Let’s stop for a second to reflect on the state attorney general’s report in the case of Andrew Cuomo. I have read the 165 pages. It is a narrative about charges of sexual harassment that investigators found credible, and that were more numerous than expected. But there is a real Crazytown aspect to the story.
The governor of New York is painted as a public leader who treats the young women around him as sexual prey. The report details close and intimate hugs, kisses, buttock-grabbing, breast-grabbing, leering comments and violative questions and statements. Have you cheated on your husband? Would you? I am lonely. Have you been with older men? Would you find me a girlfriend? To one target he described his criterion for a girlfriend as someone who can “handle pain.” This is all too believable. His prey included not only women who worked for him but a state trooper he saw at an event and got assigned to his security detail even though she didn’t meet the position’s requirements. He then targeted her for harassment.
He had a modus operandi. When a woman whose bare back he was stroking grabbed his wrist and removed his hand, he remarked, “Wow, you’re aggressive.” He then asked for a kiss. He had an air of entitlement: He was taking what was his. Many of the events described in the report occurred after the pandemic had raised his profile to that of public hero. Politicians are never so dangerous as after a triumph.
The women were all afraid of him—he screamed, berated and was known to be vengeful. The culture of his office was rife with fear and intimidation. A victim: “It was extremely toxic, extremely abusive. If you got yelled at in front of everyone, it wasn’t any special day. . . . It was controlled largely by his temper, and he was surrounded by people who enabled his behavior.” Everyone feared retaliation for speaking out, so they didn’t.
But there is deep weirdness beyond that. He ordered one aide to memorize the lyrics to “Danny Boy.” She testified he “would pop out” of his office and ask her to start singing. A footnote says it was not the only time the governor asked her to sing. The aide found herself writing to a former staffer, “He just asked me to sing Bohemian Rhapsody so. We aren’t far off from a bedtime story.” He asked her to do push-ups in front of him, and asked what people were saying about the size of his hands. According to the report the aide testified that “she understood the Governor was attempting to get her to say something about the size of his genitals.” Another aide testified that, in complaining to staff that a speech was disappointing, the Governor said something to the effect of “You need to give me some catchy one-liners. Come up with a line like, ‘you’re having sex without the orgasm.’ ”
Mr. Cuomo’s office played a kind of berserk hardball. When news of the sexual-harassment charges broke this March, the governor’s chief of staff asked the state “vaccine czar” to call Democratic county executives and find out if they stood with the governor. The czar was understood to be in charge of vaccine availability and the location of vaccine sites. Demand for vaccines was exceeding supply. The czar called around. One Democratic county executive understood the call to contain an implicit threat regarding vaccine access. He described himself as “stunned” and unsettled by the call.
You read all this and think: The governor is a letch, a creep, a dirty old man. But also a nut—a high-functioning one, a politically talented one, but a nut. Only a nut would do these things, and only a nut would think he wouldn’t be found out.
No one in New York is walking around saying “I don’t believe it” or “That’s not the Andrew I know.” It’s apparently the Andrew Cuomo a lot of people knew.
And no one in New York can see how Mr. Cuomo survives all this, even as no one can figure out how he’ll leave. He could resign, but no one who’s known him in the past thinks that possible. The book he wrote during the pandemic has a subtheme and it’s how losing all power and standing when he lost his party’s nomination for governor in 2002 was the great trauma of his life, and winning his career in politics back in 2006, when he was elected attorney general, restored meaning to his life. He literally lives in the governor’s mansion. It’s his only home.
That leaves impeachment. All who will vote on that question know this: if Mr. Cuomo is impeached, Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul will become governor. She is a career politician from Western New York who is usually assumed, based on history and temperament, to be a moderate Democrat. If she becomes governor—the first woman in New York history—she would garner great initial good will and could become popular. This might thwart the ambitions of her party’s powerful progressives. Maybe they’ll figure that once she’s installed they can rough her up and let her know who’s boss; maybe they’ll find her unexpectedly pliant. But that’s chancy. Republicans don’t want a potentially popular Democrat either: They want to win in 2022. Both sides would benefit from a weakened, suppurating Gov. Cuomo, not a vibrant moderate who might play well on Long Island.
It would be interesting to know who’s talking to Ms. Hochul right now, and what’s being said.
Still, the Legislature’s hand might be forced by events. Circumstances now are different from when the scandals first broke. The attorney general’s report was grimly particular and distilled stray charges into one compelling narrative. The allegation that Mr. Cuomo brought a cop, a state trooper, into his net and abused her startled people and changed their sense of the story. The old civil-rights establishment that kept Mr. Cuomo afloat in the spring looks to be fracturing. And early polling is bad. An overnight Marist survey this week showed 63% of registered voters saying they want him to resign. When the scandal first broke, the public backed the governor.
His strategy since the beginning has been to delay, delay, let the steam come out. That may still be his strategy, and that of some legislators currently acting out their disapproval of him.
Here’s my thought when I finished the report. As America becomes stranger and our culture becomes stranger, our politicians become stranger. As their power increases (I can close a whole state down; I can close a country!) so do the stakes.
When parties and primary voters pick their candidates this year they will judge them in terms of various categories: likability, local support, money and the ability to raise it, stances on issues. People now have to include explicitly another category, an important, baseline question: Is the candidate fully sane? Is the candidate the kind who will be destabilized or further destabilized by the acquisition of new power? Does he push people around?
If your candidate does, take the other one.