Phil Reisman: Gov. Cuomo's juggernaut in three phases

Rob Astorino better get ready for a mugging. Phase I is over.

Andy Cuomo's payback begins now.

OK, it's true that the incumbent governor was embarrassed in Tuesday's Democratic primary against Fordham Law professor Zephyr Teachout, an unknown with no money who attacked him from the progressive left and became a heroine of the party's disaffected liberal wing. Teachout's strong showing may have been a teachable moment about hubris, but Cuomo survived the onslaught.

He won. His two-front war is over.

And so now he will turn to his antagonist on the right, and he will marshal all his resources — his money, his political guile and penchant for revenge — to surgically strip the bark off Astorino. Astorino has crudely called Cuomo a "crook" and a "jerk," but the conservative Republican from Westchester should brace himself for Cuomo's media bombardment. He will define Astorino as a cheap, racketeering politician who is backward on women's issues, gay rights and guns. Astorino's fight over the interpretation of a federal affordable-housing settlement in Westchester will be condemned as racist —and before this thing is over the Cuomo campaign, or some surrogate, might even Photoshop him in Ku Klux Klan garb.

Cuomo will unleash his fury with millions of dollars in campaign funds. If he spends merely $15 million of his Adirondack-sized mountain of cash, that will translate to $300,000 a day for the 50 days leading up to the general election. When they're finished with Astorino, he will be rendered unrecognizable to his Westchester constituency, who largely see him as an affable and effective county executive who was returned to office last year with help from independents and Democratic cross-over votes. But people from Queens to Onondaga, who don't know Astorino and haven't been paying close attention, will see him squeezed through the Cuomo View-Master, and the image they see will be that of an unappetizing, small-ball nobody.

Astorino can't come close to matching him in money to fight back. Nor will he have a chance to debate him. We already know what Cuomo thinks of debates.

After the primary, he congratulated Teachout and her running mate, Tim Wu, for "engaging in the democratic process," leaving out, of course, his refusal to engage them in a debate and the fact that he took Teachout to court in an attempt to get her kicked off the ballot. That's some champion of the process.

The Astorino campaign asserts that lawyers have instructed Cuomo not to debate because of the U.S. Attorney's investigation of charges that he meddled with the anti-corruption Moreland Commission, which he empaneled and then abruptly shut down. The theory is that if Cuomo is provoked, he could say something incriminating.

Anyway you look at it, and no matter how you add it up, Astorino is hamstrung.

"We'll have to endure," Astorino's campaign spokesman, Bill O'Reilly, said Wednesday.

Statewide, Cuomo got 62 percent, which really isn't a landslide when you consider that as a popular incumbent he should have done much better against an unseasoned neophyte like Teachout. Cuomo's margin of victory was about the same on his home turf of Westchester County, where the turnout was hardly robust at about 11 percent.

And Cuomo can breathe easy that Wu, another progressive academic, didn't defeat his running mate, Kathy Hochul — though leading up to the primary there was a lot of talk that he might pull it off.

If nothing else, the primary results might harm Cuomo's supposed quest for the White House. Writing for the politics blog fivethirtyeight.com, Harry Enten analyzed that in order to gain the support of Democrats in "crucial primary states such as Iowa and New Hampshire," Cuomo would've needed substantially much more than 70 percent of the New York primary vote. Again, he got 62 percent.

But a win is a win. The primary was Phase I.

The general election is Phase II. The Cuomo juggernaut is just warming up. Make no mistake, the Teachout defectors, or most of them, will get on board, too.

It's hard to see how Astorino won't get steamrolled on Nov. 4.

And when he does, watch for Phase III, starting on Jan. 1. That's when Cuomo will start a stealth campaign to unseat Astorino in the 2017 county executive election.

Offhand, I can think of six Democratic aspirants in Westchester already. Not one of them said a word in favor of Zephyr Teachout — and that is all you need to know about Cuomo's incredible power.