The following appeared on Monday, December 14, 2020 on The Island Now’s website:

For people who give books as Christmas presents to political junkie friends, here are my 2020 gift book picks:

Last Subway: The Long Wait for the Next Train in New York City by Philip Mark Plotch

For readers interested in understanding New York’s sad transit history, this is the book to crack open. In readable prose, Plotch exposes politicians of every stripe who made great promises and failed to deliver on upgrading and expanding the region’s mass transportation system. Last Subway focuses on the greatest boondoggle of all: the Second Avenue subway extension. What was to be the “most modern futuristic subway in the world,” faced delays for decades, soaring cost overruns, and project cutbacks. The first three stations, finally completed in 2017 and opened to much fanfare by Gov. Cuomo, cost an astounding $4.6 billion. Plotch points out that the 1.5-mile subway line “cost more than four times as much as new subway lines in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, Paris and Tokyo.”

The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser

Baker was one lucky guy. A friendship nurtured on the tennis courts of the Houston Country Club with George H.W. Bush catapulted him into the inner sanctum of Washington power centers. He would go on to manage five Republican presidential campaigns between 1976 and 1992, serve as Reagan’s chief of staff and Treasury secretary, and as Bush’s secretary of state. In 2000, he led the Florida recount legal team for George W. Bush.

Like other Texas political icons—Speaker Sam Rayburn and President Lyndon Johnson—Baker understood power and was not afraid to use it. He was ruthless in protecting his political turf and did not hesitate to throw friends and foes under the bus.

Baker was a political survivor, but an unlikeable one. He was an “avatar of pragmatism over purity and deal making over division, a lost art in today’s fractured nation.”

The Crisis of Liberalism: Prelude to Trump by Fred Siegel

Dr. Siegel, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a City Journal contributing editor, is the nation’s top social scientist. His 2014 work, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class, is must reading for anyone interested in understanding our political milieu.

The Crisis of Liberalism, is a collection of Siegel’s most trenchant essays focusing on the 1960s liberal crack-up and the left’s growing disdain for America’s working-class.

“These essays,” the distinguished historian Vincent Cannato has observed, “are deeply relevant to understanding the turbulence and divisions that plague our nation today.”

The Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War by Catherine Grace Katz

This is a pleasant, behind the scenes, narrative of the famous Yalta conference in February 1945 that created the roadmap for the post-war world. While much has been written on the last Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin meeting, this book is different. It centers on the three women—Anna Roosevelt, Sarah Churchill and Catherine Harriman, daughter of U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman—who accompanied their fathers. Daughters of Yalta describes how these politically astute women aided and protected their fathers during the grueling conference.

Trump’s Democrats by Jon A. Shields and Stephanie Muravchik

Since the late 1960s, working-class New Deal Democrats, feeling unwanted by their party’s elitist leadership, have been shifting their political allegiance to Republicans. This shift was most evident in 2016 when millions of rust-belt Democrats cast the votes that put Trump over the top in the Electoral College. While Trump lost in 2020, these “deplorables”—as Hillary Clinton called them — stuck with Trump.

In Trump’s Democrats, the authors, who spent time interviewing folks in small communities populated by white working-class citizens, explain why these voters have viewed Trump as the best president since John F. Kennedy. And they reveal that, unlike most cosmopolitan Democrats, their “primary political allegiances are to their town or country — not racial identity.”

Mario Cuomo: The Myth and the Man by George J. Marlin

Please pardon a bit of self-promotion: Readers interested in understanding why among all the 56 men who have served as New York governors, Mario Cuomo was the most complicated, endearing, brilliant, pugilistic, and exasperating, should pick up a copy of my new book.

Happy reading in 2021!

The following appeared on Monday, November 30, 2020 on The Island Now’s website:

Here is my take on the political winners and losers in this year’s game of New York politics.

Winners:

Peter King: As a member of Congress for 28 years, King has served his nation and his constituents with distinction. He proved that being civil in the political arena pays off. A public official since he was elected to the Hempstead Town Council in 1971, King should be the model for politicians of every stripe.

Tom DiNapoli: The state comptroller has used his audit powers effectively to expose government incompetence, waste and corruption. He determined that the Empire State Development Corporation squandered hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in high-technology projects that have not produced intended results. He revealed the state’s Medicaid leviathan made more than $700 million in unnecessary costs and overpayments. And he has been alerting state and local governments to the devastating impact the economic shutdown is having on their operating budgets.

Laura Curran: In fiscal 2019, the county executive achieved the first balanced budget according to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in a long time. In 2020, she has worked effectively with the Nassau Interim Finance Board to address the fiscal crisis caused by the governor’s shutdown of the economy.

Lee Zeldin: Contrary to Democratic Party expectations, Zeldin was re-elected in a landslide, receiving 61 percent of the vote. The voters rewarded him because as The Almanac of American Politics has pointed out, “he was responsive to local sentiments, including his opposition to Republican tax cuts that capped the deduction for state and local taxes employed by his affluent and highly taxed constituents.”

Andrew Garbarino: The Republican state assemblyman defied the pundits and kept Peter King’s congressional seat in the red column. Hopefully, Garbarino’s predecessor serves as his model when he gets to Washington in January.

Losers:

Andrew Cuomo: The governor refuses to admit that he made a reckless policy decision that cost the lives of over 6,000 seniors in nursing homes throughout the state. His book promoting his leadership skills during the pandemic is an insult to the memory of the nursing home victims and their grieving families.

Bill de Blasio: The city’s lazy and incompetent mayor has been unable to come to grips with the gravity of the issues New Yorkers are grappling with. If Gov. Cuomo does not reactivate the Financial Control Board to seize control of the city’s finances, he will be guilty of permitting the city, under the insouciant leadership of de Blasio, to continue on the treadmill to fiscal, economic and social oblivion.

Rudy Giuliani: His ludicrous “election fraud” antics on national television destroyed his reputation as “America’s Mayor.” Going forward, he should limit his appearances to his favorite watering hole, The Club Macanudo, located on Manhattan’s fashionable Upper East Side.

Jack Schnirman: Nassau’s county’s comptroller, a self-proclaimed “fiscal watchdog,” appears to have been asleep in the dog house. When he left his post as Long Beach City manager, he didn’t figure out he was overpaid $53,000 in severance pay. How absurd is that for someone who claims he knows the buck? The DA’s probe justifiably concluded that Schnirman and other Long Beach officials were guilty of “egregious incompetence.” Another blunder: the county’s inspector general reported in November that “a fraud scam against the Nassau’s comptroller’s office found controls were ‘not effective’ in preventing a scheme in which $2.1 million in payments were approved for transfer to a fraudster’s bank account.”

Richard Nicolello: The longtime county legislator, who voted for budgets in the 1990s that brought the county to the edge of bankruptcy and subsequently voted for the creation of NIFA to rescue it, is now trying to prevent NIFA from helping the county save millions of dollars in debt interest payments. His reason for stonewalling: NIFA members had been mean to a Republican county executive. He’s referring to the convicted felon and fiscal bungler Ed Mangano. How sad is that excuse for inaction?

Kevin Law: Suffolk County’s MTA board member came up with the dopiest idea of the year: to address the transportation agency’s projected $16 billion deficit through 2024, he called for cutting fares in 2021 “to generate more revenues by increasing ridership than if we increase fares and continued the depressed ridership.” Apparently, Law fails to grasp that LIRR ridership is down over 75 percent because people are working remotely and safely from home with their employer’s blessing. Hence, dropping the fare a buck or two will not convince these mostly white-collar workers to become dashing commuters. In addition, cutting fares will be a slap in the face to first responders and essential workers who have risked their lives taking public transportation throughout the pandemic while paying full fares.