4 August 2021: What Was Wrong With Cuomo's Creepy Slide Show?

Andrew Cuomo Sinks to a New Low

This commentary appeared in The New Republic on Tuesday, 3 August 2021. It gets to the heart of Andrew M. Cuomo's tone-deaf PR response to New York Attorney General Tish James' blockbuster report corroborating the sexual harassment allegations of his female victims.

Cuomo responded to this crisis of his own making with a prerecorded video that was depraved even by the standards of recent American politics. Cuomo insisted that, in spite of the detailed report from the state’s attorney general, “the facts are much different from what has been portrayed.”

“I never touched anyone inappropriately or made inappropriate sexual advances,” Cuomo said. “I am 63 years old. I have lived my entire adult life in public view. That is just not who I am, and that’s not who I have ever been.”

Then the slideshow started. Images flashed by of Cuomo hugging supporters and friends, including Robert De Niro, Charlie Rangel, and Al Gore. “I do it with everyone,” Cuomo said. “Black and white, young and old, straight and LGBTQ, powerful people, friends, strangers, people who I meet on the street.”...

When it comes to surreal press conferences, it is hard to find a comparable event in American politics. The names Mark Sanford and Rod Blagojevich come to mind; Anthony Weiner also strikes a similar chord. In more recent years, one might recall Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s infamous press conference when he offered to moonwalk after a photograph of him wearing blackface in medical school emerged.

But this was quite a hill for Cuomo to mount a defense atop: He couldn’t have committed sexual harassment or created a hostile work environment because he was such an inveterate kisser, hugger, and toucher of others. In his telling, the brief against him was all one big misunderstanding—and one in which Cuomo, a touchy-feely Italian-American paisan of the people, was the victim. That Cuomo’s slideshow also contained photographs of many powerful and famous people also suggested a kind of threat: This is a man who may be wounded but he still possesses incalculable power and influence. Cuomo’s defense of allegations that he bullies and intimidates those around him were intimations of future bullying and intimidating.

Cuomo's slide show was as creepy and icky as described all the way through.