Is there no choice but Andrew Cuomo?
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 68
POLITICS DEP'T.
Failed Governor Wants to Be Unavoidable Mayor
HERE IS A STORY that ran in today's print edition of the New York Times:
Two influential New York City labor unions that backed Mayor Eric Adams in 2021 switched their support on Monday to former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, reflecting his growing dominance as the race for mayor accelerates.
The coveted endorsements came from the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council and Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, which represents building workers. Together, the unions have more than 125,000 members and typically spend millions of dollars supporting their chosen candidates.
Here is a story published by Politico today:
New York City’s campaign finance regulators rejected mayoral front-runner Andrew Cuomo’s request for around $2.5 million in public matching funds Tuesday, an embarrassing glitch for a bid predicated on experience and competence.
And here is a story from Bloomberg:
Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman has donated $250,000 to a super PAC supporting former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s mayoral race.
Ackman’s contribution to the pro-Cuomo PAC “Fix the City, Inc.” was disclosed in campaign filings and brings its total fundraising to more than $4.9 million in about six weeks. Cuomo has recently received $100,000 from philanthropist and Walmart Inc. heiress Alice Walton, $250,000 from media magnate Barry Diller and $100,000 from fashion designer Michael Kors.
Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor of New York State, is running to be the next mayor of New York City, where he reportedly recently got an apartment after decades living elsewhere. His competitive position is perceived, in the press, as one of "growing dominance," as the Times put it. His appeal to voters is described, in the press, as a matter of "experience and competence," as Politico put it—even, or especially, in the lead of a story about how he bungled some basic paperwork. Behind that, really, is the belief that Cuomo is too mean and too strong to be stopped, and that, by wishful and self-contradictory extension, he would be the right person to somehow simultaneously subdue the city's political progressives and lead the resistance against Donald Trump.
The quarter-million-dollar donation to Cuomo's political action committee from the anti-diversity crusader Bill Ackman suggests which of those two conflicting missions Cuomo's backers are really counting on him to carry out. Not only has Cuomo mostly avoided challenging Donald Trump—especially on the subject of the government's seizure of Mahmoud Khalil—but his whole comeback is an active rebuke to the MeToo movement. Despite spending millions of public funds on legal actions against his multiple accusers, leading one of them to drop a lawsuit against him, Cuomo has not poked any meaningful holes in the attorney general's investigative report from four years ago that concluded he had "sexually harassed a number of State employees through unwelcome and unwanted touching, as well as by making numerous offensive and sexually suggestive comments" and that he had created a "culture of fear and intimidation." He is just seeing what will happen if he acts as if the claims that made him resign as governor don't matter anymore.
There is, clearly if regrettably, an audience for this. The public consensus that a person known for being a sex creep is disqualified from public office seems to have been not just suspended but possibly even reversed; the idea of caring about evidence of sexual misconduct now plays in the polls and the press as deeply unsavvy. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who led the effort to push Al Franken out of office and criticized Cuomo on his way to resigning as governor, is offering gutless platitudes about second chances and leaving it "up to New York voters to decide."
Cuomo is operating on the same assumptions that led Donald Trump back to the White House: that vice is a form of power now, that his party is afraid of him, that rich people trust him to look out for them, and that his past misdeeds—in Cuomo's case not just the groping and leering, but his deadly botching of the Covid pandemic in nursing homes, his misuse of state funds to produce his book, his cynical demolition of the ethics system, his corrupt dealmaking to keep his own party out of power—are already built into his profile. Take it or leave it.
So there is an idea that the idea of Mayor Andrew Cuomo is irresistible, just as the idea of Governor Andrew Cuomo was once so inevitable that his earlier record of failure and treachery didn't matter. The Times noted that the two unions that just threw their money and organizing power behind Cuomo's mayoral campaign had "called for his resignation in 2021"—but now, it wrote, "like much of the city’s Democratic establishment, the unions appear more interested in making amends than antagonizing a famously sharp-elbowed leader who could have influence over city contracts and other priorities."
If he exerts a Trumplike ability to fascinate the press and intimidate his rivals, though, Cuomo is also a replica of Trump on practical matters: a terrible chief executive who most people don't really like. He's convinced politics-watchers and some segment of the voters that his meanness and lack of principles are the same thing as strength, yet fundamentally he's weak and babyish. He has Trump's contempt for the work of governing; last week he released a purported housing plan, for a city desperately in need of housing, that was laced with typos and gibberish and included a citation to ChatGPT. Then he blamed the errors on a disabled staffer who had supposedly used speech-to-text technology.
Is this the only available future for New York? In 2009, Michael Bloomberg got his fellow plutocrat Ronald Lauder, who'd led the successful effort to impose a two-term limit on the mayor's office, to support him in seeking an extension for a third term. Once Bloomberg was free to pursue his re-reelection, everyone presumed that the race would be no contest, and treated it as such. And then, on election night, it turned out that Bloomberg's Democratic opponent, Bill Thompson, finished only 50,597 votes behind him—in an election where hundreds of thousands of potential voters stayed home.
According to the latest Siena College survey, Cuomo is polling well ahead of the rest of the nine-person field in the Democratic primary contest. Thirty-four percent of people responding to the poll said he would be their first choice in New York's ranked-choice voting system, while the next-strongest candidate, Zohran Mamdani, got only 16 percent. In Siena's multi-round simulation of a ranked-choice election, though, Politico reported that it took seven rounds of eliminating other candidates before Cuomo mustered a winning margin of 54 percent in the eighth. And Politico noted that Cuomo had expected to see his polling lead increase after Mayor Eric Adams announced he was skipping the Democratic primary to pursue an independent candidacy in the general election, but instead his numbers stayed where they'd been before. The voters already know who he is and how they feel about him, and he's apparently not winning much new enthusiasm. Can he keep on making his candidacy discouraging enough to succeed?
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, April 14, 2025
★★★★ A medium gray morning darkened for a while and then yielded to an almost clear afternoon, with the sun casting shadows through the diaphanous remains of the clouds. The open upper deck of a tour bus was mostly full. Two figures trooped up the long slope to the top of the Great Hill clutching open serving bowls of picnic food. People in all directions were pursuing various activities, well spaced out, tranquil but lively. A hermit thrush walked up toward the path, showing its bright eye and speckled breast, then retreated to bathe in a water-filled crevice in the rock. Down by the Pool a mosquito hovered, blatant in the light, by the fissured wood of the handrail of the lower footbridge. People were trying out warm-weather fabrics, cuts, and colors. A beagle stood straining and pointing at the end of its long leash toward a squirrel, and passersby stopped and faced toward the beagle in turn. A cat went by in a backpack cat carrier, worn forward, its fur smushed against the clear plastic shield. Behind it came a low pug-faced dog so black and wide and sleek that it looked like a potbellied pig. Alongside an apartment building, huge flawless tulips unfurled petals like red flags. The adjacent emerging lilacs caught the nose before the eye.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast!
Tom Scocca
CLICK ON THIS box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast archive.
TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
GOT SOMETHING YOU need to justify to yourself, or to the world at large? Other columnists are here to judge you, but The Sophist is here to tell you why you’re right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from Prague Chapter Book Of Recipes, compiled by Marie Paidar and Blanche Kammerer, published in 1922, and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
STUFFED OLIVE SANDWICHES — Deviled olives, mayonnaise. Chop olives fine in a wooden bowl, mix with a little mayonnaise dressing and spread between thin slices of brown or wheat bread. Cut in triangles or circles. BERYL CISLER.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
