Revisiting Cuomo's Difficulties

A few weeks ago I asked why Andrew Cuomo, of sll people, had suddenly fallen from grace amid MeToo allegations, most of them old and trivial, to the point that many New York Democrats have called for his resignation. That he ordered nursing homes to tale COVID patients. thereby spreading the disease among the most vulnerable, has been a distant also-ran in the case against him. But even there, similar allegations against Gov Whitmer of Michigan have gained little traction, much less than those against Cuomo. Why are the Democrats, enabled by media hysteria, eating their own?

I've said here that Robert Barnes is among the most insightful commentators we now have. His difficulty is that he talks in two-hour YouTube interviews with several interlocutors, and the discussions are rambling and desultory, with no transcripts. I hope something can be done about this. The problem is that Barnes is a busy attorney, and I don't understand how he even takes so many hours out of his schedule for YouTube. He would not have the time to organize, write, and polish a written column.

But earlier this week, Barnes put out the best theory I've heard on Cuomo's sudden fall from grace -- he thinks both the Newsom recall effort in California and the get-Cuomo movement in New York are spnsored by the same person, Vice President Harris, who wants to knock out potential competition for a 2024 election (or possible re-election) run. This would explan why so many Democrats are on board with the Cuomo part. Barnes says Harris was the deep state's favored candidate in early 2020, but when her campaign quickly lost momentum, Plan B emerged to place her as Vice President, with Biden resigning to elevate her when convenient.

Barnes gives no particular source for these assertions, but they do dovetail with other popular assumptions, certainly including that Biden will need to withdraw sooner than later, and that Harris is already performing functions like head-of-state calls behind the scenes. But recent polling indicates that the New York electorate is not on board with get-Cuomo: the media has so far failed to make the full MeToo stick.

However, I think Barnes errs in effectively equating the Newsom recall movement with the Cuomo MeToo. Newsom himself is largely correct in saying that the recall movement is Trumpian, but it isn't just a creature of QAnon cultists and rabid right wingers. It began as grassroots, but it's received financial support from the natioinal Republican Party. It is, in fact, part of a strategy by Reps McCarthy and Nunes to rebuild the California Republican Party, which was destroyed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Hollywood media figure and a Kennedy by marriage who become Republican out of pure opportunism in the 2003 recall of Gray Davis.

Whatever the outcome of the Recall Newsom campaign in a fall 2021 election, it will force the Democrats to spend heavily, while it will build enthusiasm among Republicans while generating mailing and donor lists for 2022 and 2024. It will also be a testbed for new electoral strategies endorsed by McCarthy and Nunes aiming to beat the Democrats at their own game with techniques like ballot harvesting and running attractive minority candidates. This is simply not the same thing as the intramural effort to knock out Cuomo as a potential threat to Harris, which is only a short-range intramural strategy.