He has no sense of shame.
He has no sense of shame.
W hen pundits solemnly tell one another that Andrew Cuomo is “in trouble,” I hear my children saying, “Uh-oh, you’re in trouble!” In trouble is, for a kid, a parlous state, fraught with terror. Kids don’t seem to notice that there is, generally speaking, no real punishment that goes with in trouble status. Still, the state of being in trouble bothers kids because kids have a sense of shame. Cuomo does not.
So the Democratic leader of the New York state senate sent a letter calling for the governor to resign. Uh-oh, Cuomo’s in trouble!
Not really. Not if that’s as far as it goes. The two-thirds Democratic state legislature could actually take action on this instead of writing letters. It could impeach and remove Cuomo, but it won’t. As Politico New York — a superb source for all Cuomo developments — put it: “There appears to be no serious move towards impeaching” Cuomo.
Cuomo’s strategy is to slow things down by launching an investigation on the assumption that by the time “the facts are in” we’ll all have moved on to something else, and a sober report confirming what everyone already has heard will be old news in the fall. Most Albany Democrats are backing this strategy. A letter signed by 21 female Democrats in the capital actually made the case that it would be undermining the cause of women not to gum things up with a months-long fact-finding mission into the various sexual-harassment complaints against Cuomo because the state attorney general who would lead such an investigation is a woman. You have to admire the gymnastic contortions to which Democrats will resort when all they’re really saying is: We support our Democratic leader.
Governor Cuomo isn’t going anywhere. He’s been proven to have fudged New York’s COVID deaths linked to nursing homes, undercounting the numbers by thousands. His own aide admitted that the team did this for fear that a federal inquiry might follow if the truth were known. And all of this served merely to slightly lower Cuomo’s approval rating, because Cuomo is a liberal Democrat and New York is a one-party state. Admitting that he did badly on the pandemic would be tantamount to admitting that nasty right-wingers had a point all along. Democrats are not close to admitting this. Downplaying his history of sexual harassment will be sadly necessary so as not to let the Right have Cuomo’s scalp.
Donald Trump famously stated that his acolytes would stand by his side if he shot someone dead on Fifth Avenue. Picture about 5,000 grannies on Fifth Avenue falling under the machine-gun salvo that was Andrew Cuomo’s catastrophic March 25, 2020, order that nursing homes accept COVID-19 patients, and you’ll have some idea of what just happened in New York State, which — along with its little sibling, New Jersey — has one of the two highest COVID death tolls per thousand residents of any state, and a far worse toll than any country on earth. The reaction of New Yorkers to all of this, after two solid months of heavy media coverage of the matter, is to bestow Andrew Cuomo with a 56 percent approval rating on pandemic management and a 45 percent overall approval rating. Linda Stasi, a non-crazy liberal (and former colleague of mine at the New York Post) with some moderately conservative instincts, speaks for the middle-of-the-road New Yorker in today’s Daily News when she writes, “He may not be perfect, but he has been the perfect man for our perilous pandemic times.” Disbelief and mockery greeted Stasi on social media, but she represents a widely held point of view.
The extended nature of the sexual-harassment allegations against Cuomo has damaged his standing mainly because it has resulted in negative attention in the media virtually every day for weeks. The women accusers are telling different parts of one story that is highly credible: Cuomo is creepy around women. But when Cuomo shrugs it all off, it’ll be final confirmation of a political fact that has become increasingly obvious for three decades: Democrats don’t really care about sexual harassment. If they did, they would police it among their own, and they generally don’t. Republicans don’t either, of course, as shown by the way they shrugged off the many disturbing and credible allegations made against Donald Trump.
In the early 1990s, when sexual harassment became a topic of national conversation, women and liberals led the way to a significant cultural shift. They succeeded in ruling sexual harassment out of bounds in the average workplace, and in clarifying that even comments of a sexual nature, or persistent requests for dates, were no longer allowed. A moderate Republican senator, Bob Packwood, was defenestrated for sexual harassment, and Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court nomination was very nearly undone by an uncorroborated and dubious claim of sexual harassment.
Inconveniently for Democrats, though, Bill Clinton came along just as this shift in attitudes was underway. And Democrats couldn’t bear to lose Bill. They told themselves everything Bill Clinton did with women was consensual, as evidence accumulated to the contrary.
A quarter of a century later, the approach that has taken root is the Jane Mayer standard. Mayer is a New Yorker reporter who typifies the liberal Democratic feminist metropolitan point of view. She did her best to tear apart Brett Kavanaugh, then came back and wrote an extended defense of Al Franken.
Here’s the Jane Mayer standard: Vague and unsubstantiated allegations against a conservative or Republican, even if they date all the way back to college, and even if the accuser is so foggy about what might or might not have happened that it takes days of consultations with lawyers for her to make a statement, are damning. However, a well-documented pattern of groping, admitted to and apologized for by the accused man, should be forgiven if he’s a Democrat. In fact, if such a Democrat should resign in shame over his admitted transgressions, even if he’s replaced by a Democrat, and even if that Democrat is a woman, this is all horribly unfair to the man. Democrats as a party regret chasing Franken out of the Senate. If Franken had exhibited some Cuomo-like shamelessness, and hung on for another month, he would have been fine.
When it comes to political figures, sexual harassment is not a fireable offense. If it were, Democrats would support ousting Democrats. Instead, it has become just another partisan talking point, an additional reason to hate someone you already hate. If Democrats won’t use it to oppose Democrats, then Republicans won’t use it to oppose Republicans. Kirsten Gillibrand, who helped push Franken out, didn’t like the blowback that resulted and is being much more measured about Cuomo. Kamala Harris, the country’s leading Democratic woman, has nothing much to say about the Cuomo situation. Neither does Hillary Clinton.
Not only is Cuomo not going anywhere, he’ll probably run for a fourth term next year — and win easily. It’s not obvious that he’ll even have any meaningful competition. (You’ll recall that the last time he ran, his challenger was the woman who played the least-popular character on Sex and the City.) Who will bring Cuomo’s reign to an end? Letitia James, the state attorney general, would like to supplant him, but she lacks much of a public profile and might blanch at the prospect of opposing her former mentor. If New York City mayor Bill de Blasio (whose administration must end on January 1) runs against Cuomo, de Blasio might eke out a narrow victory among voters on his home turf in the five boroughs. Meanwhile, Cuomo would trounce de Blasio in the other two New York regions — the suburbs and upstate — where de Blasio is about as popular as COVID.
Will Cuomo decline to run again? I can’t see it, unless he takes a job in the Biden administration. But virtually any cabinet post would be a demotion. The cabinet is where he started his political career. And winning a fourth term in Albany would provide Cuomo with the satisfaction of surpassing his father Mario’s accomplishment of serving three terms. Moreover, nothing would give Cuomo greater joy than humiliating de Blasio, should the latter be unwise enough to run. A Cuomo–de Blasio race would be like watching Biff Tannen giving Marty McFly a noogie every day. And a wedgie. Is de Blasio prepared for a daily wedgie-noogie? I doubt he’ll even run.
In theory, of course, a Republican could beat Cuomo in New York State. But for that to happen there would first have to be a Republican in New York State. Anybody seen one of those lately?