Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. In 2018, at the New York State Democratic Convention, Governor Andrew Cuomo said this.

Governor Andrew Cuomo: Sexual harassment of women is real, it is undeniable, and this is the moment in history to make the reform and end it and end it once and for all and New York is going to be the state to do it. It ends here and it ends now.

Brian: Cringe-worthy now maybe, right, but was he being present as his resignation assigned that #MeToo has staying power to talk about #MeToo, Andrew Cuomo, Women and Power. We're going to put this story into national, maybe even global context. Let's hear from Rebecca Traister, writer-at-large for New York Magazine and author of the book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. Hi, Rebecca, welcome back.

Rebecca: Hi, Brian. It's good to be here.

Brian: You're focused on Governor Cuomo, who's been on power and how he uses it, what you call the theatrics of dominance. Theatrics of dominance, kept him in power. Can you describe what you mean by theatrics of dominance?

Rebecca: There's a thing that Andrew Cuomo is great at and it is performing authority. We can think of the ways he's done it well. Performing competence, like in the news conferences through COVID that won him an Emmy. The people loved and felt comforted by, he would get up there and he would perform confidence and he was in control and that's the prettiest version of this. It was comforting to a lot of people. Now, what we later learned and the reason that I emphasize the word performance there, is that in fact, the state was in many ways mismanaging, under-reporting the number of deaths in nursing homes.

His top aides as was revealed in a different report that came out of the Attorney General Tish James office. Earlier this year was actually covering up the number of people who were dying. It was a performance of leadership but it was often the performance of leadership is understood as leadership. Then there were a lot of nastier and far uglier ways in which he did this. They were also always on display. In fact, that have also been weirdly appreciated, cringingly appreciated. He's a famous bully. He's had his top staff members be bullies.

Long before this happened, he has some of his top staffers, including his spokesperson, which has a party calling three female members of his own party in the state legislature. I can't use the full phrase, but F-ing idiots in the newspaper. He publicly insults people, including in his own party, as many have alleged over years. He worked hard behind the scenes to actually keep his own party out of power in the state legislature by supporting the conservative IDC that kept the legislature out of democratic hands. He does it.

When I reported a story on him in March, a long reported piece that I did, I talked to so many people who'd worked for him like on policy, who all described to me a governor who was obsessed with press conferences, obsessed with being out in front of cameras, getting the photoshoot, doing the theatrical of I'm the leader and I'm here in charge and paid far less attention to the actual mechanics of how to get policies through. He's not a governor who cares very much about policy. I think even without that reporting, you could see that that's true.

This is not at odds with how we've been taught to understand power in this country, but if you present yourself as dominant and scary, you will dominate and people will be scared of you. It has worked beautifully for Andrew Cuomo for a very long time. That's what I mean by the theatrics of dominance.

Brian: There is another narrative about him though that says the fact that he had this dominant domineering personality helped him get things done at a policy level, whether it was on-time state budgets or tough to pass legislation that they're flailing away at and failing at in Washington, marriage equality before the Supreme Court, gun control after Newtown, like exactly what they wanted in Washington and have never gotten, banning fracking, $15 minimum wage. It's his use of power, maybe even compared to his father that help get these things done.

I can remember somebody was running for president. I wish I could remember who was in one of the recent primaries and people said, "Oh, he's too nice. He's a nice guy, but he won't be an effective executive." I guess I'm wondering, is there a sweet spot? Is the sweet spot ever possible, where somebody really has power, exercises power, but for whom it doesn't fall over into abuse?

Rebecca: I think that when we accept the framing that whatever Cuomo's achievements as governor are, and we can debate where he came to those issues, because I think a lot of people who've worked on them for decades would say that those, a lot of that legislation, he actually got to pretty late. In fact, in some cases work perhaps behind the scenes to obstruct until it finally became a reality and he did it.

Those, we would have to go issue by issue but I will say that to absorb that narrative, like he got things done is to absorb something that to accept a framework that we have simply been taught from birth, which is that politics is a hard-knuckled gate and you got to be tough. Keep in mind that all of this is very tied up with ideas about masculinity and particularly white masculinity. All of this happens within a white capitalist patriarchy. I think Cuomo is a test case for like, wait, can we try to disentangle our ideas about what effective power is?

That it doesn't have to be mean threatening and scary necessarily. We see somebody who's a bully and very effective at intimidating people and say, "Wow, will they really get the job done?" It feeds into ideas that we associate, that's what power is to us, is somebody who's tough and mean. I don't know that has to be the case and I think we have to step back and question that. The Cuomo administration is a test case for this. When I was reporting in the spring, again and again-- you're right, there are these competing narratives.

Again and again, we find that some of the things that he effectively touted as being his achievements were, A, either the achievements of a lot of other people who he wasn't necessarily working to support as they were doing this work or, B, that in fact, some of that stuff winds up being empty and that he wasn't getting through all kinds of policy and legislation protections that New York could have been getting through. Again, this goes back to very old ideas about if you want to be appreciated as a leader, you have to be tough.

I think we have to really retrain our brains to disentangle the idea of effective leadership or even really toughness. What does toughness mean? Is it somebody you can count on, somebody who is honest and straightforward who takes a firm moral line? Is it somebody who is willing to scare people in his administration, state employees, journalists in order to preserve an image of himself?

I think much closer to what Cuomo was, and it speaks to our own, the ways we've been taught to understand power that we could so easily accept that as like, "Well, he's hard-knuckled and he's our bully," and say, that's what good leadership is. I actually think we need to question those assumptions.

Brian: What do you think his resignation means for the #MeToo Movement, if we can use that phrase or for gender equity in the workplace overall?

Rebecca: I think it's obviously very tied to these broader stories about a movement toward greater gender equality. I think like so much of what we've seen happen, that's been explosive and monumental over these past few years. I think it is one data point and I think that we're too quick to say, "See, here's the end of the story, this is what happened. Look at what #MeToo wrote." It's really nothing about this as simple. The story of pushing toward greater gender equality happens over years, over decades, over centuries. I do think obviously part of how we get here is through the explosion of the #MeToo Movement, which of course is distinct in another iteration of Tarana Burke's #MeToo Movement, but the #MeToo Movement that erupts in the fall of 2017 and that prompts a tremendous global reckoning around sexualized power abuse. I think it's really important to note that of the 11 women that Attorney General Tish James' report covers, more than half of them experienced the harassment that they say they experienced at the hands of Governor Cuomo after November of 2017.

That clip, you played with him in 2018 saying we don't accept. This is after the reporting on Harvey Weinstein, after the #MeToo Movement has erupted that Cuomo is still behaving this way. As we know Charlotte Bennett alleges that this was happening in the midst of COVID just last year, her interactions with him. I think I want to note that in particular, because we do all have a tendency to say, "Well, see, now we all know better." Now we've learned, and behavior's going to change, even Cuomo in his defenses initially.

Last week, he was talking about, "This is a generational thing. I don't know any better. I was raised in it. There are generational changes." No, generational change-- He was talking in 2018 in that clip you just played about ending sexual harassment. He was asking his young staffer, Charlotte Bennett about dating older men and inappropriate questions about her sex life in 2020. Again, I just always want to be careful about claiming that we're any closer to the end of a story.

We are so in the midst of these conversations and really are ongoing wrestling match with inequality, sexualized, inequality, gender inequality, racial inequality, and actually broader inequalities around power, and its abuses that I think are also really important and absolutely tied to the more sexualized stories that were at the heart of the Attorney General's report. Cuomo's abuses of power extend beyond simply the sexual or sexualized harassment.

Brian: Listeners, will the governor's resignation make a real difference in the fight against sexual harassment and the fight for gender equality in the workplace overall? Are you thinking about this in those larger terms? 646-435-7280. Has the line been redrawn in your opinion for other workplaces because of the governor's resignation under pressure because of this? 646-435-7280 or anything you want to ask Rebecca Traister, writer-at-large for New York Magazine and author of the book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. 646-435-7280 or tweet @BrianLehrer. Let me play the clip of Cuomo yesterday in his resignation speech that you just referred to in which he refers to generational change.

Governor Andrew Cuomo: In my mind, I've never crossed the line with anyone, but I didn't realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn. There are generational and cultural shifts that I just didn't fully appreciate, and I should have. No excuses.

Brian: I guess, in a way, the easy question is how much do you buy that line versus some of the evidence like on the plane one time with Lindsey Boylan. He said, "Let's play strip poker," which I don't think the #MeToo Movement had to break out in 2017 for a male boss to know is an inappropriate joke with a much younger woman employee. There was a witness to that who testified to the attorney general, her direct supervisor was also on the plane said, "Yes. I heard that."

That's one question, but more broadly, how much do you think there is a generational change that is bringing more equity to the workplace?

Rebecca: I want to say this really clearly. When Andrew Cuomo talks about being generationally confused and new standards being applied, and he's just a 63-year-old guy, okay, I want to be really clear. He's lying because, in 1986, the Supreme court ruled unanimously. The sexual harassment in the workplace was the illegal under title seven of the Civil Rights Act. Andrew Cuomo was in his 20s. He was just out of law school. In 1991, when Anita Hill testified against Clarence Thomas and described all of the ways in which Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her when they worked together, he was in his early 30s.

Again, it was just four years ago that the entire planet experienced an explosive reckoning around sexual assault and harassment. When he says, he's confused, he's telling a lie to cover for himself.

Brian: I'm sure he would say that the Anita Hill story, for example, those allegations which were really gross ways of coming on to her by Clarence Thomas allegedly, and the fact that he continued to come on to her after she rejected him, Cuomo would say, "No, this is not anything like that. I was just being playful." It wasn't actually coming onto people in the instances that he's referring to.

Rebecca: Well, the instances that he's referring to he's picking very specific instances. There are multiple women who have described him asking inappropriate questions about their sex lives, their love lives, their marriages, their preferences. There are also, of course, women who alleged that he has kissed them. Again, asking to play strip poker. There is a woman who alleges that he groped her breast, that he looked down her shirt in a very obvious way, and commented on her necklace. Once these behaviors, and especially as a pattern, I am sure he would say this was different. Let me get to the next point.

Once I say that he is lying about not knowing that these things are inappropriate or illegal, I will also say that where he has ground to stand on is that despite the fact that these behaviors have been prohibited for as long as they have been, they have still been treated as normal. Somehow often for powerful men attached to our understandings of them as powerful men and Cuomo has benefited from that. He is correct when he says in his own defense, "I kiss people in front of cameras all the time." He's right. He does.

There is video that resurface last spring of him making an absolutely inappropriate remark on camera to a reporter in front of a lot of people. She was eating a sausage sandwich and he said, "Come over and we'll take a selfie. There's too much sausage in this picture." It's a disgusting thing you don't say in a professional circumstance, especially to a young female reporter, you don't say it. He did it in front of cameras. There's a way in which like the broader bullying itself.

This speaks to the way that even as we come-- even as we fight to get closer to understanding how sexualized power abuse and other forms of power use are discriminatory, do systemic harm to broad classes of people. Even as we get better vocabulary and understanding, we still, as a culture and society normalize those behaviors. It was just Cuomo being Cuomo. It was just Harvey being Harvey. It was no secret ever that Harvey Weinstein was a brutal bully, but all those behaviors, we see that with so many of the people who we since have learned about more terrible things that they did, there was just this assumption.

That's just Harvey being Harvey, Andrew being Andrew. That's what power looks like. It is abusive. It's scary. It takes what it wants. We have been trained again since birth to admire that and associate it with effectiveness. In that regard, while he is simply not being truthful about not knowing these things, about what he's allowed to do or not allowed to do because of generational change. He is also being honest about the fact that he's done them for his whole life, that only now is he being called out on them. They have been normalized. They've been part of his shtick and thus his again, theatrical appeal.

Brian: Listener, rates on Twitter. I hope Brian Lehrer discusses with Rebecca Traister what it looks like when our supposedly closest allies, in fact, work behind the scenes to harm us most like Roberta Kaplan and Tina Tchen did with Cuomo. We can't report if we can't trust anyone. For people who don't know these names, I'll just say that Roberta Kaplan, she was the leader in the Time's Up organization which is related to the #MeToo Movement but she resigned from that the other day because, apparently, she was helping the Cuomo team behind the scenes to cover their image around this.

What do you say to this listener's question and the premise we can't report if we can't trust anyone?

Rebecca: This is one of the horrors of reporting on power and its abuses is that very often we wind up looking and I'm speaking very broadly here. This is one of the incredibly hard things about the kinds of reckonings we've been having around gendered and racist power abuses is that it often means looking at our allies. It means looking at ourselves. Again, this process that we're in the midst of understanding how many of us are implicated in and benefit from these grave and harmful inequities that have left certain kinds of people at the top of all kinds of power structures, economic, political, social, sexual.

The thing that makes it hard, the thing that makes people want to brush it off and just go back to where we were is that that entails looking and understanding and rooting out the ways in which our allies, the people that we have been dependent on, and trusted have also benefited from the very inequities that perhaps they're supposed to be fighting. That Time's Up story is tremendously sad. Their revelations about Robbie Kaplan having signed off on Cuomo's attempt to disparage one of his accusers, Lindsey Boylan are just gutting.

This is also what it means when we look at some of the political leaders besides when we look at Eric Schneiderman and understand that Schneiderman was also understood to be a great progressive fighter and an ally. It's what it means when we talk about the women who described their experiences with Al Franken. I know that that will prompt a hundred people to call and say that Franken was wronged. However, part of that is because it's really hard to take a look at the ways that the people we depend on to be our champions and our allies and to be alongside us.

I mean, this is the pain and the difficulty of the process, but if we don't do it, we're not going to move anywhere better. If we just take it as like, "Well, they're our friend," that's not going to get us anywhere better.

Brian: Guest, earlier in the show today, Debralee Santos from the bilingual community newspapers in Manhattan Times and the Bronx Free Press spoke about the tightrope that black and Latino activists had to walk to avail themselves of the resources that Governor Cuomo control that their communities needed that required aligning with him, even when maybe they were holding their noses about things like this. Is that what's behind his support from say the women at times up who we learned from the Attorney General's report were asked for input in the planning of retaliation against Lindsay Boylan when she first went public with her accusation?

Rebecca: You mean the idea that you got to--? I can't speak to what was behind their choices. I don't think I can-- I mean, I don't know what led to that relationship and their choice to work with Cuomo on that. I certainly can say that again, this speaks to what the previous listener was speaking about. So much of these powers who's come down to dependence. Issues of dependency. We understand those things in like, say around marriage and domestic abuse.

That when you have unequal powers within a domestic situation, a wife can be dependent on a husband in such a way that it makes it difficult to leave him even if she or other members of her family are being abused or mistreated. She can be economically or emotionally, socially dependent on her husband. This also happens all the time around in workplaces where you're dependent on a boss who may be behaving badly but is responsible for your paycheck and so it's incredibly difficult to come out and challenge him or her.

It can happen in politics all the time and this, we can talk about this with regard to Bill Clinton, with regard to Andrew Cuomo, with regard to Franken, where especially amongst progressives, you become dependent in a dangerous partisan world. You become dependent on the person who has one, who has the power, and maybe in your party. That makes it-- There are all kinds of incentives in place.

That's part of how power independence works when you become dependent on that person as your advocate, as your leader, to get your legislation through, to represent you when you become dependent on them as better than the alternative which, by the way, is often really true and that makes this none of this, an easy equation. When you become dependent on those people, then there are all kinds of incentives in place to work, to defend and support them and it's what makes it so difficult to hack through this thicket of complicity and obstruction.

What makes it so easy for those at the top of that network of dependence to behave as authoritarians, to whom the rules don't apply because-- and that's Cuomo wielded all of that, the dependence on him, that's part of what happens when you're a leader who deals in threats. I'm not going to-- who threatens and scares people. You do that when you know those people are dependent on you to discourage them from challenging you. When you're talking about advocates on a progressive side who feel like they need, and again, I cannot speak with specific reference to what happened around Tina Tchen and Robbie Kaplan.

What happens for people on a progressive side for years in New York state progressives have even if they couldn't stand under Cuomo, even if they had witnessed his power abuses, even if they'd been subject to them in part, they were dependent on him for funding, he has worked to hobble his enemies especially on the left. There's a long history of him absolutely trying to destroy the working families party which has repeatedly put up challenges to him of, again, strangling the democratic party itself by offering his support to the IDC, which kept the Democrats out of power. Cuomo could hurt you if you were progressive.

Brian: This is going to have to be the last thought because we're out of time but one footnote to history is that he created another "third party" called the women's equality party, apparently specifically to drain votes from the progressive working families party. He called it the women's equality party, but there we leave it with Rebecca Traister, writer-at-large for New York Magazine and author of Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. Thank you so much.

Rebecca: Thank you, Brian.

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