There are many lessons to take from the spectacular fall of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Don’t grope women. Don’t make sexual or romantic advances on your employees. Don’t treat nursing home residents as disposable. Don’t cover up health data during a pandemic.
But most of us don’t really need those lessons. Here’s a more general lesson: Don’t treat people like dirt, even if you think you can get away with it.
Cuomo, along with all of his other flaws, was famous for being hated. He wasn’t hated for his successes or for ideology. He was hated for being a jerk to people.
“My natural instinct is to be aggressive,” he wrote in his self-praising COVID-19 memoir. “And it doesn’t always serve me well. I am a controlling personality. At one time, I opposed that characterization because it has a negative implication. But you show me a person who is not controlling, and I’ll show you a person who is probably not highly successful.”
“There was a kind of constant culture of yelling and threatening,” reporter Rebecca Traister relayed from the governor’s office. He sexually harassed so many women, or made it clear that he valued them primarily for their looks, that he was very low on women willing to defend him.
Here’s another story from Traister about working for Cuomo: “You couldn’t let anybody know who you were interviewing for because there were rumors that the governor’s office would call and have your offer rescinded. They might not have valued you there. They might’ve been telling you every day — and this was also the experience of many people I spoke to — you’re doing a terrible job. They might transfer you to a place that you didn’t want to be, where you basically have no ability to do anything that you care about or good at, but they don’t want you to leave.”
State legislators had similarly prickly and demeaning dealings with the Luv Gov.
Yet, for decades, he got away with it. You see, if you’re the son of the governor, you get away with stuff other people don’t get away with. If you’re a Cabinet official, you can get away with it. If you are the Democratic nominee for governor, or the Democratic governor, amid a Democratic-dominated national and statewide media, you can get away with treating people like dirt.
Hundreds of people in Albany, including state legislators, gubernatorial staff, reporters, state officials, and so on, had to put up with Cuomo because of his power. Cuomo always had the option of not treating people like dirt, instead treating them like people, but seeing things as a statist politician tends to, only in terms of power, he never saw a reason he should.
It reminds me a bit of an old interview I attended with Bob Barr back in 2000. Barr was a conservative Republican congressman from Georgia. I don’t remember why, but almost out of the blue, he told the assembled reporters two bits of polling data: About 55% of his constituents personally disliked him, but about 55% planned to vote for him anyway.
Sure enough Barr won reelection in 2000, 55% to 45%. He seemed to relish the notion that 10% of the district disliked him but voted for him nonetheless.
Then things changed. Democrats controlled redistricting, and for the 2002 election, they drew Barr together with fellow conservative Republican John Linder. Linder beat Barr by nearly a 2-to-1 margin in the primary.
People will put up with someone they dislike if they have to. When they don’t have to anymore, they stop putting up with that person.
It took a lot to break the dam of Cuomo’s invincibility — a lot. But once there was a weakness, the deluge swept him away. State legislators in Albany used to fear him. Very few loved him.
So why did Gov. Ralph Northam survive in Virginia while Cuomo didn’t survive in New York? There are plenty of reasons, but one relevant factor was that Northam had friends in Richmond, not merely people who feared him. They were torn between punishing his wrongdoing and helping a friend. Cuomo’s longtime colleagues in Albany were not so torn.
There are many reasons to treat people well. Hopefully, you will do so because other people are beloved creatures of God who have diginity and deserve to be treated with dignity. In your weaker moments, though, consider that when things turn against you, the people you treated poorly will stop having your back.
