This Fucking Guy

I lived in New York City for twenty-five years and I don’t live there anymore. This is not something I’ve written about much because the market for writing about leaving New York is pretty well saturated, and frankly, my thoughts are simple: I love where I live and I love where I used to live and I feel very lucky on both counts.

New York City is filled with my friends, generations of my family, my colleagues, the magazine I’ll be going back to in the fall, and one million of my memories. Strangely (to me, anyway) I don’t miss living there. But the last mayoral election in which I didn’t vote was 1993, and it’s hitting me hard that on Tuesday, voting in the Democratic primary there will conclude. It’s hitting me so hard that I’m writing this from a highway in rural Poland, where I’m traveling for book research, yet somehow am still thinking about the New York mayor’s race.

Opining on the election from afar makes me a dismal cliché: even the New York Times’ non-endorsement was reportedly by a DC-based editor and assured pronouncements about who should or shouldn’t prevail have come in from Jim Clyburn of South Carolina and Larry Summers, who I guess lives in Cambridge?

I am happy to acknowledge that this is none of my business anymore while offering one point of privilege: that over the years, especially the last five years, I have thought hard, reported carefully and written extensively about the man widely favored to win Tuesday’s primary: former New York governor Andrew Cuomo.

There’s probably not any story I’ve worked harder on than the one I reported in the spring of 2021 about Cuomo, when he was facing a cascade of allegations of sexual harassment. Back then, I was anxious to report what I was hearing from people who had experienced his abusive behavior first-hand, and also somewhat vexed by the flatness of the #metoo frame that was being widely applied to the situation. What I mean is that while some of the inappropriate behavior Cuomo was alleged to have engaged in was indeed sexual in nature, I thought that understanding it only through that lens actually took away from the broader picture of manipulation and toxicity that characterized Cuomo’s lengthy tenure in New York state politics.

Now Cuomo, who’s been itching to make a vengeful comeback since before he even stepped down, wants to be mayor, despite having spent his adulthood living in Albany and Westchester County; despite having shown the city nothing but contempt for most of his time in state politics; despite having repeatedly worked at odds with previous mayors; despite a long history of raiding the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s budgets and in 2020 driving out the well-regarded transit master Andy Byford; despite having spent years as governor hindering a Democratic agenda by cooperating with conservatives, and yes, despite having stepped down in disgrace four years ago.

Watching this man enter the mayor’s race and (until recently at least) lead the broad Democratic field by a massive margin has been abysmally depressing, another demoralizing symptom of the Trump-era willingness of all kinds of institutions, from the political media to the Democratic party, to roll over in the face of regressive authoritarianism. So many people who called for Cuomo’s resignation in 2021—from his former progressive critic and mayoral challenger Jessica Ramos to Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres to the New York Times itself—have lined up in Cuomo’s corner, managing to wave away the damning litany of harassment allegations as immaterial to the questions facing New York City now.

Just days after having told Politico that she wished to live “in a city where voters cared about women getting harassed,” Ramos did an about-face, endorsing Cuomo and telling Times that he was the mayoral candidate “best positioned right now to protect this city” from Trump. She didn’t seem to realize that in reversing moral course to bend the knee to Cuomo she simply became the most recent example of how Trumpian Cuomo’s approach to domination has always been. Far from a bulwark against Trump, Cuomo offers a carbon copy of his tactics, (barely) dressing them up in Democratic party clothing.

The two-bit slippery self-interest of Cuomo and those rushing to help him is, apart from everything else, just so embarrassing. Who knew that political malevolence could be so cut-rate, transparent and tacky?

Does no one else remember how Cuomo wriggled and flailed in 2021, begging his critics to wait for the careful investigative work of New York’s attorney general Tish James before they rushed to judgment on him? “Let the Attorney General do her job,” Cuomo chided, as if everyone else were being unreasonable. “She’s very good, she’s very competent…That will be due process and then we’ll have the facts.”

Of course, when James’s office provided due process, via a 165-page investigation conducted by two independent attorneys who over five months interviewed 179 people and reviewed 74,000 documents, and concluded that the governor had sexually harassed eleven women, nine of them his employees, Cuomo’s faith in James was replaced by pathetically aggrieved vitriol. Cuomo called James’s report “a brand of ugly politics I had never seen before;” in the years since the report prompted his resignation, Cuomo, via his senior attack dogs, has never stopped attacking James, celebrating her losses and set-backs even when they were against Trump or the NRA. The point isn’t the back-and-forth between Cuomo and James, it’s that when it comes to Cuomo, he sees no greater moral, political, or civic battle than the one for himself.

This is the guy who, along with his top aides, has spent in the neighborhood of 20 million dollars of New York taxpayers’ money waging a lawfare campaign against the women, many of them young, who came forward to describe the way he treated them. He has since worked tirelessly to defame and degrade the women who spoke up (even the ones to whom he originally extended apologies) exhausting their spirits and their funds, subpoenaing their phone records and former college interns, working to reveal their identities even when ordered by the court to desist. It is very worth reading this account in the City of how both inside the courtroom and out, Cuomo’s “attorneys and some family members have battled to rehabilitate his image by helping shred that of any perceived detractor they targeted.”

The cruelty in service of ego made it extra galling to read the New York Times half-assed mayoral endorsement of Cuomo this week. Though the paper’s editorial board had vociferously called on the former governor to step down in light of the harassment allegations in 2021, their dismay apparently became far less important than preventing Cuomo’s 33-year-old progressive challenger Zohran Mamdani—whom they cast as too inexperienced and too left wing—from winning the primary. “We have serious objections to [Cuomo’s] ethics and conduct,” the paper’s opinion piece read, “even if he would be better for New York’s future than Mr. Mamdani.”

It’s just so stupid, and again, so humiliating, how afraid those with institutional power are of what comes next. These people—the Times, Clyburn, Summers—are so scared, so unable to conceive of a world without them and their worldview at its core, that they will, every time, choose the monsters they have known for generations over anyone they can’t imagine gaining access to.

It’s blinkered and power hoarding and gross, but it is also -– as Mara Gay pointed out in her good rebuke –- strategic malpractice by a sclerotic Democratic party and political media that again and again choses to foreclose on its next generation’s ability to build a power base for the future, alienating voters who could not be clearer about their mushrooming distrust of how party and media have long done business.

Sure, it is absolutely true that an untested leader like Mamdani might be bad! But Andrew Cuomo has already shown how bad he is; it’s right there in your editorial call for him to resign his last job four years ago!

The attempt to wave off his “ethics and conduct” as somehow a distraction from the claim that he would be better for New York minimizes the harassment, but also fails to reflect that the harassment allegations were not some side sin, but in line with everything else that had always been troubling and corroded about Cuomo’s leadership. Yes, there was plenty of power abuse that was sexualized. But the danger in thinking of it as only sexual harassment is that it can be written off as only sexual harassment, walled off from the rest of his governing style, which in Cuomo’s case it absolutely cannot be.

Because while it should be disqualifying that he is credibly alleged to have leered and pawed and spoken inappropriately and threatened nine women in his employ, he didn’t just leer and paw and speak inappropriately to and threaten them. That’s how he behaved with everyone! Over decades! And while a savagely unjust white patriarchal political culture may have conditioned us to confuse that kind of behavior with effectiveness, Cuomo was not in fact very effective as governor.

His administration underreported nursing home deaths during COVID, then tried to get the attorney general to withhold her report on it, then attempted to alter numbers to cover it up. His public bickering with New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio at the start of the pandemic is estimated to have cost the city 17,000 lives that might otherwise have been saved. That’s 17,000 New Yorkers.

Far from being some beacon of Democratic leadership, Cuomo impeded a Democratic agenda in his state for years, forging a tacit alliance with the state’s conservative Democratic faction, the IDC, that blocked or slowed the progress of progressive legislation that could have made people’s lives better earlier. Some of the stuff he gets credit for—like hiking the minimum wage or the Reproductive Health Act—happened after years of obstruction that Cuomo not-so-secretly leveraged as an excuse for not acting. Meanwhile, he opposed Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s attempts to tax the city’s wealthiest residents, capped property taxes at 2 percent, and after having gotten early accolades for expanding Medicaid access for immigrants, later made major cuts to Medicaid eligibility.

Rather than working with members of his party, Cuomo obsessed about their loyalty to him; he once called Democratic assemblyman Ron Kim, who had criticized his aides’ attempts to cover up the number of nursing home deaths, and allegedly suggested that he could “destroy” him, Cuomo and his senior staffers routinely berated, demeaned, and threatened not only other politicians, but journalists covering them. One of Cuomo’s aides kept a 35-page dossier on an Albany journalist who eventually left her job. Another reporter said in 2021 that she quit her job covering politics for the Albany-based News10 after five years of “threatening” and “incessant bullying” from the administration.

And if the loyalty tests plus the bullying plus the multitudinous harassment claims haven’t underlined Cuomo’s similarities to Trump, how about the COVID-era prefiguring of the president’s war on public health and science; Cuomo waved of medical “experts” as untrustworthy, and a lot of New York public health officials quit while he was in charge of the state. Meanwhile, his administration created liability protections for hospitals and nursing homes that would become a corporate immunity model for Mitch McConnell at the federal level. Those protections were drafted by a hospital lobbying group that had donated over a million dollars to the New York State Democratic Committee which was funding Cuomo’s 2018 reelection campaign.

Relatedly, Cuomo created a commission to investigate public corruption, then exempted himself from their investigations, then shut the whole commission down.

None of this can or should be understood as existing in some separate category from the harassment allegations. Cuomo’s whole concept of leadership is rooted in manipulation, braying meanness, the belief that he should never have to face consequences; it’s the accrual of power built not on accomplishment or innate talent, but on the diminishment, disrespect and objectification of others. As one of his former staffers perceptively told me in 2021, “The same attitude that emboldens you to target a 25-year-old also emboldens you to scrub a nursing-home report.”

The culture of Andrew Cuomo’s leadership has been built on toxic, brutal tactics that allowed him to perform capability while in fact being extremely bad at the job of governing.

I hope that if you’re interested or don’t remember some of this stuff, that you read my long and carefully reported story about Cuomo from 2021 (bonus: his top hench-woman Melissa DeRosa has described it as “disgusting” and a “well-orchestrated hit piece” so you know it’s good; you can read my story about her here).

I have written on so many grim subjects, but here’s a funny thing: no one I’ve ever reported on has given me nightmares like Cuomo and his team. Not because of how they behaved toward me, but because of the stories I heard from people who once believed in them, who wanted to make the world better or safer or more just and went to work for them, and wound up hounded and haunted, who had their sense of purpose and hope in the potential for government derailed, hollowed out.

The fact that he gave me nightmares probably would please him very much and isn’t that pretty much the ballgame? A thing we unequivocally don’t need more of is a leader who longs for people to live in fear of him.

The thing is: it doesn’t have to be this way. No one needs Andrew Cuomo, despite what the macho posturing might lead people to believe. No city needs a mayor who is petty and vindictive, self-obsessed and manipulative, whose greatest skill is making himself look big and powerful by making everyone else feel small and powerless.

And in this cycle, there so many other options. I’m not voting, but if I were, Zohran Mamdani (profiled here by my colleague Alex Jung) and Brad Lander, one of the city’s left-liberal stalwarts who’s a lovely human being, would be the first two candidates on my ranked choice ballot (they have also cross-endorsed, and even cut a cute ad together). Adrienne Adams has years of experience and strong relationships across New York city and state. Zellnor Myrie, who was my local state senator for the last years I lived in New York, would be my next and very enthusiastic choice. In fifth, I’d probably rank Michael Blake or even Scott Stringer, who I don’t like much. But I truly believe that every one of these people would be a better mayor than the man who is predicted to win.

So I guess all this is to say that while I do not actually miss living in New York City, I do miss voting against Andrew Cuomo.

A statue I saw on a long layover in Copenhagen.