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Flannery Amdahl’s memories of working for Andrew Cuomo are in stark contrast to the rock star status the New York governor enjoyed last year.
“People talked all the time about how he would shout and belittle people,” said Amdahl, 37, who described the governor’s office as the most toxic and insulting place she had ever worked.
‘His staff members copied the behavior and that’s why I felt I was being treated this way by my supervisor. I think it was unbridled and familiar: everyone in Albany talks about how dirty the room is. ‘
As Cuomo goes from hero to zero, such complaints are just the tip of the iceberg. He is accused of disguising the number of coronavirus deaths in state nursing homes. Amdahl, a former labor policy adviser, believes he should resign for this alone. But it is the other scandal that the three-term governor is consuming that makes the national democrats particularly treacherous.
Four women have come forward to accuse Cuomo, 63, of sexual harassment. Charlotte Bennett, 25, a former assistant, told CBS that Cuomo’s questions at a one-on-one meeting last June led to “the governor trying to sleep with me”.
Another former assistant, 35-year-old Ana Lis, made allegations Saturday night, telling the Wall Street Journal that Cuomo “asked her if she had a boyfriend, called her lover, touched her on her lower back … and once kissed her hand as she got up from her desk ”.
Before Lis came forward, Cuomo apologized for remarks that made one of the women uncomfortable while denying that it had become improper. Although an independent investigation is underway, he faces calls to resign from Congresswomen Kathleen Rice, a Democrat, and Elise Stefanik, a Republican, as well as Democratic government officials.
But no other National Democrats joined the chorus. The Axios website calls it the party’s’ hypocrisy moment ‘and argues:’ Governor Andrew Cuomo should get explicit calls to resign from President Biden if you apply the standard the Democrats set for similar allegations against Republicans. And this is not a close call. ”
The charge of double standards indicates a steep learning curve for a party that has struggled to keep up with the shift in public attitudes toward gender roles, power dynamics and sexual boundaries.
Its hierarchy defended Bill Clinton over his inappropriate relationship with young intern Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s. But in 2017, as the #MeToo movement held powerful men accountable, Kirsten Gillibrand, a senator holding the former seat of Hillary Clinton in New York, argued that the former president should resign over the matter.
That same year, Gillibrand becomes the first Democratic senator to urge her Minnesota colleague Al Franken to quit over allegations of sexual misconduct. She was accompanied by others, including Kamala Harris, who tweeted: “Sexual harassment and misconduct must not be allowed by anyone and must not occur anywhere. I believe the best thing for Senator Franken is to retire. ”
Franken only did so, but some critics now believe he was the victim of a rush to the verdict and should have been allowed to wait for the outcome of an investigation.
This time, although Gillibrand said Cuomo’s alleged actions were “completely unacceptable”, she stopped demanding that he resign before the investigation. This is a view shared by the other senator from New York, the majority leader Chuck Schumer, as well as Joe Biden and Harris, now vice president.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Friday: “The vice president’s view is that she believes all women should be treated with respect. Their voices must be heard. They need to tell their story. There’s an independent investigation now under the supervision of the Attorney General of New York, and she certainly supports it. ‘
But that puts Democratic leaders out of step with groups like Women’s March, born out of the January 2017 protests against Donald Trump, who faced numerous allegations of sexual assault and harassment and was caught on tape boasting of the grabbing of women’s genitals.
Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of Women’s March, said: ‘Any man who makes women feel unsafe at work should resign. This is our general view on harassment in the workplace.
“We believe that there should be an independent inquiry, but Cuomo himself has not even denied many of the allegations of harassment, and for us it is about disqualifying behavior. It can be illegal, but also not illegal. ”
Carmona urged the governor to take responsibility for his actions.
‘Cuomo should be the person talking about this, and the duty for his personal conduct should not be on other people. However, the Democratic Party must set the standard here because women have been so poorly served, certainly for the past four years, and of course before. ”
‘Sensitivities have changed’
Just as the immediate deification, then the immediate demonization of Cuomo has led many to call for nuance and complexity, it can also be said that no two cases of sexual harassment in politics are exactly the same.
Sometimes allegations are decades old and before the accused was in office. In Cuomo’s case, they are much more recent, suggesting that the governor has ignored the lessons of #MeToo. Sometimes the claims are related to inappropriate touch or comment. Others are about rape or other forms of violence.
In 2018, Eric Schneiderman, a New York attorney general praised as a liberal advocate for women’s rights, resigned after being accused of physically abusing four women. Cuomo was among those who quickly asked him to retire.
Later that year, Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was nearly derailed by allegations by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford that he sexually assaulted her at a party when they were both teenagers. Harris, then a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was praised by fellow Democrats for her roster during the bitter political battle.
In 2019, several women accused Biden of making unwanted physical contact. Lucy Flores, a former Nevada state congresswoman, recalls, for example, a 2014 meeting in which he touched her shoulders, leaned in to smell her hair, and kissed the back of her head. He released a video message promising: ‘The limits of personal space protection have been restored. I understand.”
The parallels were unacceptable this week when Cuomo, according to Anna Ruch, put his hands on her cheeks and asked to kiss her at a wedding in 2019, saying he regularly greets people with a hug and kiss , a habit he inherited from his father, the former governor Mario Cuomo.
“I understand that sensitivity has changed,” he told reporters. “Behavior has changed. I get it and I’m going to learn from it. ”
Last year, Tara Reade, a former senator, claimed that Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993. He vehemently denied the claim, which remained unfounded and faded from the election race. Biden chooses a woman – Harris – as a walking partner and often emphasizes his work as the main sponsor of the Violence Against Women Act.
His fate was very different from that of Franken, who was once typified as a presidential candidate.
Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “Afterwards, a number of Democrats in the Senate who pushed him to resign later expressed regret. They realized that they were moving too fast, that they did not know enough, and that the punishment did not really fit with what they later learned to be the misconduct. ”
Jacobs added: ‘There’s a learning curve and it’s about understanding what happened and not being intimidated by Republicans who refuse to play by the appearance of decency. Do you remember back to Kavanaugh? They would not even investigate it, but rather [Senator] Lindsey Graham shouted at the committee.
‘I do not think the Republican Party is capable of lecturing anyone on dealing with sexual harassment. They seem to have gained real expertise on how to dodge it. ”
Cuomo, who was housing secretary under Bill Clinton and delivered the Emmy-winning Covid-19 briefings last year, New Yorkers have long been known for his bruised, pugilistic, old-school style. As he fights for his political life – if he does not resign, it may be untenable to run for a fourth term – activists hope that wider lessons will be learned not only by politicians but also the wider society.
Emily May, co-founder and CEO of Hollaback !, a global movement to combat harassment, said: ‘As a society, we need to move the conversation away from just looking at these high-profile individuals who are harming and really start watching. in the ways in which damage is part of the everyday water in which we swim.
‘Just because we fired Andrew Cuomo and Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein does not alone solve the problem. The bigger problem is still, that is that harassment is considered an acceptable part of our culture. That is why so many of these rulers do. So yes, we need to respond and uproot harassment wherever it is, but we also need to keep an eye on the ball. ”