The Cuomo Legacy

A ndrew Cuomo’s sleaziness, mendacity, and entitlement created so many scandals that the one that actually brought his downfall — repeatedly groping women in and around the office — was not nearly the most important among them. But Cuomo can also take credit for some major accomplishments, and he was New York’s most consequential governor in generations. When he was widely regarded as young, green, and trading on his father’s three terms as governor, Cuomo flamed out spectacularly in his first bid to succeed Mario as the suzerain of Albany in 2002, when he was outclassed by the much more senior fellow Democrat Carl McCall. McCall, who would have been the first black governor of New York, went on to lose (as Cuomo’s father, Mario, had) to Republican George Pataki while Cuomo regrouped and paid his dues. First, in 2006, he was elected state attorney general, succeeding Eliot Spitzer when Spitzer became governor. After a comical series of scandals that took out first Spitzer (in 2008), then Spitzer’s lieutenant governor and successor David Paterson (who declined to run for election after finishing Spitzer’s term), Cuomo had no serious competition when he finally ran again in 2010.

It was when he was running for reelection in 2014 that his famous, weird, but often fortuitous feud with New York City mayor Bill de Blasio began; after the two appeared to be allies for that year, which was de Blasio’s first in office, Cuomo turned bitterly against de Blasio. Cuomo blocked de Blasio’s plan to increase taxes on the richest New Yorkers in order to fund pre-K. He opposed de Blasio’s push for a $15 minimum wage. He nixed de Blasio’s plan to mandate a five-cent charge on plastic bags. Later he reversed himself on all of these positions, proving his principles were flexible. But most thrilling, Cuomo ardently backed charter schools, which Governor Pataki had created in the state in 1998 with an eye on improving the woeful state of public schools in New York City. De Blasio would have crushed the charters if he could have; Cuomo vastly expanded them, and today more than 100,000 of New York City’s roughly 1.1 million public-school pupils are enrolled in charters.

Moreover, Cuomo built like no governor in my lifetime. After the completion of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge connecting Staten Island to Brooklyn in 1964, “public improvement” became something of an oxymoron in New York. Few major projects opened in the next five decades. But Cuomo did manage to direct some of the gushers of tax revenue flowing into the downstate economy to useful, lasting projects, though in some cases he was merely lucky enough to be the one who oversaw the final phases of development. At 34th Street and 11th Avenue, presaging the privately built neighborhood now known as Hudson Yards, Cuomo’s MTA in 2015 opened the first new subway station in 25 years (at a breathtaking cost of $1.7 billion). The long-running joke that was the Second Avenue subway, a project that had been in development since the 1920s, finally came into existence (well, one-fifth of it, anyway) and opened on January 1, 2017 (at a ludicrous cost of $4.5 billion). Cuomo tore down the old Tappan Zee Bridge and replaced it with a beautiful new one, opened later in 2017, at an absurd cost of $4 billion (then renamed it after his dad). The renovations of both JFK ($13 billion) and LaGuardia ($8 billion) Airports are well under way; there are now gleaming new terminals in both hubs. The link between Grand Central Terminal and the Long Island Rail Road ($11 billion) is due to open next year. The sparkling Moynihan Train Hall, a $1.6 billion improvement of the nation’s busiest rail hub, Penn Station, opened on New Year’s Day, and more Penn Station renovations are coming. Whether any of this could have been done less expensively is worth discussing, but for a change New Yorkers have something other than social-services spending to show for their tax dollars. You’d have to go back many decades to find another governor with as much to brag about as Andrew Cuomo. Certainly Mario Cuomo’s 12-year administration left almost no lasting improvements, though the first Cuomo did not have nearly as much money to play with.

All of this should be remembered alongside Andrew Cuomo’s egregious and outrageous flaws, many of which came into sharp relief just in the past 15 months. Cuomo’s March 25, 2020, order that nursing homes accept COVID-19 patients (not rescinded until May 11) now looks like possibly the single most catastrophic move made by any American politician during the pandemic, and Cuomo proceeded to lie about it and cover up to understate the consequences of his blunder — even as he was entreating publicly paid staffers to work on a memoir bragging about his pandemic management for which he was paid a ludicrous $5.1 million. To this day, New York’s official record understates the true number of COVID-19 deaths by 11,000, a trick Cuomo managed by simply not including all of the people who died of the virus before they could reach the hospital. Also not included are some unknown number of New Yorkers who died of the virus but were not tested for it because tests were so scarce in the early weeks of the pandemic. The state’s own data, as released to the federal government, show 54,000 COVID deaths, yet the state claims only 43,000. New York and its close cousin New Jersey remain the two states with the highest death tolls in the nation.

Against all of this carnage and mendacity, which occurred while the media were flinging wreaths at Cuomo’s feet and declaring themselves “Cuomosexuals,” Cuomo’s serial mauling and pawing of women looks relatively minor. But even Cuomo finally grasped the scale of the disgust with his sexual harassment. Minutes after his lawyer patiently explained to the press, “The governor did not mean to grope her” and “If he touched her rear end, he certainly didn’t mean to do it,” Cuomo honorably fell on his sword, crying out, as his father had the night he was dispatched by Pataki in 1994, “Excelsior!” The state’s motto — higher! — is now the political epitaph for two generations of humiliated Cuomos.