Happy Belated Andrew Cuomo Day
After months of calls for his resignation, Andrew Cuomo finally announced his resignation on August 10th, 2021 (though it will not take effect for two weeks). Cuomo’s resignation is a victory for New Yorkers, Americans, and women everywhere but the fact that Cuomo was able to survive as long as he has is inexcusable. Not just because of these allegations (though that alone is enough to damn him for an eternity) but because of his record as a whole, both professional and personal. Cuomo has always been not just bad but uniquely bad.
Andrew Cuomo’s career began as the product of nepotism, his father Mario Cuomo (1932–2015) brought his son onto the political scene as a campaign manager during his 1983 gubernatorial run which he of course won. Mario proceeded to hire Andrew as one of his policy advisors. When Andrew outgrew this role he became a New York City district attorney(I’m sure with no help from his father.) Andrew held various political roles throughout the 80s and early 90s before being appointed by Bill Clinton to be Assistant Secretary for Housing and Urban Development, which quickly turned into him losing the assistant part.
As HUD Secretary, Cuomo is best remembered for contributing to what became the 2007 subprime mortgage meltdown. Cuomo had required that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy more private subprime mortgage backed securities that resulted in high risk lending which according to economist Arnold Kling, “promoted housing speculation not home ownership”. Cuomo again showed fiscal irresponsibility when he launched “Community Builders’’ without congressional appropriation. The “Community Builders” program involved the hiring of around 800 new HUD employees(paid up to $100,00) to promote the achievements of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. So basically Cuomo, an unelected politician arbitrarily decided to spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on a PR campaign.
In 2001 when the Clinton administration ended, Cuomo left the attorney general’s office. His next goal was to run for New York Governor but he didn’t make it past the Democratic primary. After the brief campaign, Cuomo set his sights a little lower and ran for New York State Attorney General. All things considered, Cuomo didn’t seem to do too bad a job here, he managed to not engage in any cartoonishly blatant corruption and even held then Governor Elliot Spitzer accountable for something. His performance in this role functioned as an effective stepping stone to run for Governor in 2010.
Cuomo’s 2010 run for Governor was smooth sailing, he had the support of President Obama throughout the Democrat primary and needless to say easily defeated the Republican contender. After assuming office it did not take long for Cuomo to resume his corrupt habits. On his first day he rightly renewed a Spitzer era executive order that prohibited gubernatorial appointees(the people Cuomo gives a job to) from donating to the Governor(because it is an obvious conflict of interest). However later on, a 2018 investigation by the New York Times revealed that Cuomo had accepted over eight-hundred-thousand dollars from his political appointees and over one million dollars from people who were connected to those appointees. (i.e. appointees’ spouses, friends, and family.)
This pattern of corruption of course continued throughout Cuomo’s tenure, for example the Moreland Commission, which Cuomo established to fight corruption was revealed by the New York Times to have been “directed away from investigations that could prove politically damaging” . Soon after this report, the commission was disbanded. Two years later, Cuomo’s Deputy Executive Secretary, Joseph Percoco and seven other Cuomo aides were indicted in a bribery investigation, Percoco had served as Cuomo’s campaign manager during his 2010 and 2014 gubernatorial runs.
Other than his terrible sexual misconduct scandals, Cuomo is most known for his response to COVID-19. At the start of the pandemic Cuomo was praised as the alternative to President Trump, he was rewarded with high approval ratings, abundant speculations on a presidential run, hours upon hours of free press(including cringe inducing, immoral segments with his brother Chris on CNN) and even an Emmy award for his daily press conferences(during which he regularly lied).
Despite these heroic portrayals, Cuomo’s response to COVID-19 was atrocious. On March 25, 2020 Governor Cuomo ordered that all nursing homes in New York accept “medically stable” patients from hospitals regardless of whether or not they had a confirmed case of COVID-19. Two months later this order was rescinded, but by that point Associated Press had counted over 4,500 infected patients who had been forced to return to nursing homes in New York. Cuomo defended the order by saying that he was simply following the CDC guidelines, but this is not true since the CDC said that patients should only be released if all infection control procedures could be adhered to. It doesn’t end there though.
On January, 28th, 2021, the New York Attorney General’s office released a report claiming that the New York State Department of Health had “undercounted the total deaths from COVID-19 within nursing homes by 50 percent”, by this point it was now believed that over 15,000 New Yorkers had died in nursing homes. Less than a month later, an audio recording of Melissa DeRosa (one of Cuomo’s secretaries) admitting that the Cuomo administration had “intentionally withheld” nursing home data was leaked. On October 23rd, 2020 Andrew Cuomo’s book “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic” was released.
None of this unfortunately was enough to bring Cuomo down, in order for him to be pushed out of office, several brave women had to come forward about sexual harassment they had suffered at the hands of Cuomo. On December 13, 2020 Lindsay Boylan a former aide to the Governor claimed that he had “sexually harassed me for years. Many saw it, and watched.” In the almost one month period between Lindsay’s allegation and Cuomo’s resignation 7 more women would come forward. Finally Cuomo announced his resignation, after doing everything in his power to discredit these women.
A year ago Andrew Cuomo was sold to us as the antithesis of Trump. He was an honest guy who cared about his constituents, he didn’t lie about COVID-19, he kept Americans informed every day with his press conferences. He wasn’t a pig like Trump, or incompetent like Trump. But the reality is in every way that mattered, Cuomo was little more than Donald Trump with a D next to his name. His long career was filled with nepotism, corruption, misogyny, and lies. Had he not received constant glowing coverage from just about every media outlet, perhaps he could have been pushed out before doing as much harm as he did.
