology?

Andrew, on the other hand, took a principled stand against a millionaire's tax. Perish forbid that anyone making tons of cash should have to fork over a few bucks to support public schools. That wasted money could have ended up in the Cuomo campaign coffers (and probably did, too). You won't see Andy risking his career on anything so trivial as people being killed for no reason.

Andy has no problem getting elected with 53% of the vote and demanding that districts who wish to support their children in school get 60% to do so. He has no problem withholding money from districts with a GEA that his unconscionable tax cap makes it impossible to make up for. He'll stand with demagogue Eva Moskowitz as she drags her kids like little pawns to Albany on a school day for a political rally. If you or I did that, we'd be facing dismissal if not prison time.

So you can call Cuomo many things. You can fight him in many ways. But if you opt for empty name-calling, it's abundantly clear someone is clueless.

That someone is not Andrew Cuomo.

With the passing of Mario Cuomo, we're left to reflect on his legacy. I voted for him every chance I got, and had no reservations whatsoever about it. He's well-known for his principled opposition to the death penalty, which he vetoed every chance he got. It's likely that's what lost him his bid for a fourth term against George Pataki. New Yorkers had also grown weary of his Hamlet on the Hudson routine, in which he endlessly pondered whether or not the time was right to run for President. But there were always reasons to support him. 

 Nowhere was this more evident than in his 1984 keynote address to the Democratic Convention. At the time, the White House was occupied by Ronald Reagan, who supported union in Poland but actively contributed toward its downfall in the US. Reagan, you may recall, fired the air traffic controllers, the only union possessing the peculiar lack of foresight it took to have supported him in 1980. He also instituted a GOP signature initiative, tax cuts for the rich, with the rest of us hanging on and hoping for the best. Reagan was happy with this, riding around his ranch with a cowboy hat. Mario had another vision:

...there's another city; there's another part to the shining the city; the part where some people can't pay their mortgages, and most young people can't afford one; where students can't afford the education they need, and middle-class parents watch the dreams they hold for their children evaporate.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? This is a theme we heard Bill de Blasio use in his quest to become mayor--it's a theme many lifelong democrats take to heart. This is why a lot of us fight corporate education reform. We want our children and students to have the same or, hopefully, better opportunities that we did. Of course, in that, we have formidable adversaries.

Sadly, in the case of Andrew Cuomo, the apple has fallen miles away from the tree. Doubtless it's very difficult to live in the shadow of such a legendary figure, particularly when it's your father. And surely Andrew has gone to great lengths to rebrand himself. That's particularly evident when we look at another section of Mario's 1984 speech.

We believe we must be the family of America, recognizing that at the heart of the matter we are bound one to another, that the problems of a retired school teacher in Duluth are our problems; that the future of the child -- that the future of the child in Buffalo is our future...

Andrew's been vocal on both these issues. Much as we'd like to, we can't ignore his most recent remark on teacher pensions:

Albany has been too concerned with protecting the pension rights of teachers and not enough with the future of students. #NYGov2015
— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) January 1, 2015

How's that retired teacher in Duluth feeling about Andy right now? The New York Post can't contain its delight at the prospect of placing her on that cat food diet so Murdoch can pull in a few more nickels. It doesn't matter that NY is not in that sort of trouble, and it doesn't matter that the retirement system is not unique to teachers.

As for Buffalo, Andy's using it as a rationale to double down on the junk science used to rate teachers. If Buffalo schoolchildren aren't doing well on standardized tests, it must be the fault of teachers. It has nothing to do with rampant poverty or lack of industry. And of course those things are not Andy's problem. While Mario would have fretted over such things, Andy couldn't care less. 

While Mario Cuomo took a principled stand against the death penalty, son Andrew opts for a principled stand against a millionaire's tax used to fund public schools. The contrast couldn't be clearer.

Alas, our governor is an unprincipled, opportunistic, self-serving, morally bankrupt empty suit whose only priority is his own selfish ambition. He does not answer to we, the people, but rather to his wealthy contributors. He brands himself a "student lobbyist," but lobbies only for schools controlled by Eva Moskowitz. We, the UFT and NYSUT, made a huge error in failing to endorse his opponents. Clearly Andy has no appreciation whatsoever for our neutrality.

The only redeeming factor here is the fact that he's no longer the juggernaut he was four years ago. It's pretty evident the Emperor has no clothes. Yet when NYSUT and UFT leadership had a choice between Andrew's agenda and Mario's (embodied in the form of one Zephyr Teachout), it chose not only to stand on the sidelines, but also to actively scuttle Teachout's WFP nomination.

Perhaps we can credit our activism, as well as Revive NYSUT's questionable promises, for the fact that they sat this one out. But we have to do more. If we respect the legacy of Mario Cuomo, it behooves us all to respect and enable his vision, a vision that respects and empowers not only us, but also our students and their communities.