HANDY DANDY ANDY

Vlad "The Impaler" Putin, barbarian of all the Russias and would-be emperor, has just done a gigantic favor for New York's not-very-liberal governor.  He has made him relevant at last.  Or so it appears to me.

Hillary Clinton's much-hyped ascent had stymied Andrew Cuomo's presidential hopes to the extent that he had to seem not to be running.  He joked in a phone interview not long ago that he couldn't hear a question about him becoming a candidate and that the caller was "breaking up".  He has not even the skeleton of a national organization, and he hasn't been visiting other states.  For as long as New York and the country are giving Hillary the benefit of the doubt, he's the forgotten man.

But Hillary has just taken another hit, along with the revelations about things she has said privately.  It was she who pushed our attempt to get along with Putin.  She wasn't wrong to do that, but her doing it now makes her look "soft" on Russia and naively optimistic.

When dealing with a sociopath like Putin, you have to do two things at once.  One is to effectively block what he tries to do; the other is to let him save face and give him a means of backing down.  This was precisely our policy toward the Soviet Union, and it succeeded in keeping the peace.

Because Mr. Obama hasn't been bellicose toward Putin in the Ukraine crisis and has been wisely keeping his moves under wraps, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina just accused him of being "weak" and "indecisive".  To continue the Republican campaign to destroy the president's authority in an hour of crisis when the country has to have some confidence in him is one inch from committing treason.   Yet I haven't heard a single Democrat say anything like that.  That's what's wrong with the Democratic party.

This kind of thing is why it would be a good idea for somebody military or highly accomplished in business to be a candidate in '16.  Getting somebody who unarguably can play hardball into it may be necessary just because the Repubs are always going to portray the Dems as wimps if they can.

And this brings us back to Andy Cuomo.  Even before Putin made his reactive move after losing his foothold in Ukraine, Cuomo was positioning himself as an implacable warrior on behalf of preserving our fast-eroding social and economic gains.  He wasn't talking about foreign affairs, but his tough-guy moves believably can extend to that sphere by implication.

The likeliest Repub nominee for New York governor this year is Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino, who straddles tea party values and the presumed credibility of a conventional office-holder in an important job.  Astorino is running.  And Cuomo is running at him, playing offense rather than defense.

Liberal bloggers have made it known that they'll take down a Cuomo presidential run if they can.  As long as he didn't seem to be after the White House, they held back.  Now he'll have to answer them and drown them out.

Several weeks ago he made what may have seemed an impromptu remark about there being no room in New York for extremists who are anti-abortion, anti-gays, etc.  This created a big stir, but he didn't back down or soften it.

He reportedly followed that up a few days ago in a meeting with top state Republicans, warning them that if they ran a social conservative like Astorino against him, he would, in effect, tear the guy's arm off and beat him to death with it.  That is, he'd go all-out on social issues, about which New Yorkers generally agree with him.

The Repubs might hope to talk about other things; but because Astorino holds to those right-wing stands, Cuomo is saying they won't be able to do it.  He'll make such a candidate radioactive.

If the Repubs had it more together, they might be able to come up with an attractive businessman who was kind of a muttering moderate on social issues.  Then they'd lose the backing of the Conservative party, but they could get a decent vote by attracting some independents.  But Astorino is their course of least resistance.

Cuomo figures to win big anyhow.  Running up the score by breathing fire on social issues won't hurt him in the state and will make him seem a champion of established social liberalism nationally.  That's not to say that he's ready to do anything about the emergence of our oligarchy or the disappearance of our middle class. On those things he'll play it safe like Hillary.  But he'll be seen as aggressive, a gut-fighter.

Assuming Hillary runs, he won't find it hard to come up with an excuse for opposing her.  Meanwhile, he can afford to wait while she bleeds out, thumping his manly chest all the while.

As with Hillary, he's a hard person to warm up to.  It looks to me as though the I-just-don't-like-the-guy factor that dogged Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon may work against him.  In the Northeast the tepidness of his progressivism is a problem for him, while in the rest of the country he'll be mistakenly seen as very progressive as well as being an "ethnic".  It might have helped him if his ancestry had been Spanish rather than Italian.  So, even apart from the Hillary factor, he has much to overcome.

But he now has a road ahead.  By playing rough this year, he can be the General Patton of sellout centrism and not just another governor.