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There are many ways for New York City to turn the page on Mayor Eric Adams.
None of them need to include Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor now plotting a comeback as mayor. Yet he is working the phones right now, trying to persuade donors and New York Democrats to back him for mayor in a special election if Mr. Adams resigns in the wake of his recent indictment. It is up to Democratic leaders as well as voters to make it clear that Mr. Cuomo has no political future — not as a replacement for Mr. Adams and not in any vainglorious attempt to return to the governor’s office, either.
Before abjectly resigning in 2021, having been accused in a state attorney general’s report of sexually harassing 11 women, Mr. Cuomo did some things well as governor. He was adept at slashing through the state’s thicket of bureaucracy to finish big infrastructure projects. New York’s airports are much improved, for example, for which he deserves credit.
The press briefings he held during the pandemic defending public health measures, like mask mandates and vaccinations, were a balm of responsible leadership during Donald Trump’s presidency. They were undermined, however, when the public later learned that Mr. Cuomo’s officials had helped cover up the deaths from Covid of more than 4,000 people in nursing homes.
But after nearly four years of visionless mediocrity and cronyism, New York City needs a mayor who is deeply ethical and treats his staff with respect. It needs a mayor who puts the priorities of the public above his own political ambition and personal interest. It needs a mayor, in fact, who likes living in New York City.
None of that describes Mr. Cuomo, whose toxic bullying of state employees was legendary in Albany, whose trampling of fundamental ethics was continuous. If he does run for mayor, the public will need answers to some basic questions, including who is funding his campaign and when and how he established residency in New York City. For years, he lived in Albany and Westchester.
The 2020 report from Letitia James, the state attorney general, found Mr. Cuomo had sexually harassed numerous women who worked for him in his role as governor, then used the powers of that office to punish women who complained, an abuse of power. In a state with a normally functioning Democratic Party, a governor forced to resign amid serious allegations of sexual harassment wouldn’t be the first choice to replace a mayor under criminal indictment.
One former senior Cuomo aide has made this point publicly: “Maybe we shouldn’t go from a scandal-scarred mayor who may have to resign in disgrace to a scandal-scarred governor who did have to resign in disgrace,” Lis Smith, who served as a Cuomo spokeswoman in his 2018 campaign for governor, wrote on social media recently.
It is telling that many of the people who worked closely with Mr. Cuomo have told me they no longer believe he should be anywhere near public office, and they have described the former governor as a man largely driven by the pursuit of amassing power. If he runs for mayor, he is very likely to seize upon the current absence of leadership at City Hall and campaign on the idea that New York City needs a strong and steady hand that only he can provide.
It isn’t at all clear, however, that Mr. Cuomo’s authoritarian, vindictive approach to governance would work in the city.
He would lack many of the powers he enjoyed as governor. New York City tends to thrive when the many branches of its sprawling municipal government are in the hands of strong, independent-minded leaders. Mr. Cuomo would probably try to micromanage these agencies and rule them by fear, infighting and petty cruelty, as he governed in Albany — a style that could bring city business to a halt and drive talent into the private sector. Rather than effective government, New Yorkers could expect a mayor at war every day with city agencies, the City Council and a united bloc of progressives.
Voters, donors and others flirting with a Cuomo mayoralty may want to take a closer look at the former governor’s record before deciding whether supporting him is worth the baggage he brings.
Mr. Cuomo may be counting on a sentiment among some voters that the #MeToo era included excesses. But the sexual harassment allegations against him are voluminous and credible. So credible that the state’s taxpayers have already had to fork over more than $25 million to pay his legal bills related to the various scandals.
“Many, many good people will be ready to put this abuser in his place,” Lindsey Boylan, the first woman to publicly accuse Mr. Cuomo of harassment, said on X on Sept. 26. These women aren’t going away.
For all the current woes at City Hall, the culture of corruption in Albany goes back farther and is much worse and more deeply entrenched. Mr. Cuomo ran for office promising to change that culture. Instead, his closest aide, Joseph Percoco, was convicted on federal bribery charges. (One of Mr. Percoco’s three convictions was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.) Perhaps more insulting to voters was the Moreland investigatory commission, which Mr. Cuomo created in 2013, telling New York it was an independent body aimed at rooting out Albany corruption. Instead, he exempted himself from its investigations and shuttered it the following year.
And Mr. Cuomo’s performance during the pandemic was not the model of leadership he has portrayed it to be, as shown by the state’s public reports undercounting by more than 4,000 the number of nursing home residents who died from Covid. The undercount was an attempt to deflect responsibility from his disastrous decision in March 2020 to require nursing homes to accept patients who had tested positive for the coronavirus. More than 13,000 nursing home residents died of the virus in the first year of the pandemic.
From mid-March to mid-June of 2020, the virus killed nearly 23,000 people in New York City, giving it the second-highest mortality rate of any city in the world, according to an analysis by the Empire Center, a nonpartisan think tank. Mr. Cuomo made costly mistakes in the early days of the pandemic that probably contributed to the deaths of thousands of New Yorkers. In March 2020 he rejected a request by Mayor Bill de Blasio to order city residents to shelter in place and essentially shut down the city. Public health experts have said New York’s delayed response might have cost more than 17,000 lives.
Under Mr. Cuomo’s leadership, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority issued a memo that initially barred employees from wearing masks on the job. In the first year of the pandemic, he used state resources, including staff members, to help him write a book about leadership. A state ethics panel later ordered the governor to hand over the millions of dollars he received for writing the book, a decision Mr. Cuomo has appealed. Though he won an initial round in court, the issue is still tied up in appeals.
He was one of many public officials forced to make high-stakes decisions about public health with what was too often incomplete information about a novel virus while President Donald Trump was lying about the threat it posed. But there were other leaders who made better decisions at the time that most likely saved lives. If Mr. Cuomo runs for mayor as an expert manager, this record is deserving of scrutiny.
Also worth examining is Mr. Cuomo’s relationship to New York City, which is tenuous. As governor, he often delighted in torturing Mr. de Blasio, a habit that sometimes left the city’s residents wondering who was really in charge, like the time he closed the subway without bothering to inform the mayor.
A more serious question for Mr. Cuomo would be why he should lead a city whose needs he often treated as secondary, at best, even while relying on its votes come election season and on its tax dollars for projects in other regions of the state.
For years as the subway deteriorated, Mr. Cuomo denied running the system. When he finally got around to addressing mass transit, the efforts were modest compared with the resources he directed toward suburban commuter stations and on a project exceeding $11 billion to give Long Island Rail Road riders access to Manhattan’s East Side. City residents funded much of the bill.
Mr. Cuomo tried to shift the state’s Medicaid and public university costs to the city budget and often used state approval of vital city initiatives as a political negotiating tactic. In just one example, he delayed for years the implementation of a city speed camera initiative aimed at reducing pedestrian deaths.
Given this exhausting history, it makes sense that 55 percent of city residents and 52 percent of city Democrats said in a Marist Poll released on Oct. 4 that they didn’t want to see the former governor run for mayor. Mr. Cuomo may be thirsty, but voters don’t seem to have a burning appetite for his return.
Hopefully, Mr. Cuomo will pick up on what voters appear to be saying: New York is ready for something different.
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