I mean, it shouldn’t be meaningless:
New York had had enough corruption, [Andrew Cuomo] said, and he was going to put a stop to it. “Job 1 is going to be to clean up Albany,” he said, “and make the government work for the people.”
Mr. Cuomo became governor on that platform and [the NYT made a silly claim here], but he failed to perform Job 1. The state government remains as subservient to big money as ever, and Mr. Cuomo resisted and even shut down opportunities to fix it. Because he broke his most important promise, we have decided not to make an endorsement for the Democratic primary on Sept. 9.
…but it is, for the basic and simple reason that Andrew Cuomo will win the Democratic nomination for Governor of New York; and once that happens the endorsement of him by the NYT in the general election will be as inevitable as the sunrise. Put another way, Glenn Thrush is precisely right, here:
This seems like a cop out, and precious. Hold your nose and pull the lever like everybody else. http://t.co/z6h0iNHPsr
— Glenn Thrush (@GlennThrush) August 27, 2014
The New York Times will support Andrew Cuomo; but some vestigial sense of shame is apparently still rattling around in their editorial board’s collective head, so nobody at that paper really wants to face the fact that they’re reliable shills and propagandists for the Democratic party. So they’ve come up with this wheeze to make the NYT feel better about itself. Shame that they’ve never read Shakespeare’s Scottish play:
Act II, Scene 3
Knocking within. Enter a Porter.
Porter: Here’s a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key. [Knocking within.] Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there, i’ the name of Beelzebub? Here’s a farmer, that hanged himself on the expectation of plenty: come in time; have napkins enow about you; here you’ll sweat for’t. [Knocking within.] Knock, knock! Who’s there, in th’other devil’s name?Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come in, equivocator.
We’ve never really been fond of people who can’t make up their mind; or more, accurately, ones that have made up their mind, but want to get credited for doing it the other way.
Moe Lane