In Missouri, we saw this movie three years ago: An obnoxiously arrogant governor, with few allies left in his own party — Friends? Who needs those? — belatedly resigns to avoid being impeached over sexual and other misconduct. He's bowing out for the sake of his family, he insists. Oh, and in the clear hope that by getting out before he's thrown out, he can run again.
I refer, of course, to former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, whose pre-scandal self-regard was perhaps most perfectly captured that time he rappelled from the rafters into a bull-riding competition in the JQH Arena in Springfield, Missouri.
Or wait, maybe it was when he said nothing to correct Stephen Colbert's incorrect assumption that as a Navy SEAL, he had taken part in the raid on Osama bin Laden. He just couldn't say, he told Colbert, as if simply too bound by the cowboy code to confirm his own heroics.
Either way, the Republican Greitens has an awful lot in common with New York's Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who announced on Tuesday that he is finally resigning, too, also over sexual and other wrongdoing.
Like Greitens, Cuomo wrote a wildly self-aggrandizing bestseller, on his superior handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. And he did so not only while the pandemic was still going on, but even as he was hiding how many elderly New Yorkers were dying in nursing homes.
The lies these men tell are not the brags of beginners, and both fooled people: "Meet my hero, Eric Greitens," Tom Brokaw said in blurbing his book. And Cuomo, as we know, put on a fabulous COVID TV show.
On the day that Greitens tearfully resigned, in May of 2018, he said he was doing so because "it's clear that for the forces that oppose us there is no end in sight. I cannot allow those forces to continue to cause pain and difficulty for the people that I love."
Such meanies, these vague "forces" making his loved ones suffer. If only he could have done something about that. Behind a closed door in his adjoining office, our then-governor's then-wife, Sheena Greitens, listened with her arms crossed.
Quit because of looming impeachment, not conscience
Forces allegedly beyond his control have also been bedeviling poor Andrew Cuomo. In his gooey Tuesday resignation speech, he said of his three grown daughters, "I want my three jewels to know this: My greatest goal is for them to have a better future than the generations of women before them." Especially the women who had the misfortune to work for him?
Most infuriating lines: "It is still in many ways a man's world. It always has been. We have sexism that is culturalized and institutionalized." Well yes, no thanks to you, Gov. Grabby.
"Your dad made mistakes and he apologized and he learned from it," Cuomo said, addressing his daughters.
I do feel for those young women, just as I did for Sheena Greitens, a Stanford grad and Marshall Scholar at Oxford who earned a Ph.D. in government from Harvard and is an expert on North Korea. That she somehow maintained her dignity throughout the whole grubby world of hurt caused by the father of her children was quite an accomplishment.
Probably, what Cuomo learned from his mistakes is that smearing your accusers doesn't work as reliably as it once did.
But I'm afraid that what he's also learned is that he can try again, someday soon, just as Eric Greitens is doing in running for Roy Blunt's U.S. Senate seat.
Greitens left office only when it became clear that there were more than 100 votes to impeach him, in a legislature controlled by his own party. Eighty-two were needed to impeach.
Why was that? Because of credible testimony, under oath, from a woman who claimed he'd sexually coerced and assaulted her. The details were outlined in a report from state House investigators. "Out of nowhere," the woman said, "(he) just, like kind of smacked me and grabbed me and shoved me down on the ground."
Greitens called the woman, who had to be forced to testify, a whore. He blindfolded and restrained her in his basement, after taking away her phone and clothes. She believed he took a photograph while he had her tied and taped up. Republicans and Democrats in the House agreed: The woman, who had been his hairdresser, was completely believable.
Greitens has denied acts of violence, but he has also claimed his actions with the victim were "consensual." He refused to testify before the legislature's committee.
The day he announced his comeback candidacy for the U.S. Senate, he said this: "The facts are, after a 20-month investigation by the Missouri Ethics Commission, they came out and said we were completely exonerated." Which was not even close to being true.
No one in Jefferson City, Missouri, was standing up for Greitens on his way out the door, just as they aren't coming to Cuomo's defense in Albany, New York, now. And as is true for Cuomo, Greitens resigned when criminal charges were still possible.
We always knew that Greitens hoped to get credit — oh what a good soldier you are, stepping down — for sparing his party and the state any more agita. But he didn't deserve any thanks, and neither does the three-time governor of New York. There is no virtue in self-preservation, which is all that's going on here. Saying that he "made mistakes and learned from it" sounds like he's relaunching already, before he's even cleaned out his desk.
