NY’s Disgraced Gov Cuomo: Let’s Not Pretend He Did Any REAL Good

After being made to resign by official accusations of sexual harrassment,NY Governor Andrew Cuomo is finding nuggets of forgiveness among some prominent Democrats. They claim that, except for,you know, the sex thing, he wasn't all that bad.In fact, he was kinda good. In fact, he did "a helluva job" , to quote President Biden.

The majority (though not all) of these semi-sympathizers are men. Most prominent women won't dignify with any kindness the governor's thuggish,piggish behavior towards his female staff and acquaintances. Even if some of these accusations had been fueled by spite, I believe most are genuine. Otherwise,how could so many ladies have stepped forward at once, telling the same horror story? Still, I can see how Cuomo apologists might believe that the sex thing didn't matter that much in the end. Because in the end,it might have just been the best pretext to pry a cynical despot off his ironclad perch. Notice how the impeachment drive evaporated once Cuomo quit. Now his female enemies claim that he got off too easy; the men are more philosophical: he's gone, no need to crucify him. Getting rid of him has been hard enough. There are no term limits for governors in New York and Cuomo seemed well entrenched. Previous attempts to primary him out the door had failed. Meanwhile, he was doing a lot of harm and very little good. He was reputedly ill-tempered, rude and vindictive, arrogant and vain,more interested in polishing his image than in governing fairly. He neglected state business but worked hard at his public relations, surrounding himself with famous people who sang his praises, staging televised lovefests with admirers, but no reporters to question him. He excelled at grandstanding--empty political gestures to fool constituents into believing something great had been achieved on their behalf. His famous "infrastructure" projects were like facelifts for patients with organ failure. Cuomo built flashy cosmetic additions to the mass transit system, but neglected its real problem: trains and buses running poorly due to severe technical, budget and staffing problems. Cuomo rebuilt the Tappan Zee bridge, then renamed it after his own father and rushed to inaugurate it before addressing its structural safety concerns. His "good" moves were invariably offset by nastiness performed on the sly. His handling of the pandemic was marred by lowballing nursing home deaths, and then illegally using staffers to write a self-congratulatory book. The press reported all of this and yet, the beat went on. Nothing happened. Only NY government workers complained about this man who tried to balance the state budget on their backs by screwing them out of their modest yearly raises,by threatening them with layoffs, by publicly blaming them for the state's financial shortfalls... even though these shortfalls were manufactured by Cuomo himself, who held on tightly to government purse strings while asserting the state was broke. That was his way of flipping the bird at labor unions and dodging contractual agreements with his own employees. But alas,if NY state workers were wise to Cuomo, NY voters were totally blinded by his posturing. New Yorkers LIKED their rugged, swaggering macho governor, who claimed to be "New York Tough". Never mind that he disbanded a state commission tasked with investigating him, that he jealously pushed out a popular, competent head of mass transit,setting adrift a system that had been on the mend,never mind that he refused to work with the progressive mayor of NYC, that he consistently sided with Republican interests although he's a Democrat, that he cut public funding for health and education while refusing to tax his rich friends and that, despite all of this, he had the gall to masquerade as a liberal-- none of it seemed to matter. But the sex thing did. He'd done all kinds of horrid things--did I mention he abandoned his dog at the Governor's Mansion as he was moving out? Or that he dumped his longtime girlfriend after she had a mastectomy? Deplorable acts, but it took a sex scandal to turn public opinion against him. Fine. If that's what it took, so be it; the result was beneficial in the end. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Now on to the next governor--let's see what SHE does...