Andrew Cuomo: From leader to liability

Just a few months ago, Andrew Cuomo’s assured handling of the Covid crisis saw him touted as a serious candidate for the highest office. Now, though, accusations of sexual harassment and the concealment of nursing home deaths leave the New York governor fighting for his political career. Sean O’Grady considers where it all went wrong

(Getty Images)

It is perfectly possible that by now the White House would have been engulfed in allegations of sexual misconduct and inappropriate behaviour by a president – President Andrew Cuomo, the alternative history 46th president of the United States.

It seems a past political age now, but only a few months ago the current, and still for the time being, governor of the state of New York was touted as the great hope of the Democrats. His response to the Covid crisis put Donald Trump to shame, as it was intended to. “We’re not going to put a dollar figure in human life,” was Cuomo’s promise.

His sombre, sprightly talking gravelly streetwise press conferences were watched with a mixture of admiration and hope, in America and around the world. Like Anthony Fauci, here was a man levelling with the public, not trying to pretend the coronavirus was a Chinese hoax.

Governor Cuomo took his struggle with the Trump administration for resources public, and with some success. When the Covid case rates started going down, Trump tried to purloin the credit. There was “Cuomo 2020” merch going on Amazon. You could buy a “Cuomosexual” coffee mug, a reference to his stand for LGBT+ rights, though it reads less happily now.

Cuomo produced another book – Lessons in Leadership, which at least looked like a job application for something. He was interviewed on CNN, by his brother Chris as it happens, for Cuomo Prime Time, bashfully turning down every suggestion that he might be thinking about a late run for the Democrat nomination and the White House.

The only question anyone raised was whether America needed another vain, thin-skinned arrogant New Yorker either on the campaign trail or in the White House. It was, though, a modest objection. Quicker witted and younger (63 now) than Joe Biden, progressive but not as radical as Bernie Sanders, and with a certain charisma, Cuomo was, in the words of a sympathetic biography, “the contender”. More than that, he was a cult.

That’s not the word you’d use about him now. Fortunately, for all concerned, there never was a president Cuomo, and, as it was for his famous father Mario, governor of the state through the 1980s, a Cuomo presidency was a chimera.

There was, however, much buzz after the Biden victory on 3 November about Cuomo being appointed attorney general of the United States in the Biden administration. Cuomo was more than well qualified. He had trained as lawyer, ran his own law firm (again, just like his father), had served in Bill Clinton’s administration, as assistant secretary and then secretary (at cabinet level) for Housing and Urban Development.

He had made time to work with homelessness charities. Before he was elected governor of New York in 2010, he had spent four years chasing down corruption in the administration of New York and outside as attorney general of the state.

He obviously had the political clout, and the Dems surely owed him for defying Trump. It was publicly discussed. It was, though, all too much to bear for a former Cuomo staffer, Lindsey Boylan, who had reason, she believed, to think that Cuomo was far from the ideal candidate for the post. It triggered her. On 13 December 2020 she decided to send a series of Tweets that continue to reverberate, stating: “Yes, @NYGovCuomo sexually harassed me for years. Many saw it, and watched. I could never anticipate what to expect: would I be grilled on my work (which was very good) or harassed about my looks. Or would it be both in the same conversation? This was the way for years.” Later she wrote this account of one of the alleged incidents. In her own words, then:

Lindsey Boylan, pictured in 2019 (Getty)

“‘Let’s play strip poker.’

I should have been shocked by the governor’s crude comment, but I wasn’t.

We were flying home from an October 2017 event in western New York on his taxpayer-funded jet. He was seated facing me, so close our knees almost touched. His press aide was to my right and a state trooper behind us.

‘That’s exactly what I was thinking,’ I responded sarcastically and awkwardly. I tried to play it cool. But in that moment, I realised just how acquiescent I had become.

Governor Andrew Cuomo has created a culture within his administration where sexual harassment and bullying is so pervasive that it is not only condoned but expected. His inappropriate behavior toward women was an affirmation that he liked you, that you must be doing something right. He used intimidation to silence his critics. And if you dared to speak up, you would face consequences.”

Boylan, like others, in due course left the state’s employment. She also claims that he touched her without consent and frequently made inappropriate comments to her and other women about their appearances. Cuomo’s spokesperson says that “Ms Boylan’s claims of inappropriate behaviour are quite simply false.”

His assured handling of the Covid crisis was in stark contrast to the failures of President Trump, and saw him touted as a potential challenger for the White House (Getty)

As with the earlier cases in the #MeToo movement, her claims promoted others to come forward. Charlotte Bennett, another staff member who had dealings with Cuomo, claims he asked her questions about her sex life, whether she was monogamous in her relationships and if she had ever had sex with older men (she was 25).

And then there was a third, though not in a work environment, who alleged that Cuomo had kissed on the lips, unwanted, and at a wedding reception. There is a photograph of him holding her, much shorter than him, holding her face in his palms like some medieval Lord of the Manor making the most of his ancestral droit du seigneur.

Cuomo has not handled the allegations especially well. He appeared to minimise things by issuing a non-apology that was pretty transparent: “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,” Cuomo wrote. “I acknowledge some of the things I have said have been misinterpreted as an unwanted flirtation. To the extent anyone felt that way, I am truly sorry about that.” According to the governor, he “never inappropriately touched anybody”.

Conceding that some sort of independent inquiry was needed, Cuomo first tried to get a judge familiar to administration officials appointed, but his own attorney general, Letitia James, had other ideas. Instead, she approached an external legal firm and granted them full subpoena powers and her authority to go digging. The mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, says Cuomo was not treating the situation seriously enough, and should go. The pair are rivals, but it still must hurt. Other members of the state legislature have also expressed unease about alleged (non-sexualised) bullying, and Cuomo has few vocal supporters. His accusers say he will not take full responsibility for his actions.

Cuomo certainly no longer appears to be the polar opposite of Trump in his attitude to women. Unhelpfully for Cuomo, the details of his past association as a legal adviser to the Trump organisation in the 1980s have been dredged up. Just as Mario had been one of the elder Trump’s legal advisers in the 1960s, so too was Andrew close to Donald.

It was natural that the Trumps, as important real estate developers, should have dealings with the preeminent political family in the city and state of New York, and Mario Cuomo was a senior member of the state administration before his time as governor from 1983 to 1994, and one of the few Democrats to have a national profile and a remote chance of challenging Ronald Reagan and later George HW Bush for the presidency.

There’s no reason to think that there was anything untoward about the relationship between Fred and Donald Trump, and Mario and Andrew Cuomo, but maybe these New Yorkers, all the descendants of relatively recent immigrants from Europe, had more in common than they realised.

In 1989, for example, Trump was Mario Cuomo’s largest corporate political donor – some $25,000, and a 1992 profile published by Village Voice gives a taste of the NYC scene the time:

“A few nights after the fundraiser, Donald went to a second, private, Cuomo affair – Andrew Cuomo’s birthday party at a midtown pub. The party was cohosted by one of Andrew’s closest friends, Dan Klores, the fast-talking aide to public relations czar Howard Rubenstein, who had handled the Trump account for years.

But Donald barely spoke to Klores at the party, instead huddling with Andrew for a half hour. Andrew would later claim that it was the first time he’d ever met Trump – his way of minimizing the client relationship that had a transparently troubling side to it. It was just one more rhetorical Cuomo ploy – hiding a compromising business arrangement behind the supposed detachment of personal distance.”

Nor are the Trumps the only dynastic connection the Cuomos has picked up. Andrew did very well for himself by marrying Kerry Kennedy in 1990. As a daughter of Robert Kennedy and niece of JFK, this was tantamount to marrying Democrat royalty, and it undoubtedly brought some very welcome fresh connections to Cuomo’s already full Rolodex. Kennedy, a human rights actitivist, thought herself fortunate to have landed this “hunk” with political ambitions of his own, and they had three daughters before divorcing in 2005. The Kennedy-Cuomo sisters are blessed, or possibly not, with a near-aristocratic political surname, rivalled only by the offspring of Julie Nixon and David Eisenhower.

With his then wife, Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, at the launch of her book ‘Speak Truth to Power’ in October 2001 (Getty)

Even if the current misconduct allegations had never been thrown at Cuomo, the gilt was already starting to peel from the statesmanlike portrait. One way or another, a gross under reporting of deaths from Covid-19 in New York State care homes was uncovered, with a 50 per cent under reporting. Congress member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a prominent Democrat complained: “Thousands of vulnerable New Yorkers lost their lives in nursing homes throughout the pandemic. Their loved ones and the public deserve answers and transparency from their elected leadership, and the secretary to the governor’s remarks warrant a full investigation.” That too is now the subject of inquiry, by the FBI among others.

More locally, but no less problematic, New York State is what Cuomo describes as “functionally bankrupt”, with a $10bn deficit, even bigger than the one he inherited and pledged to cut back in 2010, though the pandemic is to blame for much of it. New York’s underground system and its airports are other headaches, and the Cuomo administration has not been free of corruption allegations of its own.

He also tried and failed to establish Amazon’s second HQ in the state (though it was not his fault they were scared away). It is all a disappointment, given that Cuomo took over from two problematic Democrat predecessors, Eliot Spitzer and David Patterson. Now, facing re-election next year, Cuomo is also turning into something of a liability.

Cuomo (C) speaks with former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (L) as the then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump looks on during an event to mark the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks (AFP/Getty)

Perhaps “tragedy” is too big a world for what has happened to Cuomo, but there is more than a hint of promise unfulfilled. His father was teasingly nicknamed “the Hamlet of the Hudson” because of his agonising over the Democrat nomination for president in 1984, 1988 and 1992. His son looks like never again enjoying the exquisite pain of deciding if he should run for the highest office. New York, state and city, has turned out some remarkable politicians – the two Roosevelt presidents (Theodore and Franklin), Al Smith, La Guardia, John Lindsay, Nelson Rockefeller, Ed Koch, Harvey Milk, Rudi Giuliani, AOC, as well as the Trumps and the Cuomos, and it remains a substantial political base. Were it not for his character flaws Andrew could have run in 2020 or 2024, and won.

It would have been a remarkable story for a boy from Queens, whose grandparents ran a grocery store, a warm rendition of the story of the American dream. He was, or appeared to be, a feminist and defender of women’s rights (which annoyed some in his Catholic faith), he stopped fracking in the state, he stood for equal LGBT+ treatment and single sex marriage, he was progressive and he made his state one of the most restrictive for gun ownership. He might have done much more good had he made it to the White House. Maybe, though, it was just as well that he didn’t.