Michael Shnayerson is a longtime contributing editor to Vanity Fair and the author or co-author of five books. This article has been excerpted from The Contender: Andrew Cuomo, a Biography (Twelve), which comes out March 31, 2015.

Close up, Andrew Cuomo had his flaws. But as a newcomer to the national stage, he looked a big winner—and he was. In just two years, the New York governor had whipped the country’s worst-run capital into shape, pared its $10 billion deficit, balanced two on-time budgets in a row and passed marriage equality—here was a contender indeed.

It was late 2012, and Hillary Clinton, her tour of duty as secretary of state just concluded, seemed the inevitable front-runner for 2016, the one Democratic candidate Andrew wouldn’t take on.


But there were suddenly health issues. Exhausted after four years of shuttle diplomacy, Clinton had incurred a stomach virus that left her dehydrated, so much so that one night in mid-December 2012, she collapsed at home, alone. When she finally got to a hospital, her doctors diagnosed a concussion and kept a close watch on it. On Sunday, December 30, 2012, they detected a blood clot in a vein called the right transverse sinus, behind her right ear, between the brain and the skull. Had the clot gone untreated, it might have caused a stroke or brain hemorrhage. Three days later, Hillary was released from New York-Presbyterian Hospital flanked by her husband and daughter, looking tired but relieved.

Inevitably, questions about her health would reemerge, but for now, Hillary at 65 remained the most experienced prospect in either party. Polls projected her trouncing all comers, from Vice President Joe Biden to the headline-grabbing governors of New Jersey and New York. And that, for Andrew, made for a maddening dilemma. Until Hillary declared herself in or out of the race, big-money Democratic donors would sit on their hands. “It’s really a crazy situation,” one Cuomo supporter admitted. “He’s totally trapped by her.”

***

When Andrew Cuomo and his wife Kerry Kennedy moved to Washington in 1993, they settled at Hickory Hill, the Kennedy family estate in McLean, Virginia, where Kerry had grown up amid constant sports, roughhousing, and bombing down pool slides with her ten siblings. They would be welcome there, Kerry’s mother, Ethel, assured them, until they found a house of their own.

Early every morning, Andrew donned a black leather jacket and helmet and rode his Harley-Davidson motorcycle from Hickory Hill to the hulking cement bunker that was the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where President Bill Clinton had appointed him assistant secretary for Community Planning and Development (CPD) and where he was determined to make a mark on a languishing agency.

If Andrew couldn’t change CPD overnight, he could at least set a new tone—and that he did. He got to his office early, and then, just like his father, pulled out his shoeshine kit and buff-shined his black wingtips. If one of his civil service staffers arrived for a meeting with shoes dull or scuffed, Andrew was not above pulling out the kit to shine theirs too.

Also like his father, then New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, Andrew was a list maker, setting priorities by hand in a black three-ring binder and holding staff meetings to parcel them out, then strike them when they were done.

“Andrew was going 150 miles an hour,” recalled a staffer. “Anytime someone said, ‘Let’s do that next year,’ he would say, ‘Let’s do it right now.’ If you tried to slow him down or dissuade him, you were no good.”

The old-timers understood that Andrew had to shake things up. They had just one complaint. “You were never given the chance to show you were as energetic and innovative as he is,” one remarked. “You never had that opportunity. You had a stigma placed on you from the beginning. Personally he’s very arrogant, and stereotypes people.”

Andrew didn’t deny the arrogance rap; he just explained it. “You come in, you tell the truth—you’re right: the place stinks,” he said. “The civil servants say, ‘Whoa, you’re criticizing us.’ That’s right—because it’s true. I’m not blaming you, civil servant, it was the manager, it was Congress that passed the laws that put you in place. But if it sounds like a criticism, that’s because it is. And by the way, everyone out there knows it doesn’t work. You may not like hearing it, but everybody knows. Actually, I’m getting you something: it’s called credibility. And now maybe we can do something with it.”

***

Along with jump-starting CPD, Andrew remained his father’s close adviser and so, just weeks into his new Washington life, he found himself serving as a go-between for Mario Cuomo and the White House on the startling, unexpected question of whether President Clinton would name the governor of New York as the next U.S. Supreme Court justice.

Justice Byron R. White, whose appointment by Kennedy had raised hopes of a staunch liberal tenure but led instead to a more centrist voice on the Court, announced his retirement in March 1993. Mario was at the top of a short list of prospects to replace him. And so ensued a flurry of calls between the president’s senior policy adviser, George Stephanopoulos, and Andrew, acting as his father’s surrogate.

“Andrew wanted his father to do it,” a close Cuomo adviser from that time recalled. “He was encouraging the [Clinton] administration, saying, ‘My father will not reject you.’” But the White House remained cautious.

It turns out that Mario didn’t want the seat, and very well might not have wanted it from the start. According to one of the governor’s close advisers, Andrew had wanted it for him—and had kept on lobbying on his behalf, telling Stephanopoulos that he represented his father’s views when in fact he was out there alone, pushing his father’s nomination and hoping that when the president called, his father would say yes after all.

Andrew’s own motives, the close adviser felt, were at least as complex as his father’s. “There are those who believe that Andrew very much wanted his father elevated to the Supreme Court because that would put him out of the way.” In or out of elected office, the presence of Mario Cuomo in New York would be disruptive to the son hoping to run for governor or senator himself. But immured instead in the U.S. Supreme Court Building? Perfect, for both father and son.

And Andrew’s star was rising fast. When his big project at HUD, empowerment zones, or EZs, poor areas around the country that would be given big block grants to pull them up, was passed into law, Andrew embarked on a rigorous travel schedule around the country, talking up the zones and offering local leaders help in applying for them. The leaders were impressed, not just by the talk of EZs, but by Andrew’s advance team. It was larger than any they’d ever seen for an assistant secretary of HUD. When Andrew himself arrived, he was flanked by four or five staffers with two-way radios, and security agents with earbuds. It was like the president had arrived. Except that at 35, Andrew Cuomo still looked like an overgrown kid.

That December, he and Kerry were invited to the White House for dinner and a screening of the movie Philadelphia. Time magazine ranked them as one of Washington’s power couples of the new administration, adding impishly, “Not much fun but great last names.”

Andrew now socialized with the president himself. When a columnist for the Wall Street Journal wrote an admiring piece about Andrew, the president dashed off a note of congratulation; Andrew put it up in his office. The president sent him a clipped-out crossword puzzle that he’d completed in ink, with “Cuomo” as one of the answers. That went up on the wall too, along with a page from the final Housing Act of 1994—authorizing the EZs—signed by the president.

For Andrew, this was more than about getting in his ultimate boss’s good graces. The president his father had scoffed at not long ago was dizzyingly charismatic. He was at least as well-read as Mario, and as passionate in his politics but also, like Mario, very pragmatic. Later, Andrew would speak of Clinton as one of his three mentors, along with his father and—quite seriously—his high school government teacher. What others saw was Clinton supplanting Mario as Andrew’s number one mentor—becoming in effect a new father figure. Clinton was only 11 years older than Andrew but he was, after all, the president. Age was beside the point.

Awed as he was, Andrew was aware of the craft behind the charm. To friends, he would demonstrate the Clinton touch in all its variants: holding a shoulder, gripping an arm, a forearm, taking a hand or patting a knee. Andrew, as one reporter noted, seemed to understand both the lure of the Clinton touch and the humor of it. Clinton, Andrew said, knew every nuance of what he was doing. “The effect of touching you there,” he demonstrated to the reporter, “or touching you here.” Implicit in the shtick was an awareness that Clinton was always, on some level, acting.

The gravitational pull was palpable. Back in his office, Andrew frequently quoted Clinton to his staffers. He still revered his father—he always would—but he sometimes seemed a bit impatient with the aging three-term governor who’d botched his chances for higher office. At an event in 1994 that all three men attended, Mario was scheduled to speak before the president. Andrew scribbled a note to his father, sternly telling Mario not to go on for too long. Acting shocked, Mario passed the note to the president. Clinton grinned, and scrawled on it, “Clinton’s 8th Law. Blood is thicker than water. But the paycheck is thicker than blood.” Andrew promptly framed the note and added it to his office wall.

In the fall of 1994, Mario ran for a fourth term as governor of New York—to his son’s dismay. Voters were tired of the Cuomo brand, Andrew told his father. Mario himself was tired. Better to step aside, let a fresh face run, and win the enduring gratitude of the state Democratic Party, which might prove useful, both father and son knew, for a future Andrew candidacy.

Mario listened, but seemed not to hear. He traveled the state grudgingly, and voters seemed to feel it. If Mario had convinced himself that he could win a fourth term, he was disabused of that notion. For two days after his loss, he remained in the mansion. Finally in a rueful interview he acknowledged the impact of voter discontent. “It’s very difficult to say what the people wanted,” he said. “Maybe the people just didn’t like Mario Cuomo.”

An era was over, and Mario knew it. From now on, the only Cuomo in public life would be his son.

***

Eight years later, in 2002, after a turn as HUD secretary, Andrew was crisscrossing New York state once again, this time trying to prop up his own sagging gubernatorial campaign.

In July, New York’s senior senator, Democrat Chuck Schumer, formally endorsed Cuomo’s primary opponent Carl McCall, joining a majority of other prominent state Democrats. A decade later, when they found themselves targeted by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, some of those Democrats would wonder what they had done to deserve his enmity. Had they not supported him for governor in 2010? They had. But not in 2002. Eric Schneiderman, then a New York state senator, later the state attorney general? Tom DiNapoli, then a state assemblyman, later the state comptroller? He would not forget the names on that list. Not a single one.

The Clintons were, of course, exempt from retribution. They were too powerful. But Andrew could only have seethed at their silence as the campaign wore on. The Clintons, as skilled as Andrew in the art of off-the-record leaks, let slip that McCall, who was African-American, in their opinion would fare better against incumbent Republican Gov. George Pataki than Andrew, delivering key blocs of blacks and union members, perhaps winning the governorship. A primary victory by Cuomo, on the other hand, would only exacerbate racial tensions. “She doesn’t need any of that rubbing off on her—she knows that,” said one of Hillary’s advisers. “She’s better off if it’s Carl, and so’s the party.” In Clinton world, as in Cuomo world, comments like that didn’t come out by chance, though for the record, Hillary insisted she was neutral.

Cuomo had maintained a lead in most polls all year, despite an April gaffe in which he said that incumbent Pataki had not been “a leader” in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. In early July, he led by as many as 15 points. But in August his numbers plummeted, giving McCall a 16-point lead. The shadow race was emerging as the primary neared. Voters were paying more attention, and in Andrew they just didn’t like what they saw.

In the end, nothing was enough to save the flailing campaign. On the eve of the state convention, Andrew withdrew. Standing beside him was ex-president Clinton, coaxed into dignifying the occasion with his presence. “Today is a day you should be very, very proud of, Andrew,” the president declared to a hastily gathered crowd that included Kerry Kennedy, Andrew’s parents, and his sister Maria, all in the front row. This was the right decision, Clinton intoned, good for the party, and Andrew would live to fight another day. The only political career that was over, the former president joked, was his own.

Tomorrow was another day, but this day, a New York Times reporter declared, marked for Andrew, who had started his campaign with such confidence and clout, nothing less than “a spectacular humiliation.”

***

Andrew Cuomo did, in fact and however improbably, come back to live another day. After a stint as attorney general of New York, Cuomo entered the governor’s race again in 2010. This time he won, and embarked on his gubernatorial career as forcefully as he had launched himself into HUD years before.

With the recognition of his early successes in office came, inevitably, talk of 2016. The Washington Post, in a 2012 rundown of the country’s top 10 governors, put Andrew at number one. Not only was Cuomo the most popular governor in the country, the Post noted, “but he’s also doing it in a tough state where politics is cut-throat and the budgeting process is a minefield. ... At this point, it’s hard not to call him an early favorite for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.” Time put him on its new list of the hundred most influential people in the world.

As 2014 arrived and reelection loomed, Cuomo’s favorability rating remained high—about 63 percent—but it was floating gently downward. A poll of Albany lawmakers and politicos would have ranked him much lower, for the truth was that Andrew had worn out his welcome on both sides of the aisle. To more than a few, he wasn’t a Democrat at all, but instead some Darth Vader standing atop both parties with a boot on each one’s neck.

Andrew had his own word for that. “Bipartisan.” And a case might be made that he had done exactly what a strong-willed, bipartisan governor should have done. His wins were significant, his budgets on time. If all sides resented the dealmaker, wasn’t that proof that the dealmaker was making good deals?

It hardly seemed fair, after all his smart moves, for Andrew to be blocked by the one person—the one politician in America—who could stop him cold.

In June 2014, Hard Choices, the 656-page memoir of Hillary Clinton’s years as secretary of state, rolled out with global fanfare but to tepid reviews. Initially brisk sales plummeted by week two. On her book tour, Hillary offered teasing or coy answers to the overarching question of whether she would run. Some close friends swore she would, others that she might not. As always when she came back into the limelight, her favorability ratings fell: for all those who admired her, a lot of Americans still had contradictory feelings about the Clintons, and the prospect of another Clinton presidency—a twofer, with Bill also in residence—seemed possibly one too many. A cottage industry in anti-Hillary books did a lively business as summer unfolded, with one outselling her own book. As inexorable as Hillary for President seemed, there were hints in her book tour interviews that she might just startle the world and choose a private life over a public one.

About all of this, Andrew, as powerful and wily as he was, could do nothing. He had spent his life working up to this moment, plotting each next step. Of his generation of American politicians, he had the single best résumé for a White House run: the time put in at each next station, the solid achievements scored. Yet there was Hillary, blocking his path, the one politician he couldn’t fight.

Now, even as Andrew waited on Hillary, there was a new threat coming up in his rearview mirror. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren had paid none of the dues that Andrew had. She hadn’t started by stuffing envelopes and doing advance work. She hadn’t spent her twenties helping the homeless. She hadn’t gone to the White House to shake a moribund housing agency back to life. She hadn’t suffered the pain of running for office and losing in the sorriest way. Yet there she was, edging up on him: the new hope for his party’s liberal wing.

A year is a lifetime in politics. That much was true. The path to 2016 might yet come clear for Andrew Cuomo, and if it did, he would be ready: no Mario-like hand-wringing for him. If it didn’t, a lifetime of striving might be stopped right there, though a governor of such rapacious ambition would not go gently into that good night.

***

The verdict came within minutes of the polls closing on Tuesday, November 4, 2014: Andrew had won his second term. Not by the 64 percent his father had mustered in 1986, not close: more like 54 percent. For an incumbent who had raised $47 million and spent much of that battling a rival with minimal name recognition, it was a C-plus performance at best.

Still, it was victory, and for Andrew Mark Cuomo, it came with a poignant moment. In a packed banquet room in Midtown Manhattan, he took his father’s hand and held it aloft, a boxer’s sign of triumph. As all could see, Mario was fragile, his once-powerful frame diminished, the tentacles of age encircling him. One of Andrew’s advisers asked the governor-elect if it felt like a last hurrah. “Yeah,” Andrew said quietly. “It’s all right.” By which, the adviser knew, Andrew meant it was more than all right. Mario was seeing the dynasty he’d built get carried on. Andrew, the loyal but unintellectual son, had proven his mettle once again.

For Andrew, the second term would be very different from—and more challenging than—the first. The state was in better fiscal shape, with all that that entailed. But the governor had worn out his welcome. From across the political spectrum, there was censure of the ill-fated Moreland commission, Cuomo’s own commission to investigate corruption in New York, which he had disbanded and which is currently under federal review. “What Cuomo is walking into is a seething, resentful mess,” declared Richard Brodsky, the former assemblyman and fellow at a left-leaning think tank. “But he has the political skills to repeat the thing that everyone credits him for, which is making the government function.”

Could that yet be Andrew’s springboard to national office? “Every presidential election is a reaction to the style of the guy in the Oval Office,” suggested one of Andrew’s advisers. “If you have gridlock Obama, then the person who will replace him, Republican or Democrat, is the anti-Obama. Is it Hillary? Or could it be Andrew?” Andrew was a long shot, the adviser conceded. “But he’s positioned himself. He can’t contest Hillary for the left, but he can position himself as someone who can deal with the left and the right. He’s viable in this cycle if people collectively say we can’t put someone forward who’s not a strongly moderate candidate.

“So you’ll see Cuomo trying to move the party to the center going forward,” the adviser suggested. “He can stake out his position and then embrace Hillary. If she wins, it makes sense. If she loses, it makes sense. I think his positioning is Clintonian. The irony is: who is more Clintonian, Hillary or Andrew?”

For Andrew, a unified Republican U.S. Congress could be far more beneficial than a divided one. If the party actually governed, instead of obstructed, it might be strong for 2016. Hillary as the Democrat might lose. Four years of a Republican presidency might set Andrew up as the perfect alternative: the seasoned, centrist, three-term governor with all those on-time budgets behind him. At the picture-perfect presidential age of 63.

There was just that nagging question of character. Andrew was commanding, pragmatic, hardworking, personally incorruptible (so far), fierce in defense of his policies—and willing to compromise when absolutely necessary. In short, a strong leader. He was also vengeful, bullying, mean-spirited, conniving, not always true to his word, and very secretive.

In his first years as governor, Andrew had often drawn comparisons to President Lyndon Johnson for his charm and cunning in getting bills passed. Now another president was sometimes evoked. Rex Smith, editor in chief of the Albany Times Union, had written that glowing editorial upon Andrew’s inauguration, wondering if a tough, strong, no-nonsense leader was exactly what Albany needed after its years of chaos. Now he was struck by similarities between Andrew and Richard Nixon—ones that had only grown with Andrew’s handling of the Moreland commission, and the investigation that hung over his head.

“Hmm,” Smith wrote. “Do you know anybody else in public life who is a compulsive manipulator? Whose impressive roster of accomplishments, achieved through his prodigious political skills, is at risk of being overshadowed just now by questions involving ethics and credibility?” Moreland was no Watergate, Smith conceded. “But like the crisis that felled Richard Nixon,” he wrote, “the political peril confronting Andrew Cuomo is rooted in the very behavior that enabled him to achieve success.”

Unlike Nixon, Andrew had another chance: a whole new term in which to achieve great things. He made a first significant decision before the term even began: on December 17, 2014, flanked by state health officials, he issued a statewide, permanent ban on fracking. Antifracking activists were as stunned as the oil and natural gas industries. The governor had hidden for nearly two years behind an ongoing health study, and pushed the hard choice past election day, but in the end he’d come out flatly against fracking. Unproven as the health risks might still be, the list was just too long: birth defects, respiratory illnesses, air and water pollution from benzene, formaldehyde, and more. With that one stroke, much of the state’s Democratic Party came back to his fold. They might not like Andrew Cuomo any more than they had the day before, but this, as Vice President Joe Biden had whispered to Obama when health care passed, was fucking big. Nationally, the fracking ban would weigh on other governors grappling with the issue. It also made Andrew, once more, a serious contender for 2016. Or 2020.