Don't Let The Door Hit You On The Way Out, Andrew Cuomo
I wrote about the end of Cuomo-ism for The New York Times. Here's the column:
Back on Aug. 8, at 5:40 p.m., the retirement-aged nepo baby and disgraced former governor of New York tweeted at the much younger man who had soundly beaten him in June in the Democratic primary for mayor:
In case you forgot, I’m Andrew Cuomo, son of Mario, grandson of Andrea.
Welcome to the heavyweight bout, @ZohranKMamdani
This is a two-man race. You look tired already. It’s just the second round.
Three months later, with more New Yorkers casting a ballot than in any mayoral election since 1969, Mr. Mamdani knocked him out.
I was happy to see Mr. Cuomo go down, and not just because I found Mr. Mamdani, in both his policy goals and the campaign he ran, inspiring. The 67-year-old scion just felt like a Tammany Hall throwback: an entitled bully who views others exclusively as instruments of power or impediments to it. This type is not always, but often, old, white and male, one who refuses to acknowledge that his time is up.
Maybe this drubbing will finally knock some sense into him. (But I wouldn’t bet on it.)
Mr. Cuomo’s tenure as governor ended in disgrace in 2021 after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment. He resigned but continued to maintain that the accusations were meritless. In fact, in June, he said he regretted his decision to step down.
He took a shot at his successor, Kathy Hochul, suggesting she hadn’t really done anything of note in the past four years, and when asked about it, his spokesman offered a patronizing thank-you to Ms. Hochul for “holding the line” on major issues facing New Yorkers, as if she were not really the governor, but merely a place holder struggling to maintain Mr. Cuomo’s work.
This is in keeping with Mr. Cuomo’s supersize sense of entitlement, which manifests itself not just in his resentment that sexual assault allegations ended his governorship and insinuation that anyone else in the governor’s office is an inferior, but also in the way he repeatedly demonstrates without an iota of self-awareness that he is owed political power and authority. Apparently, he thinks it’s something you can inherit from your father.
When Mr. Cuomo was campaigning, he was caught parking his blacked-out Dodge Charger illegally and was issued speeding tickets four times in under three months. New Yorkers are unfortunately accustomed to the police parking wherever they want to. Mr. Cuomo was abusing authority he didn’t even have.
The small things, of course, were eclipsed heavily by the big things — the biggest of which was that Mr. Cuomo and the big-money landlord-and-finance types who were bankrolling him seemed to believe he should be handed the mayoralty because this is their city: They own it; the rest of us just live in it while paying increasingly exorbitant rents. He raised a lot of money from large donors and spent it on ads, and didn’t bother to break a sweat going out into the community, much less doing the sort of round-the-clock campaigning Mr. Mamdani did.
Worse, he channeled the sort of right-wing scaremongering about the state of the city, its putative criminality and how much worse it would inevitably get under Mr. Mamdani, while he insisted that he was the only person who could save it. It felt as if he wasn’t running for mayor of New York City to serve New York City residents, or even because he particularly wanted the job. Instead, he was doing New York City residents a favor.
His equally out-of-touch billionaire backers, who have barely seen the city beyond the windows of their S.U.V.s for years, thought they had hired the man for the job, but didn’t actually understand what the job was.
When voters failed to be sufficiently grateful for this in the primary, Mr. Cuomo (and his backers) decided the voters were wrong, and he ran as an independent. When asked if he should have done anything differently in the primary, he said he thought he should have done more on social media. He didn’t understand that Mr. Mamdani did not do well with voters only because he was on TikTok; he did well with voters because he spoke to issues they cared about and did it everywhere, including but not limited to TikTok.
Inasmuch as Mr. Cuomo had a message that didn’t involve only crime-doomerism and Islamophobia, it was that his opponent was young and less experienced. True enough. But at least that meant that voters could project their hopes onto Mr. Mamdani and his simple and direct message about a more affordable city. We knew exactly what we were going to get with Mr. Cuomo.
Remember when he spun up an ethics commission to clean up corruption in Albany, and then ultimately disbanded it after it began looking into him and his allies? His gubernatorial administration was sullied by scandals involving bribery and concerns over conflicts of interest, and he actively eschewed transparency, with his staff using private email to conduct state business.
When Andrew issued his “son of Mario, grandson of Andrea” tweet back in August, the first reply was: “sir this is a wendys.” While many New Yorkers have respect for Mario Cuomo, who had also been a New York governor, this line of argument, which amounts to, “Don’t you know who I am?” was not a persuasive case for Andrew Cuomo as mayor. Dynastic politics in America are not universally admired. The Kennedys had glamour and tragedy, but now they have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The Clintons ran aground. And the less said about the Bush clan the better.
So goodbye to Mr. Cuomo and Cuomoism: sharp-elbowed, retributive and transactional. The people who backed Mr. Cuomo and lost must now pay attention to what we the people of the city actually want, and give respect to Mr. Mamdani, the candidate who won. Mr. Mamdani has a friendly smile, but again and again he showed that he also can land a punch.
“I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life,” the new mayor-elect said on election night. “But let tonight be the final time I utter his name.”
You and me both, I thought.
If you're subscribed to my newsletter, you probably already knew how I felt about Cuomo, but hope you enjoyed the read anyway.
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Elizabeth