New York Governor Andrew Cuomo reappeared on television this week to apologize for being a creep.
Scratch that: Governor Andrew Cuomo reappeared on television to play a guy who was just sorry enough for being a creep for that to make the headlines and TV news clips about his performance. He choked up a little. There was an acknowledgement of pain, however unintentionally caused. He named one of the accusers. Maybe not a performance worthy of another Emmy, but I could see it nominated for a People’s Choice Award.
The governor's special apology show on Wednesday, nominally a coronavirus briefing, came a week after his first accuser’s account had appeared and his briefings had abruptly stopped and just a day after a third young woman came forward to accuse the three-term governor of acting inappropriately with her. Anna Ruch says that Cuomo tried to kiss her at a wedding. Her accusation differs from the other two because she had just met the governor, at a wedding he was officiating, and because a photographer captured the moment of greatest discomfort—Ruch’s face frozen in an expression of Do Not Want as he holds her face in his hands. Cuomo’s expression can best be described as “horny Tex Avery cartoon.” The New York Post ran it on its cover with the headline “Handsy Andy.”
The other two accusers are former aides. Charlotte Bennett alleges that Cuomo asked her inappropriate questions about her sex life when she was working for the state’s COVID task force. Lindsey Boylan says the governor subjected her to years of intimidation and harassment, including suggesting the two play strip poker, comparing her appearance to his ex-girlfriend’s, and an unwanted kiss while they were alone in a room on business. He’s denied Boylan’s allegation, since part of his defense is that he never touched anyone inappropriately, never mind what you see in the photo of him and Ruch, while offering a statement in response to Bennett that was more a denial than an apology, a “sorry if you were offended” dance-denial that didn’t seem to play well with anybody and that he repeated the substance of, while trying to make it sound more encompassing and less legalistic, at his staged press event on Wednesday.
Not to minimize Anna Ruch’s experience—what woman can’t relate to the uniquely uncomfortable feeling of an old weirdo getting fresh with her at a wedding?—but hers was the least serious of the three accusers. And yet, Ruch was the only accuser Cuomo singled out by name in his apology.
During the early days of the pandemic, Cuomo would frequently appear on television to play the role of “competent governor doing a great job of handling the pandemic.” His PowerPoint point presentations became a comforting shared cultural experience for many. Some compared them to FDR’s “fireside chats.” He talked frequently about his three twentysomething daughters. And the public ate it up, issuing adoring canticles in the form of theatrical late-night declarations of one’s “Cuomosexuality” and original songs that went viral on social media, songs that were a bit reminiscent of the pop songs rewritten to be Jesus-centric parodies I learned at Catholic summer camp. People referred to him as “Daddy.”
In the Cuomosexual community’s defense, New York’s governor stepped into a plus-sized comfort void left by then-President Trump’s baffling ineptitude during the early days of the pandemic. Cuomo’s comparatively calm, organized slide shows provided an alternative to the delusional chaos of Trump and the snide lying of his press secretary. What people wanted was the truth, information, an acknowledgement of a shared reality. Trump was unwilling to do even that.
But Cuomo’s public Ward Cleaver act upstaged the character of a man who, privately, was doing his own share of fucking up. In recent weeks, the public has learned what people who have covered, worked with, run against, or, hell, even paid close attention to Cuomo have known for years: that Governor Cuomo is a petty, vindictive bully with no qualms about mistreating people who dare cross him or, if you’re an attractive woman, dare spend time around him. A man who will threaten to “destroy” a professional acquaintance who didn’t agree to participate in a cover-up about nursing home deaths in the state he was supposed to be running. The women Cuomo was hounding were around the same age as his daughters. Bennett even made a point of telling the governor she’d played middle school soccer against one of his daughters, as a way of suggesting to him that he back off, which he did not.
Andrew Cuomo is not your dad. He’s your dad’s asshole boss who hits on you at the company Christmas party.
And once again, the public has been fooled by a deliberate TV act.
Armchair cultural analysts who didn’t vote for President Trump are quick to point out that Trump owes his career to The Apprentice producer Mark Burnett, who, for years, gave Trump the chance to play a powerful and competent business leader over and over again on TV. In reality, the Apprentice set wasn’t Trump’s real office. He wasn’t running the show. And he was a serial failure in business, not to mention widely disliked in New York. Rumored “Trump Tapes” from behind the scenes at The Apprentice purport to show the pretend mogul acting less like a boss and more like an insecure low-level Wall Street bro desperate to impress people with his racism and sexism. But the people in red states watching big strong businessman on TV didn’t know that.
But if it’s correct that many people who voted for Donald Trump couldn’t tell reality from reality TV, then Cuomo “fans” were similarly bamboozled, albeit by a more staid act starring an actual governor. Pandemic Cuomo was staging and starring in his own stripped-down version of The Apprentice, minus the celebrity co-stars and most of the overhead.
Because we keep falling for it, American democracy is more like a casting call than ever. Candidates win support because they put out cool videos or issue sassy clapbacks that go viral on Twitter. Part of the reason Ted Cruz is so annoying is that he forces the American public to watch him try to be a beloved celebrity despite having the charisma of overcooked peas. As a result, we’re electing people who are more interested in being stars than they are in getting anything done, and encouraging people who are already in office to take the path of least resistance—why actually govern competently when it’s easier than ever to trick people into believing you’re competent by simply appearing on TV and leaning into your Daddy attributes?
Governing is hard; having people believe that you are a leader without actually doing any positive leading requires much less work. Cuomo isn’t the only one cosplaying what his voters want rather than simply becoming it. Texas, for example, is rotten with politicians who perform toughness and demonstrate a capacity for triggering the libs but cannot govern and are not tough.
A younger generation of wannabe partisan celebrities waits in the wings. Take Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), who was one of the youngest persons elected to Congress ever, at age 25. Prior to his political career, Cawthorn was a campus-famous sex creep and brazen fabulist, who looks and speaks like the leader of a racist Southern fraternity in a film set in the 1960s, which is exactly how his voters think a congressman should look and speak. But any person who listens to him talk for more than 30 seconds, who listens to the words he uses, must only conclude that this man is a handsome idiot—Congress’ first himbo, if you will—and he has no business running a popsicle truck much less writing laws.
Unlike Cuomo, Cawthorn has apologized for absolutely nothing, and no one in his party cares, since Republicans gave up on even pretending to hold themselves to the standards they talk about and apply to others when they became the party of Trump. And, while the creepy, creepy stuff that women say that Cawthorn did happened while he was an undergrad, not a congressman, he was in school three years ago so these are hardly distant memories. Still, he’ll probably get re-elected, because he looks like he should.
Cawthorn isn’t the only aspirant influencer disguised as a politician.
Trump hired people to work for him based on the fact that he liked watching them on Fox News, a fact that was ridiculed by some of the same people who fell for Cuomo’s act.
On the left, out-of-staters poured millions into Amy McGrath’s doomed Senate campaign against Mitch McConnell, on the strength of a few Hollywood-quality videos of the candidate next to fighter jets. Perennial failed candidate Randy Bryce raised millions that could have helped other progressive candidates actually win on the basis of his viral mustache.
The difference here is that Republican voters seem impervious to the notion that television isn’t real, whereas Cuomo’s supporters are a bit more amenable when presented with facts that contradict what they saw when they were declaring their horniness for their governor. Cuomo’s approval rating has fallen from a pandemic high of 71 percent down to 38 percent (a number that is truly Trumpian).
This isn’t to say that politicians should stop appearing on TV to reassure the public, or to inform them of what’s going on. Of course political leaders should be good communicators and should be good on television; communicating is part of the job. But leadership is more than going on TV and I fear that unless Cuomo steps down or is brought down by a candidate who actually wants to lead, the endgame here is a supercharged army of behind-the-scenes bullies, Cawthorns, and vainglorious fame-seekers, producing their own reality shows that may as well be called Guy Who Has Any Business Running A State.
