Andrew Cuomo
Andrew Cuomo

Andrew Cuomo, who represents the old guard of the Democratic Party, never had a chance in his race against Queens assemblyman Zohran Mamdani for New York mayor.

As New Yorkers clamored for fresh blood to reinvigorate the party, Cuomo pitched his experience and his ability to swing into action on Day One of taking office. There would be no need for “on the job” training, said Cuomo in a dig at Mamdani. That fell on deaf ears.

Backed by Wall Street financiers, Cuomo siphoned potential votes down the stretch from the beret-wearing, cat-loving nutcase Curtis Sliwa. He received an apparently unwanted “endorsement” from Donald Trump, which is the kiss of death in NYC.

Cuomo, 67, should dust himself off and mull his political future. If he wants to remain in the political arena, an opportunity exists—albeit in DC.

The former Secretary of Housing should run for the Staten Island/Brooklyn Congressional seat held by Republican Nicole Malliotakis. The ineffective Trump suck-up Malliotakis, who represents my part of Brooklyn, would be toast against Cuomo.

Cuomo’s political skills play well in NYC’s most conservative borough. About a quarter of Staten Island’s population are Italian Americans, a plus for Cuomo.

In the race for mayor, Cuomo trounced Mamdani and Sliwa in Staten Island. He took 55.8 percent of the vote combined to the combined 44.2 percent tally for Mamdani and Sliwa. He also won the Brooklyn part of the district.

Malliotakis is NYC’s only Republican Member of Congress. The Democrats haven’t run a serious candidate against her since 2022 when she defeated her predecessor Max Rose in a re-run. Cuomo could cruise to victory.

Some may think that serving as representative of the Lost Borough would be a step down for the three-time Empire State Governor.

Perish that thought. John Quincy Adams, the nation’s 6th president, ran for Congress after Andrew Jackson beat him in 1828. He represented Massachusetts in the House for 17 years. If Congress was good enough for Quincy, it should be good enough for Andrew.

A tour in Congress would remove some of the sting that Cuomo must have felt after falling to the 34-year-old political neophyte.

Cheap shots… Donald Trump has called Zohran Mamdani a “Jew-hating” Communist lunatic who is going to lead New York City to economic and social disasters.

“Any Jewish person that votes for Zohran Mamdani, a proven and self professed JEW HATER, is a stupid person!!!," Trump wrote on Truth Social on Election Day.

Republican National Committee chair Joe Gruters joined the fray: “Democrats have officially handed New York City over to a self-proclaimed Communist, and hardworking families will be the ones paying the price.”

Name-calling is easy for Republicans. Figuring out why they lost the much-winnable governor seat in New Jersey takes some thought and listening to voters who are fed up with the high cost of living. Mamdani based his entire campaign on affordability.

Republican strategist Steve Bannon say Republicans must recognize the ability of Mamdani and his Working Families Party and Democratic Socialists of America to rally supporters.

"What this kid got was 5,000 people canvassing in Brooklyn by going door-to-door, the Working Families Party and the DSA. People should understand they’re the rising power organizationally,” Bannon told Politico. “Tonight should be a wake up call to the populist nationalist movement under President Trump, that these are very serious people, and they need to be addressed seriously, not dismissed, like so many of the pundits have done.”

Fun while it lasted… Tim Berners-Lee told the “FT Future of AI Summit" on Nov. 5 the rise of generative AI could doom the Internet advertising model.

He noted that large language models could eventually replace humans in reading the ‘Net.

If people then ask the LLM for information, it will spit out the data minus any accompanying advertising, “and the whole ad-based business model of the web begins to fall apart.”

The father of the world wide web said advertisers assume that human eyeballs are reading the webpages. Once that is no longer the case, web advertising will begin to wither away.

Note to WPP CEO Cindy Rose: Speed up that transformation to a more integrated system powered by data and AI before it is too late.

What are they, chopped liver? Gannett, which says it publishes 200 local newspapers, is changing its name to USA Today Co. Inc. on Nov. 18.

The reason: It wants to leverage the power of the newspaper that was launched in 1982, "that brought America together by promoting understanding and fostering unity with a focus on being the trusted digital platform that connects audiences across the country,” says Gannett’s announcement that sounds a tad highfalutin.

To me, USA Today’s claim to fame was its pre-Internet hotel/motel distribution model, which kept travelers up-to-date on sports and weather reports back home. That benefit is long gone, as is the notion of a national newspaper.

By adopting the name of its flagship, Gannett is better positioned to unload some of its newspaper properties. That roster includes the Des Moines Register, Detroit Free Press, Tennessean and the Florida Times-Union.

Gannett has some low opinion of that group—it doesn’t list their names in the annual 10-K filing.

It just lists the paper’s domestic markets (Cincinnati, Asbury Park, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Akron, Oklahoma City, Sarasota, Palm Beach, Phoenix, etc).

Gannett does list the names of its UK papers that include the Oxford Mail, Ipswich Star, The Bolton News, Glasgow Evening News and South West Wales Argus.