“When the claim is against someone who has been effective and has a record of accomplishment, it never resonates,” said a longtime Andrew Cuomo adviser. | AP Photo Cuomo leans into the 'bully' moniker under the image of 'strong' leadership

When Gov. Andrew Cuomo publicly derided his brother Chris as a foundling with “certain development issues,” or when he said some Jews were bad dancers, the state’s most powerful politician wasn’t just making ham-handed jokes.

He was giving his opponents from both parties more fodder for their argument that Cuomo is a “bully.”


“Listen, we’ve all experienced it,” said Cuomo’s Republican challenger, Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro, whose daughter actually does have developmental issues.

“It’s kind of an open secret,” said Jumaane Williams, the New York City Council member trying to unseat Cuomo’s lieutenant governor.

It’s also an explicit part of Cynthia Nixon’s Democratic primary campaign against Cuomo.

"We've all seen it: Andrew the bully,” she said recently. “He bullies other elected officials. He bullies anyone who criticizes him.”

The tactic has not proven effective against him in the past and seems unlikely to now. And yet Cuomo’s opponents keep engaging in their quixotic bully awareness campaign because no one likes a bully, right?

Not exactly.

The Cuomo camp and its allies don't run from the bully moniker. Rather, they dismiss it as an ineffective attack line and argue that “bully” is just an unflattering term for a strong leader. A bully capable of smashing heads together, they contend, is precisely what the electorate needs in an Albany as grotesque and rife with self-dealing as this one.

Tarring a candidate with the “bully” brush is a campaign tactic of early vintage and dubious value. Hillary Clinton called Donald Trump a “bully” in an ad campaign that both defined the word (“A blustering, overbearing person who puts down or intimidates others”) and interspersed unflattering footage of Trump with clips of fictional bullies like Biff Tannen. Trump is now president.

Ruth Messinger accused Rudy Giuliani of “standard bully behavior’ in her run against him in 1997. Her opinion was not particularly outlandish. Two years later, former Mayor Ed Koch would publish a book called, “Giuliani: Nasty Man.” Giuliani won the election.

The “bully” critique isn’t even entirely new to anti-Cuomo gubernatorial politics. In 2014, The New York Times editorial board and Rob Astorino, the former Westchester County executive, accused Cuomo of “bullying” behavior. The electorate shrugged.

“Your bully is my champion,” said longtime Cuomo adviser Steven Cohen.

“If you think you are getting anything done in Albany by being Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm — and I’d say that to both those candidates — then you’re wrong,” said Bill Cunningham, a Democratic strategist unaffiliated with the Cuomo campaign, referring to a children's book character portrayed on the big screen by Shirley Temple.

Perhaps it’s a measure of the inefficacy of the bully tack that one of its chief proponents is Bill de Blasio, whose political skills seem consistently outmatched by the governor’s. Many credit de Blasio with bursting through whatever dam of silence there was around the issue when, in 2015, he summoned the City Hall press corps to his office to excoriate the governor’s penchant for “revenge.”

The animus between de Blasio and Cuomo runs deep, if only because Cuomo was once his friend and boss. But tales of Cuomo punching down are legion and span decades.

In 2000, former HUD Inspector General Susan Gaffney filed a sexual harassment complaint against Cuomo, whose office it was her job to investigate, alleging “she was verbally abused in weekend telephone calls from Cuomo,” according to a Washington Post article from the time.

It was Cuomo who engaged in a whisper campaign about former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s alleged use of eyeliner.

Earlier this year, disgraced former lobbyist Todd Howe, once an aide to Cuomo’s father, Mario, told federal investigators, “Andrew Cuomo deserves attention and scrutiny and is a bully."

Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner found herself attacked anonymously in the press after she publicly disagreed with Cuomo. In one instance, a “well-connected Capitol insider” told the Daily News she’d soon be "taken down at the knees.”

Reference was often made in Cuomo’s office to Comptroller Tom DiNapoli as “chipmunk balls.”

More recently, a finger-wagging Cuomo informed a female reporter she was doing a “disservice to women” by asking him about sexual harassment in his administration. His office orchestrated a smear campaign against a well-regarded Port Authority chairman whom the administration deemed too eager to build a new Manhattan bus terminal, POLITICO reported in 2016. And Cuomo reportedly urged union leaders to defund community groups that endorsed Nixon’s campaign. Officials told The New York Times in April that Cuomo and his aides pressed them to skip an event called to protest his bullying tactics.

Miner, the former Syracuse mayor now considering a run against Cuomo, shuns the word “bully” as imprecise, but in her estimation, the most pernicious effect of the governor’s heavy-handedness lies in real-world policy mistakes.

With his unwillingness to brook dissent, Cuomo, she argues, quashes discussion that could forestall crises like the one now afflicting the MTA he effectively controls.

“Over and over again, any disagreement — no matter how based in public policy and viewpoints — if it is against what the governor’s team’s talking point is at that moment, is deemed heresy,” Miner said.

Bill Lipton, the state Working Families Party political director who saw Cuomo-allied unions defect from the party after it endorsed Nixon, feels similarly.

"When you use the power of the state to suppress dissent and silence opponents, that's when we stop looking like a democracy," he said.

And yet, to say someone “is a bully and unnecessarily abuses people doesn’t go over nearly as well as people think it might,” Messinger told POLITICO last week, after speaking at a conference about gender violence.

That’s largely because it’s so easy to put a positive gloss on the whole thing.

“When the claim is against someone who has been effective and has a record of accomplishment, it never resonates,” said Cohen, the longtime Cuomo adviser. “The claim sets up the retort: Nice doesn’t get it done; you want nice or you want results. Most voters want results.”

There are, however, limits to that argument.

In Messinger’s experience, voters are fine with men like Trump, who rose to fame by ritually humiliating people on "The Apprentice." But they don’t accept the same show of strength from women.

“The challenge for women is to show they can be forceful,” when even “disciplined” exercises of authority can prompt voters to say, “she’s too tough, too strong, too much like a man,” Messinger said.

Etymologists say the term “bully” originated from the Middle Dutch term for lover, “boele,” before transforming into a term denoting an unloving person who uses intimidation and fear to get his way. While bullying is widely considered a bad thing, voters seem to reserve a special carve-out for politicians.

Voters, said Messinger, “don’t want to be bullied, but they think having a big, tough [leader] asserting the authority of the city and state and nation — that’s actually an image that appeals.”

There’s data to support the notion that voters consider Cuomo a forceful leader.

The Cuomo campaign pointed to a May 2 Quinnipiac University poll finding that 67 percent of New York voters agreed that “Andrew Cuomo has strong leadership qualities.”

“Consistently, what you see about Andrew Cuomo in the public polls is the perception that he is a strong leader and that’s what the voters want,” said Cuomo campaign pollster Jefrey Pollock. “They want a strong leader. New York is a tough state to govern and therefore they need a strong leader at the helm.”

Cuomo campaign spokeswoman Abbey Fashouer echoed the notion.

“It’s clear New Yorkers value how hard Gov. Cuomo fights for them, defends their values and delivers change — from a $15 minimum wage, paid family leave, banning fracking, record funding for education, the smartest and toughest gun safety laws, and free college tuition," she said. "The governor is focused on real results for New Yorkers; we’ll leave the silly attacks to others.”

The strong leader argument has a history of working, though there are some exceptions. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was never directly implicated in the closure of bridge access lanes in an act of political revenge — the scandal that became known as Bridgegate — but his ties to the scheme’s architects, and the culture of bullying he created, are thought to have helped sink his political ambitions.

Cuomo’s challengers seem, at least on the surface, to be more mild-mannered than the governor. The equation of strength with heavy-handedness rubs them the wrong way.

"The Governor takes pride in his ‘hardball’ attitude, but he shouldn't,” said Nixon spokeswoman Lauren Hitt. “It invites parallels to Trump — someone the Governor is spending a great deal of time trying to contrast himself with.”

Molinaro agrees.

“Don’t confuse being nice for being weak,” he said. “You can be strong in a democracy and still bring people together.”