I can solve the Cuomo problem

There has never been a reason for Andrew Cuomo to run for mayor of New York City. As governor, he resigned in disgrace in the summer of 2021 amid a ballooning sexual harassment scandal (he denied the accusations), but even before that he was a schmuck: an abrasive nepo-baby who was terrible for both state and city.

Cuomo massively understated nursing home deaths during the worst days of the Covid pandemic, then won a $5.1 million deal to write a book about his so-called “leadership” in that era—then was determined by the state ethics board to have violated a promise not to use state resources to finish the book. Over the course of nearly a decade, he continuously cut money from the MTA—hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Streetsblog—both from its operating budget and from its capital-project funds. (In fairness, he did support congestion pricing.)

Cuomo is not just bad—he’s a clown who does not understand New York. He does not understand that you eat a bacon, egg, and cheese, not a bacon, cheese, and egg. He does not understand that when someone asks you where you live, you answer with your particular microneighborhood, ideally providing a set of cross streets or obscure-except-to-locals landmark (“where Hank’s Saloon used to be”), not with the borough-wide blandness of “Manhattan.” He does not understand that everyone asks everyone else how much they pay in rent because it’s an existential issue. I mean, no surprise—the guy hasn’t lived here in 35 years. Literally every single person on this TikTok page gets the city better than him.

Still, some people—stupid, misinformed, deluded, stupid people—support the guy. I can’t fathom why, and it’s pointless for me, at least, to really look at his record, and the records of the other candidates for mayor, and draw out some reasonable, intelligent, but ultimately useless explanation for the situation.

What I can do is fix the situation. I have the solution. I am the solution.

How do I know this? Because I’ve done this before.

Do you remember the summer of 2022? It was mostly pretty good here in New York. The Covid vaccine had brought back some semblance of normal life, the presidency was once again boring, and inflation was only just starting to impact the economy. There was only problem—one ant at the picnic, one bee in our collective bonnet. And that problem’s name was Bill de Blasio.

De Blasio had been mayor of the city until January 1, 2022, but we’d all tired of him years earlier—at around the same time he lost interest in us and decided to try running for president. (Spoiler alert: He didn’t get far.) For his entire second term, he accomplished nothing except for managing the city through Covid. Which… okay. Fine. Over the course of eight years, he brought us universal pre-K and a slightly more organized viral holocaust. It was something, but it was not enough. He never seemed focused, present, engaged. All his term did he look away—to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was, what he was doing. He was elsewhere.

When he departed the office, many of us were happy! Not because Eric Adams was taking over but because De Blasio would finally leave us alone for a while.

“A while” turned out not to be very long. Within a few months, De Blasio had decided he should run for Congress, representing the 10th District—where I happen to live. God, it was dumb. And annoying. Why did he think anyone still wanted him around? But I guess if you’ve been a successful politician long enough, you can always find aides and supporters and backers to keep you in the public eye well past your expiration date. I resigned myself to having to vote him out in the primary.

But then, one Saturday in late May, when I was shopping at the Grand Army Plaza farmers market, I was approached by a man with a clipboard who asked me to sign a petition for Bill de Blasio.

“Is it a petition to tell him to go away and never return to public life?” I asked.

No, he said. But if you need to tell him that, he added, the former mayor is right over there.

And indeed he was. Bill de Blasio was talking to people not 20 feet away. And so it was time to take up the aide’s challenge and tell the guy what he needed to hear. I walked over, waited till he’d finished with one last constituent, then began talking to the very, very tall former mayor of New York City.

First, I thanked him for universal pre-K. It was good. Then I asked him to just leave politics for the next several years. Run for nothing. Go away. Do something else. Let us all just fucking recover. He probably needed it, too—he hadn’t been able to focus, maybe this was the time to find something new and different, not throw himself back into the political ring.

He took it well. But what about the city under the pandemic, he asked: Didn’t he handle that well?

He did, I guess. But it was not enough. It would not be enough to overcome the reputation he’d earned for himself as a daydreamer, a dilettante, a lightweight. He needed, I said, to leave politics to someone else.

De Blasio thanked me, and told me he still wanted to help, still wanted to run. But six weeks later, as the good sweet corn was starting to come into the farmers market, Bill de Blasio dropped out of the congressional race:

As we can all tell from this post, he clearly, if subtly, gave me credit for swaying his decision. Without me, without my brave intervention, he might have continued the fight, and might even have won, or altered the outcome in some unknowable way. But having heard my words, considered my argument, and thought deeply on the matter, he had had an epiphany: No one fucking wanted him in Congress! And not only did no one want him in Congress, he didn’t want to be there either. He’d just come off two terms as mayor of New York City—he could do anything he wanted now. He could get divorced. He could take overpaid positions at universities where he doesn’t really have to do anything, so he can pay off a $475,000 fine for misusing public funds. He could go to the gym in Brooklyn or in Manhattan, and no one would care. He could just go and have a life as a wealthy ex-politician, giving paid speeches in Italy or whatever. Who cares? I don’t.

Now, however, it’s clear that my city needs me. If I could persuade Bill de Blasio to give it all up with an off-the-cuff five-minute chat at a Brooklyn farmers market, then it’s time to test my powers with Andrew Cuomo. He’s older, I know, and more set in his ways, so it might take 10 minutes instead. But I feel confident that if I were to get him alone, perhaps over dinner at a quaint little Italian-American restaurant in the Bronx, he would hear my plea—which echoes the pleas of millions of New Yorkers—and reconsider the reckless trajectory he’s on. I may not be a sophisticated political thinker, I may not have what many people think of as a “good argument” for why the other candidates are better qualified for the position, but what I can communicate effectively is disgust. Just raw, eye-rolling, had-it-up-to-fucking-here disgust. Ten minutes with me, a random Brooklyn milquetoast, and he’ll start to understand how deeply he’s loathed by the populace, and how, perhaps, he doesn’t really want to be around such people himself. After all, he’s rich and famous and has maintained his girlish figure into early old age—he could do whatever the hell he wants instead. Catch a fish, ride a motorcycle? That’s what his old Instagram claims he likes, and who am I to argue with a social media profile? Honestly, I don’t care, and I want to keep not caring—I want a mayor I don’t have to care about, who just makes things happen, keeps the city running, and doesn’t need to be the center of attention all the time. I know, I know: The job attracts a certain type, and it always will.

But it doesn’t have to be Andrew Cuomo. Not this time. All I need is an introduction, a handful of minutes with the guy to make him see clearly—and to work my ineffable magic. Who among you can help make that happen? 🪨🪨🪨