After visiting the United States at the beginning of the XIXe century, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville decided to publish his observations. In his classic Democracy in America, he notices the absence of a “class consciousness” in the young republic where, unlike monarchical Europe, everyone can aspire to the same social positions and the same treatment.
And principle.
In fact, of course, since the beginning of American history, people – especially men – have been able to benefit from their last name to climb the social ladder and stay at the top more easily than all of their fellow citizens. . Only since the middle of the XXe century, there were the Adams, the Roosevelts, the Rockefellers, the Udall, and, of course, the Kennedys and the Bushes.
There are also the Cuomo.
The late Mario Cuomo was three times elected governor of New York State in the 1980s and 1990s. During most of this period, he was considered the Democratic Party’s biggest national star, though he declined. repeatedly to run for president.
Two of his five children now hold positions of enormous prestige and influence: Andrew, 63, who has been governor of New York for a decade now; and Chris, 50, the titular host of a daily CNN public affairs show in the Niche the most competitive American cable news channels.
The big Brother
Andrew Cuomo made a name for himself nationally – even internationally – at the height of the pandemic. Presented and perceived as a leader firmly in command and attentive to science, he played in a way the role of real-time opposition figure to the chaotic and crazy management of Donald Trump in Washington.
He quickly built up a huge pool of “political capital” – with his approval rating topping 70% in the spring, he was being tipped off as president-to-be. He even received an Emmy Award (the American equivalent of our Gemini) for his daily television press conferences on the pandemic.
Ironically, the state he ruled knew the worst record in the country, and almost in the world, in deaths linked to COVID – 19 per number of inhabitants. If it were to form an independent nation, New York State would have the worst death toll outside of the micro-republic of San Marino, with 2,436 deaths per million population as of Thursday, double the rate for Quebec.
The gap between popular perception and reality was already breathtaking.
In fact, from the outbreak of the epidemic, Cuomo had, without much fanfare, formally ordered the retirement homes in his state to admit patients infected with COVID. Weeks and thousands of deaths later, after the executive order received early media attention, it was taken off the state’s website – as if it never existed.
The house of cards held for months – until it finally collapses. First with the shock report of the state attorney general – a Democrat like the governor – who in early 2021 reported extraordinarily inaccurate data provided by the Cuomo administration on deaths in residences for the people elderly. At least double what was officially recorded should have been declared.
Days later, one of Cuomo’s top advisers admitted to state lawmakers that the data wasn’t just inaccurate – it had been deliberately tampered with by the governor’s team.
At the same time as the numbers were faked, Cuomo signed another executive order, little noticed at the time, granting legal protection to the managers of hospitals and retirement homes from potential lawsuits. It was only later that we realized that the associations of hospitals and residences for the elderly had poured some two million dollars in Cuomo’s election pot.
Far from being seen as the future head of the American government, Andrew Cuomo today rather has the latter on his tail, since he is the subject of an FBI criminal investigation.
And this only concerns the exercise of his official functions.
On Wednesday morning, Cuomo’s ex-press secretary Karen Hinton took published a text in which she depicts her professional relationship with the governor as the equivalent of being trapped in a marriage in the 1950s – a toxic work environment rife with bullying and, to use Hinton’s expression, “culture of the penis ”.
This text has set the stage for another posted later the same day by Lindsey Boylan, a senior New York government official, in which she claims to have been a victim, along with many other women too fearful of Cuomo to testify, sexual assault and harassment by the governor .
The latter would have done it verbally – asking Boylan, for example, to play with him at the strip poker, or even inviting him alone to his desk at a Christmas party to show him, with a smirk, a box of cigars he would have received from Bill Clinton (so that she understands the reference very well). obvious to Monica Lewinsky).
And he would have done it physically – repeatedly touching her lower back and legs, then, following a professional meeting, kissing her on the mouth without the slightest hint of invitation to do so.
The little brother
In just about any respectable organization or structure, there are laws and clauses designed to prevent conflicts of interest. To CNN, that meant not allowing Chris Cuomo, for obvious reasons, to speak on air about his brother … until the pandemic struck in 2020.
From then on, while Andrew Cuomo was offered the most important platform of his career, his younger brother was encouraged to amplify it incalculably by inviting him to repeat. If there was complicity, there was also complacency – extreme complacency. Obviously, it should come as no surprise that Chris Cuomo did not adopt the aggressive posture reserved for other politicians on his show in front of the New York State Governor. They were brothers, after all! It is not for nothing that this practice was originally banned.
So why allow it in these circumstances? As disaster struck the state, the public would have expected the governor to be asked tougher questions. Without ever having actually answered that question, CNN announced last week, as scandal engulfed Andrew Cuomo, that the policy prohibiting Chris Cuomo from speaking about his older brother on air. would suddenly be reinstated.
Of course, another solution would, in principle, have been possible: withdrawing Chris Cuomo the privilege of using his microphone. Not because his brother is a governor, but because, months before the coronavirus crisis, the host publicly threatened physical integrity of a citizen during a verbal exchange – which in New York State constitutes a crime.
At the start of the pandemic, Chris Cuomo was infected with COVID-19 and, while using his platform daily to denounce people who did not follow health instructions, he violated his own quarantine, insulting in particular a man crossed in a public place. And he has minds openly to viewers about it. Then he continued to exceed the sanitary rules of the building where he is staying – measures encouraged, it should be remembered, by his brother, governor of his state of residence.
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The Trump era may have desensitized more than one. One of the consequences of recent years is that endorsing, implicitly or even explicitly, the worst excesses of the President of the United States has caused many to lose the moral authority necessary in a scandalous situation.
Every citizen is presumed innocent until proven guilty – including Andrew and Chris Cuomo. However, many ordinary citizens have or would have seen their careers ended, their jobs taken away, for less. Yet today Andrew Cuomo still heads America’s fourth largest state; and Chris Cuomo continues to pilot his show night after night, like nothing had happened.
In American democracy, where the principle of equality is supposed to reign, how is this possible?
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