“Harassment, cruelty, and deception”: the Andrew Cuomo Story

Rebecca Traister, who has a major new story with new revelations about the governor who was turned into a media star despite handling COVID quite badly, sums up his defenders (or erstwhile defenders) well:

That Andrew Cuomo is being characterized by fellow Democratic politicians as a lecherous tyrant who empowers his staff to threaten and intimidate should not, in some ways, come as a surprise. During his decade as governor, he has often strutted his thuggish paternalism while his top aides disparaged those who challenged him. Two years ago, a Cuomo spokesman called three female state lawmakers in his party “fucking idiots.” In 2013, Cuomo created the Moreland Commission to investigate public corruption, only to shut it down abruptly less than a year later amid allegations that he had obstructed its work; one of Cuomo’s closest associates, Joe Percoco, is serving a six-year term in federal prison on bribery charges.

But until now, none of this left a lasting mark on the governor. If anything, it burnished his reputation: Cuomo was a bully, but he was our bully. Over the course of the past year, however, as he took his show national as Governor Covid, the political dynamics in Cuomo’s own state were shifting. Now, the venal toxicity that has buttressed his career has, at least temporarily, been exposed for what it is.

Though the multiple scandals erupting in Albany seem to toggle between sexualized harassment stories and evidence of mismanagement, what is emerging is in fact a single story: That through years of ruthless tactics, deployed both within his office and against anyone he perceived as an adversary, critic, or competitor for authority, Cuomo has fostered a culture that supported harassment, cruelty, and deception. And while some have continued to defend Cuomo’s commitment to “creating the perception of strength,” and his mastery of “brutalist political theater” (as Mayor de Blasio’s former spokesman told the New York Times last month), his tough-guy routine has in fact worked to obscure governing failures; it is precisely what has permitted Cuomo and his administration to spend a decade being, to borrow Wertheimer’s assessment, both mean and bad at their jobs. As one former Cuomo staffer told me, “The same attitude that emboldens you to target a 25-year-old also emboldens you to scrub a nursing-home report.”

Again, the irony is the fact that he’s a much worse governor than Spitzer is the only thing keeping him afloat despite his conduct being much worse; better for your enemies by 25-year-old female aides than people with actual power. But both the his constant harassment of and cruelty toward employees and the nursing home scandal are impeachable offenses in themselves, and it’s looking like more and more members of the Assembly are seeing it that way.

…wjts in comments:

As I’ve said several times, the myth of “He’s an asshole, but he gets results” frequently leads both to people incorrectly believing that you need to be an asshole to get results and to people incorrectly believing that because someone’s an asshole, they must be getting results.