Andrew Cuomo’s Case for 2020—No, Really
NEW YORK—Here’s how Andrew Cuomo ends our first interview at the beginning of January, sitting in a chair in his office, after eating cookie No. 4 from the tray his staff prepared. I put a simple question to him: “Would you like to be president?” He dodges it over and over by talking about how much he wants to do his job as governor well. Finally he says, Well, Joe Biden is running anyway.
A lot of people think Biden is going to run, I acknowledge, and the former vice president certainly seems to be moving in that direction. But Biden looked like he was about to run in 2015 too, only to end speculation at the last minute. So: What if he doesn’t?
“Call me back,” Cuomo says, and puts his hand out immediately to shake, ending a conversation that lasted through a bathroom break and a theatrical phone call with his daughter, in which he begged her not to try cooking him dinner because she’d make too much of a mess of the pots.
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A Cuomo interview is a manic chess game. It’s hard not to feel his hand trying to guide every move, constantly recalculating and recalibrating, and going off the record to embellish a point or ingratiate himself. It’s also hard not to feel his actual hand: Sort of for emphasis and sort of for dominance, he’ll grab a foot or knee, quickly lean forward with his big body, and stare until he’s not the one who breaks. He never wants to be the one who breaks.
Cuomo doesn’t do much reflecting on himself, especially in public. But in two long interviews in person, and over the phone, on the record and off, we spent well over five hours talking about why he thinks so many Democrats hate him, the psychodrama that gets read into every mention of his father, and what he thinks Nancy Pelosi and others in Washington have to learn from him. At one point, he even started drafting on the fly what he’d want in his own eulogy.
Cuomo can be irritating, confounding, and egotistical. He can also be engaging, intense, and charismatic. He deliberately stands apart from the leftward tilt of his party, but his record of bills signed into law on many core progressive issues is unmatched by any other Democrat, in D.C. or the states, with the possible exception of Jerry Brown. He wins in landslides, but most politicians in New York and beyond can’t stand him.
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He doesn’t fit easily into the Democratic Party and has, at least for now, taken himself out of the two-year-long battle over its identity. Is there a place in national politics for a man who has spent a career lighting bridges on fire and obsessing over power plays in Albany that don’t matter at all outside New York? Is there a place for a person who gets tagged as a moderate? Who doesn’t get into the presidential mix himself?
And yet: As Democrats are desperate to show they can bring more results than promises, he is a three-term governor of one of the biggest, most complicated states, with a long list of accomplishments. As Democrats worry that the party’s 2020 nominee won’t be able to take on Donald Trump, he is another brash Queens guy, and just as eager to throw around his machismo and bravado.
He’s waiting on Biden. Other than that, Cuomo clearly thinks he has a stronger case to make than any of the people running right now. But not so strong that he’s ready to actually make it.
N Cuomo is the longest currently serving governor in America. He handily defeated Cynthia Nixon, a leftist, lesbian television actress, last fall. Cuomo won more votes, as he and his staff eagerly point out and then point out again, than anyone else in the history of New York. He will note that in this case includes both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Mario Cuomo, his father and role model and constant reference point.
