Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, explained his approach to the Legislature as we flew in a state plane from Albany to Westchester County. At fifty-seven, Cuomo still has an athletic build, and, at two hundred pounds distributed over a six-foot-one-inch frame, he fits into an airline seat with some difficulty. It was mid-December, and he was on his way to Manhattan to continue a vigil. His father, former Governor Mario Cuomo, was at his apartment on the East Side, with end-stage heart disease. Mario Cuomo defined his three terms as governor with oratory; Andrew Cuomo has sought to build his reputation in a different way. He made clear that his primary inspiration when it came to dealing with legislators was Bill Clinton, not his father. During Clinton’s second term, Cuomo served in his Cabinet, as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. “I was watching, and they were impeaching the guy, and he was still there every day, asking them how they were doing, trying to make deals,” Cuomo recalled, his voice bearing the hard consonants of Queens, where he grew up. “My job is to get to yes,” he said. “If I don’t make a deal, I get nothing done. If I get nothing done, I am a failure. If the objective is to make a nice speech, it means nothing.”

Because New York State’s government had long been controlled by “three men in a room”—the Governor; Sheldon Silver, the Democratic Speaker of the Assembly; and Dean Skelos, the Republican Majority Leader of the Senate—Cuomo often found occasion to praise the other two. “I’m very big on giving other people credit,” he told me. “It’s the whole collegial thing. That’s how I get what I get done done.” Most recently, in his State of the State address, on January 21st, Cuomo said that he would soon be going on a trade mission to Mexico, and he displayed a PowerPoint slide of himself, Skelos, and Silver, all wearing sombreros. “We are going to be our own version of the three amigos!” Cuomo declared, to appreciative laughter from Skelos and Silver, who were seated on the stage beside him. A perfunctory shout-out like this would ordinarily draw little notice, except that, the following morning, federal agents led Silver off in handcuffs.

Silver was charged in a baroque scheme to exploit his office for personal gain. According to the prosecutor’s complaint, he arranged for state funding of a research laboratory at Columbia University for victims of an asbestos-related cancer. The director of the lab referred his patients to Silver’s personal-injury law firm, which, in turn, filed lawsuits on their behalf. From this and a related arrangement, Silver is said to have netted more than four million dollars. (Silver has denied wrongdoing, though he did step down as speaker; the lab director and the law firm have not been charged.)

Cuomo’s solicitude for Silver and others in the Legislature was longstanding. In the summer of 2013, Cuomo created what became known as the Moreland Commission, a bipartisan group of leading citizens, who were to spend up to eighteen months investigating public corruption in the state. The commission’s inquiries focussed in particular on whether the outside business activities of state legislators should be subject to tighter regulation. By early 2014, Silver and his colleagues had come to loathe the commission, and went to court to thwart its inquiries. Around the same time, Cuomo was seeking to pass his annual budget, and he hoped to do that on schedule. So, just nine months after Cuomo created the commission, he abruptly shut it down. Silver passed Cuomo’s budget; Cuomo rid Silver of the meddlesome commission.

On the day after Silver’s arrest, I met with Cuomo in his New York City office, on Third Avenue. I asked him about the widespread contention that the charges against Silver showed that Cuomo should have let the Moreland investigation run its course.

“They’re exactly wrong,” Cuomo said. “What happened on the Moreland Commission is they subpoenaed the outside info of the Senate and the Assembly, in a fairly aggressive way. The Senate and the Assembly join together, the Republicans and the Democrats, in a motion to quash the subpoenas. And they are successful in the lower court. And we’re stuck for, like, four months.”

Closing down Moreland, in Cuomo’s view, broke the logjam. After the shutdown, the Legislature passed modest ethics reform, which increased penalties for bribery and established a pilot program for public financing in the next state comptroller’s race. Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney in Manhattan, demanded the Moreland files and used them to make the case against Silver and, perhaps, others. “We get the legislation I wanted in the first place,” Cuomo told me. “Moreland takes the same cases and the same subpoenas and hands them to local D.A.s and to Preet.” Cuomo disclaims any responsibility for Silver’s possible misdeeds. “If Anthony Weiner shows his private parts, do you blame Obama? These are criminal acts of individual legislators. What would you have me do?”

Each step in Cuomo’s analysis makes a kind of tactical sense. But he shut down the investigation even though the Legislature failed to make significant political reforms. Bharara and the other prosecutors obtained the commission’s files only because Bharara publicly expressed his outrage at Cuomo’s action. * Cuomo’s explanation ignored the symbolism: How could there ever be a legitimate reason, in a state long beset with corruption in its Legislature, for the governor to short-circuit his own marquee attempt to clean it up?

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For better and for worse, Cuomo views his work as a series of transactions. He disdains rhetoric; he prizes results. He has had several accomplishments in his first four years. Against heavy odds, he pushed through a marriage-equality bill in the Legislature; he banned fracking; he tightened the state’s gun-control laws; he closed thirteen prisons; he started construction on the first major bridge in the state in fifty years, a replacement for the Tappan Zee, across the Hudson; and he passed four balanced budgets in a row, all on time. Deeds, not words—that might as well be the motto of Cuomo’s administration. In nearly every speech, and in many conversations, Cuomo dismisses the importance of political talk. As if adopting a typical voter’s view of President Obama, Cuomo told me, “Beautiful rhetoric, beautiful vision—I’m sold on the vision—and what happens? There was no product. There was no actualization of the vision. Now I’m more disillusioned than I was when we started. You brought me up with that beautiful language, and you got me excited and I thought it was possible and then it wasn’t.”

I mentioned that Cuomo seemed especially pleased to be identified with clearing snow after storms. “Because talking about clearing the snow, talking about doing any of this crap, doesn’t work,” he said. “They’ve heard it before. They’ve heard it all. You’re not going to say anything that moves the jury. I believe that fundamentally. Show me, it’s show-me time. Show me results. Build a bridge, build a train to LaGuardia, clear the snow, save lives. Huh? A little competence. Work with the other side, not this crazy partisan gridlock, huh? You can actually work together. Balance the budget. Really? Get a budget passed on time.” By his own method of accounting, his first term as governor ranks as a considerable success. It also stands in notable counterpoint to that of his father, who died on January 1st, the day Andrew was sworn in for his second term.