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Now that Andrew Cuomo is getting close to announcing he’s running for mayor, he needs a campaign slogan.
To judge by his stealthy actions so far, my guess is he’s going to run under a banner of “No Remorse, No Regrets.”
An ironclad refusal to look back would save him a ton of time and, more important, seal off his troubled tenure in Albany and its crashing finale.
After all, defending and explaining just the many lows of his 14-year record could turn into a full-time job.
That’s because the line “he’s got more baggage than a Red Cap” fits him like a glove.
Which means he doesn’t really have the option of hiding from his past. Ignoring the mistakes, or trying to whitewash them, will more likely sink Cuomo than elect him.
‘Desperate’ for Andy?
Yet based on his stealth campaign so far, I’d say he doesn’t believe that. He apparently believes Gotham is so desperate for new leadership that he can stitch together a winning coalition by citing his accomplishments on infrastructure and other areas without accepting responsibility for the staggering failures and scandals on his watch.
The problem with that approach is the one novelist William Faulkner famously identified: “The past is never dead. It’s not even entirely past.”
That certainly applies to Cuomo’s time in Albany, which came to a crashing end with his resignation in August 2021. Had he not resigned, he would have been impeached and convicted by the Legislature.
How does he explain that without saying it was just “politics”?
Moreover, many of the big problems plaguing New York today, such as the insanely lenient criminal justice laws, carry his signature.
So does congestion pricing, which should be a job killer for any politician who still supports it.
Cuomo also pushed for a moratorium on all “fossil fuel infrastructure,” including gas pipelines, and pledged the state would be 100% “renewable energy” by 2030.
It won’t be, but the foolish effort is a big reason why New Yorkers pay among the nation’s highest energy bills.
The former governor also was hit with a slew of sexual harassment allegations that ultimately forced his resignation, and I would expect that at least some of those cases will be resurrected on the campaign trail.
He won’t want to discuss them, but his opponents and many voters won’t give him that choice.
Shameful COVID move
Then there are Cuomo’s decisions during the height of COVID, especially his infamous Health Department order requiring nursing homes to take infected hospital patients.
It remains indefensible, yet he refuses to accept responsibility for any of the resulting deaths and still claims his order merely followed federal guidelines.
That’s not true, and his attempt to hide the number of actual nursing home deaths while he reaped $5 million for a book deal remains scandalous.
Arlene Mullin, who first alerted me to the order after her mother became infected and died in a nursing home in 2020, certainly hasn’t forgotten or forgiven Cuomo.
She said recently that “every time a radio station gives him an audience and he repeats that federal guidelines lie over and over without being challenged, I can collectively feel the pain of over 15,000 families!”
Cuomo, of course, is not given to humility, and certainly didn’t come from the Fiorello La Guardia school of politics. “The Little Flower” admitted an error once by saying he doesn’t make many, “but when I make a mistake, it’s a beaut.”
Cuomo (pictured above), in that sense, is more like Donald Trump, who almost never publicly concedes error.
That has hurt Trump among some voters but ultimately didn’t stop his historic comeback, and so far, polls are vindicating Cuomo’s approach. Even allowing for the fact that they are partly about name recognition at this point, his lead is impressive, with between 35% and 40% of those sampled consistently saying he’s their choice in a crowded Democratic primary field.
The most recent poll of likely voters, conducted for Tusk Strategies, shows Cuomo at 38% and scandal-scarred Mayor Adams at just 10%.
The survey’s surprise was that Zohran Mamdani, a state assemblyman from Queens who has the backing of Democratic Socialists, placed second at 12%. City Comptroller Brad Lander, another radical leftist, pulled just 7% and former Comptroller Scott Stringer got 5%.
Spitzer-Weiner lesson
Nonetheless, history offers caution flags about a Cuomo comeback.
Eliot Spitzer, the former New York governor who resigned in March 2008 after being caught in a prostitution scandal, tried to revive his career in 2013 by running for city comptroller.
He immediately jumped to a big lead over then-Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer in the primary, and just two weeks before Election Day was polling 48% to Stringer’s 33%.
But Stringer, in reference to Spitzer’s downfall, warned voters “not to make the same mistake twice,” and after unions rallied to his side, won by four points.
That same year, former Congressman Anthony Weiner tried a comeback from a sexting scandal that drove him from office. He was leading the mayoral primary pack until he was caught sexting again, and dropped out.
As for Cuomo, it is a measure of the city’s distress that many New Yorkers appear to be looking to him as a lifesaver. They see a city in dangerous decline and say he at least gets things done.
They are right, but that was also true of Spitzer and Weiner in their own ways, and yet Democratic voters ultimately abandoned them.
Like Cuomo, neither was trusted by his peers, and there were no tears when their comebacks failed.
None of this is to suggest Cuomo needs to prostrate himself and beg for public forgiveness. That’s unrealistic and wouldn’t work anyway.
But I do believe the only sensible way forward is for him to own his whole record and admit where he was wrong.
And he owes the nursing home families much, much more than that.
Absent signs that he is not the same person who crashed and burned before, I don’t believe Cuomo will deserve or get a second chance.
It all starts with trust. Cuomo had it, then squandered it.
Unless he rebuilds what he destroyed, even victory would prove hollow.
Unpatriotic Dem says it out loud
Most Washington Dems don’t have a clear agenda, but Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett is an unfortunate exception.
Talking about the Trump administration’s tariffs, she said recently, “The fact that I’m rooting for Canada and I’m rooting for Mexico a lot is really wild, but they are really the ones that are speaking truth to power right now.”
How’s that for patriotism?
Tabloid headliner
Reader Jonathan P. Kahn offers a clever thought about Gov. Hochul’s handling of public problems, writing: “She’s like a deer caught in the headlines.”