Andrew Cuomo’s Utterly Shameless Exit

T hat was some farewell speech by Andrew Cuomo yesterday. Even to dedicated Cuomotextuals, the thing was a masterpiece of effrontery, arrogance, and Escher-style self-negating twists. The obfuscation! The blame-shifting! The conspiracy-theorizing! The denial! The sheer, sordid cheek of the thing! It was a positively Frankenian farewell.

In his 1998 confession, Bill Clinton complained, after lying for seven months about Monica Lewinsky, that the investigation into his lying had gone on too long (and cost too much money, which turned out to be equivalent to one copy of one tabloid newspaper per American —was there ever a federal outlay that was better value?). Cuomo set out to challenge The Big He in contempt for those who caught him.

There will be another time to talk about the truth and ethics of the recent situation involving me, but let me say now that, when government politicizes allegations and the headlines condemn without facts, you undermine the justice system — and that doesn’t serve women and it doesn’t serve men or society.

This sentence is amazing. James Joyce couldn’t have piled more implication between two periods. So let’s unpack it.

Begin with “the facts.” They were on Cuomo’s side? Eleven women accused him of various forms of unwanted pawing, kneading, groping, kissing, fondling, and wildly inappropriate dirty talk in the office. Cuomo initially rebutted this welter of damnation with a dossier of photographs proving that, for instance, he had hugged his own mom. I do this to everybody, it’s no big deal, was his defense. I even hug and kiss men! The file included pictures of Presidents Obama and George W. Bush non-sexually hugging hurricane victims, as though any of this had any relevance to Cuomo’s apparent habit of giving women unwanted kisses on the lips.

Cuomo’s earlier defense was not that the women accusing him were liars “without facts” on their side but that he merely had a different understanding of male–female interaction: He thought grabbing women was okay, they didn’t. “I now understand that my interactions may have been insensitive or too personal and that some of my comments, given my position, made others feel in ways I never intended,” he said in February. His own office had to enact a policy of “preventing certain female staff members from being left alone with the governor,” reports the New York Times. Is he now taking all that back, while slamming his accusers for a lack of ethics?

Moreover, his decision to resign in shame rather than face impeachment proved . . . that the entire justice system had been compromised? Cuomo quit before he could face the politician’s equivalent of a judicial proceeding: an impeachment trial. Why blame the justice system he denied an opportunity to confront him? The capper is Cuomo’s suggestion that he was the victim of a political hit when everyone involved was a member of his political party, most of them longstanding allies of his. One of his staffers noted, “We are almost uniformly good people who killed ourselves . . . to accomplish his agenda — for his political glory, and for the feeling that he would make decisions with public service as his driving goal. I feel cheated out of that.”

These women told their story to a Democratic attorney general who was a political ally of Cuomo for whom he had campaigned and fundraised and whose investigation he himself had welcomed. Cuomo was being threatened with impeachment by a Democratic assembly speaker, Carl Heastie, who was another political ally of Cuomo, and who had vowed not to proceed unless he had the support of Cuomo’s own party, saying he would discount the input of Albany Republicans who were in lockstep support for the move. Heastie, a Bronx lawmaker frequently described as an old-school machine Democrat, had spent seven months dragging his feet and, even after the release of a damning report against Cuomo earlier this month, seemed in no hurry to move forward.

Cuomo insists he is the real victim, forced out by a “media frenzy” and a “rush to judgment” — by which he means “news outlets holding powerful people to account for repeated instances of alleged sexual assault” and “a meticulous seven-month investigation that produced a mammoth 168-page report.” He suggested that the allegations against him amounted to the way “a firecracker can start a stampede.” A firecracker is something that sounds dangerous, but isn’t; Cuomo is claiming that groping women who work for you is something that sounds bad, but isn’t. He tried to sound like an ally of the #MeToo movement by saluting “the bravery and courage” of his accusers while in the same breath tarring them as liars who managed to escape being “scrutinized and verified” and in so doing did damage to “our basic justice system.”

If everyone speaking out against him is lying, though, shouldn’t he have stayed and fought for the opportunity to clear his name in an impeachment trial? It’s not justice if an unjustly accused murderer pleads guilty and reports to the nearest jailer, so why would the most powerful man in New York feebly submit to punishment for something he didn’t do?

Cuomo saved for last a real head-spinner of a claim. His blundering might well have cost more New York lives in 2020 than al-Qaeda did in 2001. While he was ordering nursing homes to accept elderly COVID patients like a fire marshal shoving people back into a flaming building, while he was hiding the facts from all of us and understating the true death toll by 11,000 using the preposterous rationale that people who died of COVID before they could get to the hospital don’t count, while he was shamelessly profiting from catastrophe by using high-profile media contacts including his own brother to promote his image, while he was using taxpayer-funded staff to write a book so that he could reap $5 million in apparent violation of state laws against using state resources for personal gain, the man was presiding over perhaps the worst COVID catastrophe in the Western world. He ruled a state which, along with its Hudson River spouse New Jersey, has one of the two worst fatality rates in the country.

And how does Andrew Cuomo request that we remember him? As the hero who delivered us from coronavirus! “Please don’t forget what we learned together last year, and don’t forget what we accomplished. We went from the highest infection rate in the nation to the lowest,” he said. Cuomo is apparently contending that, at some point in the history of the virus, New York had the lowest infection rate. But since the pandemic keeps ebbing and flowing in varying cycles all over the country, many states, perhaps most states, can make that claim also. So why bother making it? Nobody ends a football season bragging that his team held first place for a week in mid-October. New York does not currently have the lowest infection rate (nine states and the District of Columbia are doing better) and its infections (up 38 percent) and hospitalizations (up 40 percent) have both risen steeply in the last two weeks. But even if New York did have the lowest infection rate at this moment, that would be small comfort to the families of the 55,000 dead New Yorkers. Cuomo is the forest ranger who says, “Behold, I have put out the fire!” as he casts his gaze over a landscape of ash. New York today has less dry kindling than practically any other state.

Cuomo should consult the nearest mirror if he’d like to learn the identity of the true and only mastermind of his ignoble fall. In place of the thousands of words of bristling denial, defiance, and rationalization he offered Monday, the ex-governor of the Empire State should instead have left us with one solitary word, a word notable by its absence from the speech he actually gave: “Sorry.”