Three-term New York governor Andrew Cuomo is rightly being pilloried, in increasingly bipartisan fashion, both for his willful deceptions about nursing-home coronavirus fatalities and for his terrible treatment of women. Yet in a press conference today, he defiantly declined to resign, claiming he would not bow to “cancel culture” (yes, really). He also said that
I’m not part of the political club, and you know what? I’m proud of it.
As Zachary Evans, our reporter, dryly noted in reporting on Cuomo’s self-defense:
Cuomo’s father Mario was a three-term governor of the state, Cuomo served as Housing and Human Development Secretary in the Clinton administration, and he married a member of the Kennedy family.
The ridiculousness of these remarks speaks for itself. But it’s worth noting one other implication of them, and one other way in which Cuomo embodies so many of the political ills of our age. Everybody wants to rule the world these days, everybody wants power . . . but nobody wants the responsibility it entails. It is far easier once having gotten power to grandstand, or, when caught in an obvious failure, to assume the status of victim.
In the scheme of things, it’s one of Cuomo’s lesser faults. Yet it’s still worth pointing out as such.