Damning reports about Cuomo's "culture of fear, harassment, and intimidation"--and governance by optics

It was quite a day yesterday for Gov. Andrew Cuomo, to quote Politico's Anna Gronewald;

As I was struck, but not entirely surprised, by how energetic he sounded after weeks of devastating news coverage, especially damning new reports in The New York Times and New York Magazine about a culture of fear, harassment and intimidation in his office.

He faces an inquiry from from state Attorney General Letitia James and an investigation by the Assembly, a precursor to impeachment, and a large number of state politicos, most recently Senators Chuck Schumer and Kristin Gillibrand, have called for him to step down.

I guess the thing that still gets me is why we needed to wait until 2021 for the deep dive anti-Andrew Cuomo pieces. Where was prestige media in 2020? 2019? 2018?

None of this was secret. None of it is new. His pathological bullying and failure have been with us since 2011.

— Ross Barkan (@RossBarkan) March 13, 2021

In New York

Rebecca Traister's New York article, Abuse and Power, comes with an important subtitle, "Andrew Cuomo’s governorship has been defined by cruelty that disguised chronic mismanagement. Why was that celebrated for so long?"

Indeed, the issue's not just the allegations of bullying and sexual harassment, or sexualized intimidation, but the cover-up of nursing home deaths from COVID and other failures of government. She writes:

Though the multiple scandals erupting in Albany seem to toggle between sexualized harassment stories and evidence of mismanagement, what is emerging is in fact a single story: That through years of ruthless tactics, deployed both within his office and against anyone he perceived as an adversary, critic, or competitor for authority, Cuomo has fostered a culture that supported harassment, cruelty, and deception. And while some have continued to defend Cuomo’s commitment to “creating the perception of strength,” and his mastery of “brutalist political theater” (as Mayor de Blasio’s former spokesman told the New York Times last month), his tough-guy routine has in fact worked to obscure governing failures; it is precisely what has permitted Cuomo and his administration to spend a decade being, to borrow Wertheimer’s assessment, both mean and bad at their jobs. As one former Cuomo staffer told me, “The same attitude that emboldens you to target a 25-year-old also emboldens you to scrub a nursing-home report.”

Alessandra Biaggi, a former Cuomo staffer now a State Senator, has some devasting details:

The job was a lot less beacon-of-progressivism-y than Biaggi had anticipated. She was focused on an immigration bill and on the Reproductive Health Act, which would codify Roe v. Wade as state law and expand access to abortion care. Biaggi and others believed that the law was finally going to pass in the wake of Trump’s victory; it was never even brought to the floor. At the time, she couldn’t quite figure out why. “Part of what makes Cuomo powerful,” she said, “is that there’s no information sharing. It allows him to evade responsibility; nobody really knows what’s going on.”

Edifice complex

Similarly,

Those beaten down by the vicious workplace were also depressed that none of their misery was in service of effective governance or better policy. In fact, many told me, there was little interest in policy. “It was policy-making like paint-by-numbers,” said one former staffer. “The goal was superficial, as opposed to changing people’s lives. It was heartbreaking.” That didn’t mean that policy didn’t get enacted, she said, but it was second to and in service of optics. “Someone from the inner circle would call and say, ‘The governor wants to go to Orange County. What can we announce?’ ”

So that's why Cuomo, for example, likes announcing things like the new Belmont arena.

Yes, Cuomo wants to cut ribbons:

Wertheimer, who put together the governor’s daily briefing book and said that Cuomo rarely even read policy memos, agreed. Cuomo and his senior staff were obsessed, said several sources, with the annual “State of the State” book, which showcased task forces, pilot programs, and funding commitments, some of which were only tenuously rooted in reality. “The whole endeavor seemed to be about size,” said one person who worked on it. “Like if you have a big book, it shows you’re going to do a lot of things.” 

In the Times

The New York Times article, For Some Women, Working for Cuomo Is the ‘Worst Place to Be’, similarly describes the "office as chaotic, unprofessional and toxic, especially for young women." The summary:

The workers, for the most part, said they did not personally witness overt sexual harassment. But many said they believed that Mr. Cuomo and other officials seemed to focus on how employees looked and how they dressed. Twelve young women said they felt pressured to wear makeup, dresses and heels, because, it was rumored, that was what the governor liked

One high-ranking current official and two former aides said they believed they had been denied opportunities because they did not dress in the preferred manner.... 

Some current and former aides called their time at the office a rewarding experience, praising the governor and criticizing how he had been portrayed by the news media.

An intriguing detail:

The current and former employees said that women — and particularly young women — encountered a variety of additional challenges in the office, starting with the hiring process, which several aides said favored women who are tall, thin and blonde.

In Vanity Fair

In Vanity Fair yesterday,  Michael Shnayerson wrote “I STARTED TO THINK, THIS IS A BAD GUY”: ANDREW CUOMO’S BIOGRAPHER ON THE GOVERNOR’S BRUTISH HISTORY, citing 12 hard truths about Cuomo, including:

• He had to win at any cost.
• The press was the enemy.
• He hated what he couldn’t control.

So this is why, of course, those FOIL requests are so hard to get fulfilled.

Shnayerson thinks Cuomo may not survive, but points out he has always prevailed in the past, without changing. And this hard truth is, well, intriguing, "At times, he followed the money":

A family friend in real estate bought hundreds of wooded acres called Sterling Forest, an hour north of New York City. As governor, Mario called for a highway interchange where none was needed; Andrew then worked as Sheldon Goldstein’s lawyer to turn the forest into thousands of homes. Very Chinatown. When that plan fell through, he and Goldstein, along with other investors, bought a savings and loan bank called Oceanmark, in Florida, and tried to squeeze a fortune from it. This was the mid-’80s, and the gambit failed too.