“As Andrew Cuomo readies to resign in disgrace, it’s important to remember the harm he’s inflicted on New York as governor for more than a decade. There is much to pick over — his sexual harassment, his cover-up of nursing home deaths, his enabling of conservative Republicans — and a lot of it has received copious coverage. But missing, even now, is a reckoning with how Cuomo, a triangulating corporate Democrat, targeted public education.

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“The question must be asked, as we move through this crisis and prepare to confront new ones, why the early coverage of Cuomo neglected so much. Why weren’t harder questions posed? Why did performance matter so much more than policy? It is easy to imagine an alternative, reflexive skepticism from the outset, especially as New York’s coronavirus death toll soared. There was nothing, ultimately, to celebrate.”

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“As Ross Barkan, author of a new book on Cuomo, wrote in New York magazine, “At every turn, [Melissa] DeRosa and her colleagues enabled Cuomo’s predation.”

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“Political reporter Ross Barkan’s new book, The Prince, argues that the governor’s seeming success was always a fraud: Cuomo’s decisions in the early days of the pandemic caused an enormous number of avoidable deaths, and his further mismanagement forced some of his state’s most vulnerable people to bear the brunt of the disease. The book turns a spotlight not only on Cuomo’s incompetence but on his career-long adherence to the interests of moneyed elites. Barkan both corrects Cuomo’s record and illustrates the harm his governing ideology has done.”

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“[Ross] Barkan’s catalog of media humiliations is among the most maddening content in the book and illustrates one of his principal virtues as an author. He commands a deep expertise refined through a career in the New York press corps but avoids falling victim to the worst habits that afflict so many of his colleagues. Their open contempt for the Left, their reflexive deference to power, their fetish for the aesthetic of managerial competence — this was all fertile ground for Cuomo to cultivate the myth of himself as New York’s savior. That Barkan manages to operate in this hothouse of professional-class neuroses relatively unfazed is an achievement in itself, and it’s how he’s already written an entire book about a truth that many in the press are only now admitting.”

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“[Cuomo’s allies] will seek, at some point, a post-Cuomo future and they will try to justify to themselves and to others why they remained there so long, propping up a governor like Cuomo. Some may try to rebrand or claim, against all evidence, they opposed the worst instincts of their leader. They will hunt for generous private-sector sinecures; given the realities of our unseemly political world, they will probably find them. What they should never receive, though, is the mercy and understanding they never afforded others. Cuomo will leave office in disgrace. They deserve his fate.”

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“Unlike in Trump’s D.C., Cuomo has no majority of loyalists waiting in the Senate to save him: New York’s version is a mix of progressive Democrats who revile him and Republicans who would like to see him chased from office.”

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“Any ordinary politician would resign quickly… But Cuomo is not ordinary. He dreams of becoming, like Robert Moses, a titan of New York. He is still enraged that his father, Mario, lost his bid for a fourth term as governor and longs to surpass him. Cuomo does not know humility or discretion. He will fight for his political career till his last last dying breath.”

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