Governor Cuomo is being tossed about in a sea of scandals. Should he try to ride out the storm?
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has been under fire on several fronts: a furor was ignited last month when his administration admitted it significantly underreported the state's COVID-19-related nursing home deaths. In response, federal authorities have launched a criminal investigation.
Cuomo now finds himself besieged by #MeToo allegations. Last week, Lindsey Boylan, a young woman who worked for the governor, alleged in a Medium post that Cuomo made unwanted advances to her, including kissing her on the lips. A few days later, Charlotte Bennett, another former aide to the governor, came forward to report that Cuomo said some things to her which she understood to be a sexual proposition, and which made her exceedingly uncomfortable. State of New York Attorney General Letitia James's office is investigating these two allegations of workplace sexual harassment. A third young woman, Anna Ruch, who is not employed by the state, also has come forward to report that Cuomo touched her in a way that made her feel uncomfortable at a wedding reception in 2019. Ruch's story includes a photo, seemingly of the incident in question, which shows Cuomo with his fingers on the back of her neck; her facial expression conveys her dismay.
In the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg examines Cuomo's situation. She notes that the nursing home allegations haven't damaged Cuomo's standing in the state:
A recent Morning Consult poll, taken after reports of the nursing home deaths but before last week’s sexual harassment allegations, showed that 57 percent of New York voters, and 81 percent of Democrats, still approved of him. The governor is loathed by much of New York’s progressive political class, many of whom were astonished to see him transformed into a Resistance hero last year. But there’s little sign yet that his constituents have abandoned him.
My guess is that if this scandal had broken a few years ago, high-profile Democrats would have felt no choice but to call for Cuomo’s resignation. Since then, however, a few things have happened. After the killing of George Floyd and last summer’s protests, the locus of our culture wars shifted from sex to race. Tara Reade made allegations against Joe Biden which got national attention but turned out to be full of inconsistencies. And most significantly, among many Democrats, there’s tremendous bitterness toward those who pressured Al Franken to leave the Senate in 2018 after he was accused of grabbing several women’s butts...Meanwhile, many Democrats are sick of holding themselves to a set of standards that Republicans feel no need to try to meet. Twitter is full of people demanding that the party not “Franken” Cuomo, and pointing out that Republicans are taking no steps to investigate alleged sexual harassers in their own ranks, including the freshman congressman Madison Cawthorn. At a certain point, making sacrifices to demonstrate virtue, in the face of an opposition that has none, makes a lot of Democrats feel like suckers.
Just a few thoughts. What makes the sexual harassment allegations seem more serious is that there are multiple ones. An isolated he said, she said, incident perhaps could be chalked up to a misunderstanding. But several of them, from different people, not so much. I get the resentment at the seeming double standard. But if it's affecting Cuomo's ability to govern, and sucking all the attention away from issues such as the pandemic, then resigning is probably the right thing to do. One question in my mind though, why are these issues just now coming to light?
ReplyDeleteAbout the nursing home scandal, I don't see that there was a viable alternative in place to sending recovering Covid patients back to nursing homes, if space was needed in acute care for ones still critically ill. Ideally, there should have been convalescent care facilities for recovering but possibly still contagious patients. But I don't know how they would have done that. And in retrospect it sounds as if most of the spread in the nursing homes was from the community.
If misreporting the death statistics from the nursing homes was deliberate, that of course is another subject. All in all, it seems like there are quite a few trust issues with Cuomo's leadership. I'm assuming the lieutenant governor would take over if he resigned?
If Margaret is reading this, I hope she will comment, since she lives in NY.
My first coherent thought is that the wedding-reception incident does not qualify as "sexual harassment," no matter how obnoxious or inappropriate Cuomo's behavior may have been. It's not news, but rather celebrity gossip.
ReplyDeleteAl Franken was pressured to resign from the US Senate for something much more innocent than this. I notice that Kristen Gillibrand, who led the charge on Franken, is now just calling for "an investigation."
ReplyDeleteI guess it's different when you have to attack a politician from your own state. Cuomo WAS elected governor so SOMEONE must like him. Apparently this principle thing only goes so far.
DeleteJim - I don't know whether the Michelle Goldberg column in the NY Times is accessible to you, but she covers the Gillibrand angle. She states that anger from Democrats over the Franken resignation may be one of the major reasons her presidential candidacy in 2020 never achieved liftoff.
DeleteThere were other reasons than Franken why Gillebrand didn't achieve liftoff. Or rather, Franken was part of the other reasons, which were her particular brand of identity politics.
Delete"It seems clear that the #MeToo allegations are going to generate more heat than the nursing-home-reporting scandal."
ReplyDeleteYes, that's a point to ponder. Actually THE point.
I find myself increasingly impatient with women outing badly behaved men on TV. Most of these men enjoy the furtivity (?) of their actions, the thrill of reluctance, and the power of shocking.
Instead of overlooking these incidents and letting them fester for months to years, women need to understand how to knock back this kind of behavior with a little imagination.
Unwanted smooching? "Wow! You're a great kisser! But hang on a sec while I take out my dentures so we'll be more comfortable."
Say it so others can hear for extra points so they can't fire you without everybody knowing why.
Worked for me for 20 years.
Jean, I agree with you that it's better to address it at the time than to let it fester over time. I like your idea about the dentures!
DeleteWhile I think that women who have been sexually propositioned have a case, and those who have been touched and kissed after they have said they did not want to be touched or kissed have a case, I am not sure just touching and kissing qualify as sexual harassment.
ReplyDeleteWomen in parish ministry touch and kiss me all the time. Maybe they think of me as their grandfather. I am not very comfortable with it. When I was in the public mental health system none of my women colleagues ever did any of that. They would have considered it unprofessional. They respected me highly and I respected them highly. We didn't need to get personal. Maybe there is something about the marketing of the parish as a family that encourages such familiar behavior. Maybe there is something about politics and about show business that brings out false familiarity too.
As for resigning, Trump has so lowered the national norms that no one needs to consider resigning any more.
ReplyDeleteHmm. After listening to how Cuomo used one woman's sexual assault as a come-on, I was pretty creeped out. That moves the needle from "nuisance" to "predatory" for me.
ReplyDelete