Experts say that Governer Cuomo’s best chance of winning at the White House is in 2016! Click below to read the full story.

Melissa Nash

Gov. Cuomo’s appearance with President Obama upstate last week allowed him to speak at a pulpit bearing the presidential seal. If he wants a shot at doing it for real, 2016 is his “best chance.”

Cuomo is just 54, but, for a variety of reasons, the political clock is already ticking, prominent Democratic operatives say.

“He’s going to have to take the shot in 2016 if he wants to go,” said veteran Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf, who worked in the Clinton White House. “He’s going to lose value over time. He’s going to become stale.”

If Cuomo takes a pass in four years, and the Democratic nominee wins, he could be forced to wait another eight years to run. By 2024, he would be out of office — depriving him of a major platform from which to mount a campaign — or concluding a fourth term, a tenure that would be almost unprecedented for a governor of the Empire State.

But if a Republican were to win the White House in 2016, Cuomo could run four years later — if he wanted to challenge an incumbent President. And by 2020, Cuomo could conceivably be in the middle of a third term — and the trifecta is traditionally a disaster for New York politicians.

Theoretically, he could pull a Mitt Romney and run after finishing his time as governor, but he would have recent history against him.

The last candidate to become President who did not hold elected office at the time was Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The waiting game has other drawbacks.

“The key lesson for him is Obama,” one New York Democratic operative said. “Go fast before you have to cast votes or take actions that come back to haunt you — or you begin making more and more enemies.”

A national Democratic strategist agreed, saying that while “you can’t ever predict these things with certainty, 2016 is shaping up to be his best chance.”

“What we’ve seen with Obama, particularly on the Democratic side, is there is room for fresh faces with the beginning of a record rather than a full and complete record,” the strategist said.

Yet while 2016 is Cuomo’s “go” time, every politico interviewed by the Daily News acknowledged there could be a huge hurdle to him becoming Cuomo-in-chief — former First Lady, and Obama’s current Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.

“Cuomo’s actually got a decent 2016 shot — if Hillary doesn’t run,” the N.Y. operative said.

The state teachers union is bleeding red ink.

New York State United Teachers rep Carl Korn pegged the budget hole at $8.5 million, but a source said it could be twice that.

Korn blamed the deficit on the loss of 30,000 dues-paying members through layoffs and attrition since the economy went south in 2008 — combined with an unstable market that has wreaked havoc on the union’s investment income.

“NYSUT is not immune to the difficult economy that all New Yorkers are facing,” Korn said. “Our goal is to meet those challenges and maintain services — and we’re doing that.”

The union, which has an overall budget of about $140 million, has not cut staff or reduced benefits to fill the gap. Some open jobs have been left unfilled, Korn said.

Marc Ratner, a top official for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, didn’t do his sport any favors last week when he charged it was “un-American” for Assembly Dems to forego a vote to legalize mixed martial arts in New York this year.

One lawmaker called the remark “dumb,” given that UFC will be back to try again next year.

“It’s not what I would have said,” remarked Assemblyman Joseph Lentol, a Brooklyn Democrat who supports MMA.