Final summer season, the three-term New York governor Andrew Cuomo was thought of, in political phrases, lifeless and buried after one of the crucial spectacular falls from grace in fashionable US politics.
A yr earlier, he’d been an empathetic pandemic hero, providing New Yorkers a measure of confidence within the state’s response to the early waves of Covid-19 whereas the US president, Donald Trump, floundered or blustered his manner by way of day by day briefings because the terrifying demise toll mounted.
However then Cuomo was compelled to resign from workplace, leaving carrying a cloak of scandals starting from allegations of sexual harassment leveled by 11 girls, together with a member of his safety element, to a cover-up of the variety of aged individuals who died in New York nursing houses from Covid-19.
But now – at 64 and out of workplace – Cuomo is attempting to flip the narrative once more and claw again his repute and possibly, simply possibly, his political profession. “I’m not disappearing,” he instructed New York journal final yr and he would possibly simply imply it.
Over the previous a number of weeks, Cuomo has accelerated a marketing campaign of picture correction that some imagine is a prelude to efforts towards political rehabilitation. With $16m left over in his vacated governorship re-election marketing campaign coffers, he’s acquired funds to finance the undertaking.
At a Brooklyn church final week Cuomo gave his first public speech since leaving workplace. In an occasion that appeared and felt rather a lot like old school retail politicking, Cuomo took purpose at those who had introduced him down. “The actions towards me have been prosecutorial misconduct,” the Bible-quoting Cuomo stated within the speech. “They used cancel tradition to successfully overturn an election.”
The speech got here after the launch of a digital and tv promoting marketing campaign that’s blaring the identical message: Cuomo is the sufferer, unfairly pushed from workplace.
In America’s topsy-turvy politics, the place chaos and division appear frequent foreign money on either side of the political divide, even his critics are loth to rely him out.
“The nation elected Donald Trump, so all bets are off,” stated Sonia Ossorio, president of New York Metropolis’s Nationwide Group for Ladies. “It’s the wild, wild west of politics proper now throughout the nation. By way of private redemption each human being is entitled to hunt it.
“Information protection focuses on politics as a sport,” Ossorio added “which diverts consideration from what issues: maintaining our authorities trustworthy.”
The query is, does anybody care apart from Cuomo, and maybe his brother Chris who was fired from CNN for his involvement in his elder sibling’s harm management efforts?
“The trouble you’re seeing is extra targeted on a public rehabilitation than pursuit of a particular political viewers,” stated Evan Nierman, a disaster administration knowledgeable. “The probability that New Yorkers are going to leap again on the Cuomo prepare after it was derailed in such an explosive vogue is unlikely.
“Andrew Cuomo is the form of one that doesn’t like not being in management. He likes directing issues, shaping coverage and outcomes, not being on the receiving finish of that. So he’s in search of alternatives to affect his personal future and take again a measure of management.”
Final month, his legal professional, Rita Glavin, repeated proclamations of his innocence and challenged an impartial report from the state legal professional basic’s workplace that concluded “the governor sexually harassed various state staff by way of unwelcome and undesirable touching, in addition to by making quite a few offensive and sexually suggestive feedback.”
The central theme of Cuomo’s argument is that the New York legal professional basic, Letitia James, who introduced and later dropped out of a run for governor, was politically motivated. Glavin has stated she plans to file a misconduct grievance about James to an legal professional grievance committee and has claimed James’s workplace had “directed an completely biased investigation”.
4 district attorneys appeared into bringing expenses however declined to take action, every stating rigorously that their determination was not based mostly on the credibility of his accusers. A fifth, from the Manhattan district legal professional’s workplace, dropped its inquiry.
It’s a crack within the door that Cuomo could imagine he can lever open by reinterpreting, with assist of the marketing campaign battle chest, the conclusions of James’s investigation.
The previous governor has had conspicuous Manhattan conferences with the previous New Jersey governor Chris Christie and New York’s mayor, Eric Adams. Earlier than the largely Black congregation in Brooklyn, Cuomo provided a defiant and indignant interpretation of his state of affairs.
“God isn’t performed with me but,” he continued. “I’m blessed, I’ve many choices in life and I’m open to all, however on the query if I’m at peace, no I’m not. However I don’t wish to be at peace, and by the best way I don’t suppose you have to be at peace both.”
His legal professional has put it extra merely, telling a radio interviewer that Cuomo is “not going to let this go, as a result of he can’t”.
However his efforts provoked a pointy response. “As a substitute of accepting accountability, serial sexual harasser Andrew Cuomo continues to problem the accounts of victims,” read a statement from a gaggle of 9 girls’s rights and advocacy organizations, together with Eleanor’s Legacy, Amplify Her and Ladies of Coloration for Progress.
Members of the Sexual Harassment Working Group – an Albany-based group of state authorities staff who’ve skilled office sexual harassment or assault stated Cuomo was “utilizing taxpayer {dollars} to fund his victim-shaming marketing campaign after a number of investigations uncovered him for what he actually is: a serial sexual harasser who fostered a poisonous, hostile work atmosphere”.
The response broadly tallies with public opinion polls. A Sienna Faculty ballot printed final month discovered that 52% of Democrats stated they believed he sexually harassed a number of girls, and stated they believed James by a margin of 2-to-1 when she concluded he was a serial sexual harasser. Eighty per cent stated he’d made the appropriate determination to resign.
“New Yorkers will not be able to forgive and neglect relating to Cuomo,” stated Steven Greenberg, a Siena Faculty pollster.
However the former governor, who has additionally spent $1.8m on authorized and public relations bills that embody resisting efforts by an ethics fee to claw again greater than $5m he obtained for a ebook about his dealing with of the pandemic, stays set on rehabilitation.
He instructed Bloomberg final month that he had not resigned as a result of he did something incorrect – however as a result of he didn’t wish to be a distraction. “I’m nonetheless targeted on speaking what occurred right here. As a result of as a precedent, it needs to be uncovered.”
Nor would he rule out a future run for workplace.
“He’s looking for a strategy to remind individuals of what he thinks they need to take into consideration him,” stated Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic pollster and former political scientist.
Cuomo, he stated, was looking for one thing that folks can be ok with. In opposition to him are voter tendencies towards three-term governors and that the accusations towards him are “the very issues New Yorkers and People have issues with”.
“He’s acquired to discover a strategy to clarify who he was as governor and make it plausible earlier than individuals will give him the chance,” Sheinkopf says. “This isn’t a man who dies simply however he’s fairly near moribund proper now.”