Scores Soon To Be Settled

The full weight of New York’s political establishment bears down on Andrew Cuomo.

 

Bob McManus 

Andrew Cuomo’s fall from national grace has been abrupt, profound—and well-earned. Non-New Yorkers surprised by this don’t understand just how he brought it upon himself, or how many people have been waiting decades to settle scores with him.

Their time arrived with a report from state Attorney General Letitia James, accusing Cuomo of sexually harassing current and former staff members, including a state trooper assigned at his specific request to his security detail, and others—11 women in all.

And so it seems that the governor’s time has arrived as well. If he lasts another week, it’ll be a surprise to many. Longtime allies are peeling off, and the state assembly has set August 13 as the delivery date for a report on an array of allegations arising out of an impeachment probe.

Cuomo has been an imposing figure in New York politics since he arrived in the capital city with his newly elected father, Governor Mario Cuomo, in 1983. He was 25, liked what he saw, and has pretty much never left town. Having been elected governor in his own right in 2010, he was widely expected to seek a fourth term next year.

But most of the rest of America knows Cuomo from his pandemic presentations—more than 100 days of daily Covid-19 briefings, beginning in March 2020. They were informative, occasionally somber, but often funny—and hugely optimistic. For a brief moment, he was the nation’s pandemic prince. There was even talk of his supplanting Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket.

But this was a sugar high, fading quickly when the state’s true Covid casualty numbers—still among the nation’s highest—began rolling in. And soon it was reported that the governor’s staff had cooked those statistics to understate vastly the number of elderly New Yorkers killed by Covid after infected patients were forced from hospitals back into nursing homes.........

It was always all about Andrew, and that kind of behavior adds up. Now his onetime allies are recalibrating in anticipation of a new governor, Kathy Hochul of Buffalo, and a general election in 2022. Cuomo seems destined for the shadows; it’s a fate he has courted for years..........To Read More....

My Take - Schadenfreude!