“Nobody likes him!” Hillary Clinton said of Bernie Sanders in remarks taped last year for a documentary. She didn’t mean it literally, of course. Lots of people clearly like Sanders, sometimes with a fervor that irks Clinton’s fellow Democrats. She meant nobody useful: “Nobody wants to work with him! He got nothing done.” Clinton, like most people who consider themselves canny political realists, seems to divide politicians into two groups: those who make big promises, and those who Get Things Done.

But what do the politicians who Get Things Done actually get done? In 2018, The New York Times’ editorial board said Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York “gets big things done when he’s determined.” While blunt about his flaws—he was a little corrupt, sure—the board made the case for reelecting Cuomo clearly: “When focused, [he] can be a nearly unstoppable force for progress.” That election not only won Cuomo a third term but also gave him a large—and even more liberal—Democratic majority in both the state Senate and Assembly. Getting things done would no longer require a Democratic governor’s “focus,” merely his pen. 2019 would become the “most productive legislative session in modern history,” in Cuomo’s own words. By June, the legislature had passed 935 bills.

As of December 16, the Times reported, 168 remained unsigned. Then came the vetoes. The legislature passed a bill aimed at helping workers recover stolen wages. Cuomo vetoed it. It passed a bill legalizing the electric bicycles commonly driven by New York City’s food delivery workers, who are currently the targets of an absurd police crackdown. Cuomo vetoed it. It passed a bill aimed at increasing wages for some apartment building workers. Cuomo vetoed it.

By January, he had vetoed 169 bills passed during that historically productive session. The governor promised to reintroduce some of these measures, in modified forms, in 2020. But the message was clear: The main thing Andrew Cuomo gets done is deciding what gets done and what doesn’t.

When politicians and pundits implore voters not to put their faith in candidates with more expansive visions, they frequently say they do so for the sake of the voters themselves. As Clinton put it in the documentary (reviewed on page 66 of this issue), “I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.” Later, speaking to Ellen DeGeneres, she elaborated on her problem with Sanders’s political style. “[I]f you promise the moon and you can’t deliver the moon, then that’s going to be one more indicator of how, you know, we just can’t trust each other.” Left unsaid was that Clinton had made a promise of her own in 2016: that her pragmatic sensibilities made her a safer electoral bet than Sanders. The general electorate would, we were assured, select the candidate offering judicious incrementalism over radical change. The November election saw that promise not just undelivered but spectacularly exploded, as voters in a few key states went with the man in the race who made the most outlandish promises of them all.