Reinvention The (Partial) of Andrew Cuomo

He says he has grown and learned. His brute-force takeover of the mayor's race, at least, looks familiar.

- BY DAVID FREEDLANDER

DO YOU SEE THAT?" said Andrew Cuomo, making the rounds over brunch at Melba's in Harlem one Sunday in March. Earlier that morning, he had given a speech at Mount Neboh Baptist Church on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, just down the street from here, calling for the hiring of 5,000 more police officers and levying a blistering attack on the left flank of the Democratic Party—some members of which were running against him for mayor—for uttering what he called “the three dumbest public-policy words you can utter: Cut the police.” The speech was well received, the former governor gained an endorsement from the pastor, a longtime ally, and now here he was remarking on the inverted political landscape of his party and trying to get in a couple more shots at the antagonists to his left.

Cuomo hasn't been much seen since he resigned his decadelong governorship three and a half years ago in the face of certain impeachment by the State Legislature. Now, at the church, he stopped for selfies with tourists from California who remember him from his COVID briefings. He went into the kitchen to shake hands with the line cooks and busboys and try out a little Spanish. Grandmothers pinched his cheek and kissed him, asking if he’s really back and running for mayor. He shook hands with a dad who says he’s from Queens. “Oh, me too!” Cuomo said. “Hollis.”

No one asked him about the long list of scandals still hounding him: the nursing-home deaths from COVID and the attendant cover-up, the book he wrote in the middle of the crisis that he had state employees help him with, how his friends and family received COVID tests before anyone else in the state could, how a close aide went to prison for bribery, or even about the accusations of sexual harassment that ultimately led to his resignation.