Andrew Cuomo’s Long Goodbye
In his cynical campaign for mayor, the former New York governor touted the decades he spent in power.
Andrew Cuomo likes to make a big deal about the age and inexperience of the likely next mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, but the former governor himself got an early start in politics.
- Cuomo was nineteen when he helped manage his father’s doomed mayoral campaign against Ed Koch, in 1977.
- He was not yet forty when Bill Clinton named him the Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, in 1997.
When Cuomo was elected governor, in 2010, all of this early experience helped him consolidate his power and rule New York, for eleven years, as one of the most consequential governors in state history.
By the time he resigned, in 2021, amid credible and documented accusations of sexual harassment and abuse of power, he had been inflicting his forceful, recalcitrant politicking upon New York for nearly half a century.
Author summary: Andrew Cuomo's long career in politics.