New York governor Andrew Cuomo was reeling. The state’s attorney general, Letitia James, had released the results of a nearly five-month-long investigation into accusations of sexual harassment against him earlier than expected, catching the governor off guard. Worse, the results were damning: A 168-page report, assembled from interviews with 179 witnesses, described Cuomo’s offensive behavior with 11 women, including a state trooper assigned to his security detail. So the governor and top staffers met to craft a response—but also to vent their anger that Cuomo was the one who had been wronged. “The tone was, ‘I can’t believe Tish did this to us. She stabbed us in the back. It’s so unfair!’” a Cuomo associate who was told of the discussion says, still incredulous three weeks later. “The king of backstabbing complaining about an attorney general undermining people? Let’s review when Cuomo was A.G.—what happened to Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson? It’s a total lack of self-awareness.”
Cuomo’s 10 years and (almost) eight months in office ended at 11:59 p.m. on Monday, after he decided to resign rather than fight an expected impeachment by New York’s state legislature. It was the abrupt and ugly conclusion (maybe) of an incomparable four-and-a-half-decade political career. Beginning at 19, with his work as an aggressive aide on his father’s losing 1977 campaign for mayor of New York City; continuing as the manager of Mario Cuomo’s first winning campaign for governor and a top adviser on the other two, and as Mario’s enforcer and righthand man during most of those three terms; and including both a detour to Washington as HUD secretary under President Bill Clinton and his own disastrous first run for governor in 2002, followed by a comeback win in a 2006 run for state attorney general, Cuomo has been a political animal his entire adult life. No one had ever arrived in the governor’s office with greater preparation.
How he deployed that knowledge and his talents is what made Cuomo so fascinating and, ultimately, frustrating. The psychodrama with his father—in particular, Cuomo’s belief that Mario’s political career was gravely wounded by the unrealistic expectations of liberal Democrats, and what he viewed as Mario’s preference for political poetry over cold-blooded dealmaking—was a huge influence on Cuomo’s determination to be a centrist, at least by New York’s standards. Cuomo could be charming and nuanced; no one had a deeper understanding of the complex web of relationships and egos in state politics. “There’s no question that he was capable of tremendous political dexterity,” says Howard Wolfson, who dealt with Cuomo as a deputy mayor under Michael Bloomberg. “When he was at his best, he had a real LBJ-style ability to cut deals and create alliances and move legislation through the process. But for him to succeed, was it necessary to create the sort of culture that he did—the bullying and the toxicity?”
Cuomo was often right that to get things done in state government—particularly the wildly dysfunctional Albany he inherited in 2011—it was better to be feared than loved. But his Machiavellian mix came out on the dark side too often. “He has run the same play over and over again,” a Democratic strategist who has known the governor for years says. “There’s only one thing that motivates Andrew Cuomo: power, the constant projection of power, and nothing else. It’s not about money. And even this recent stuff, it’s not about sex, actually—it’s about how he holds power over people.”
There has been no more vociferous critic of Cuomo than Democratic state senator Alessandra Biaggi, on everything from policy to political tactics. Yet even Biaggi says she has sympathy, to a degree, for Cuomo. “He is unfit to lead the state,” Biaggi says, “but I do feel sorry for him. It’s very tragic to me to have somebody with this much talent, this much skill, this much opportunity, this much advantage—to take it all and just waste it. What could have been if he was just a decent, ethical person who didn’t have this obsession with controlling other people?”
Cuomo remains far more popular with state voters than he does with the state’s media class, and his team can point to a long list of the administration’s accomplishments, from tighter gun laws to rebuilt airports to marriage equality. All of which is fuel for the governor’s continuing argument that he was brought down by politics, James wants his job, and her conclusions were biased and preordained. But it wasn’t politics that made Cuomo put his hands on that state trooper.
Did it have to end this way? Was Cuomo’s bruising, manipulative style going to sink him eventually, or did he squander his gifts and blow his chance? “Well, ‘squander’ suggests that he had a choice,” says Kathy Wylde. She is president of the Partnership for New York City, a formidable organization of business interests that gave Cuomo important support for most of his time in office. Wylde’s history with Cuomo stretches back considerably longer. “I’ve known him since he was 20, and he just has no perspective, no real self-perception. When he hits a brick wall, he stops. But nothing else stops him. I don’t think he has the capacity to do anything differently.”
Three years ago I spent a long afternoon sitting in Cuomo’s Midtown office. By that point he had already earned a tall pile of political enemies. Still, he was cruising toward reelection. At one point the conversation turned to whether Cuomo could outdistance his father by winning a fourth term in 2022—and his ambition to go down as the greatest governor in New York’s history. He’s going down, all right—far sooner and more ignominiously than he had planned.
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