'The Cuomo Show' (Feat. Albany Times Union editor Casey Seiler)

Objections: With Adam Klasfeld

Two days before his newspaper ran a surprising editorial calling for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's resignation, Albany Times Union editor Casey Seiler sat down with host Adam Klasfeld for a lengthy interview identifying a through line of the governor's three-term tenure: an aversion to independent investigations.

"You can call it a Shakespearean flaw because, as in so many Shakespeare characters, his virtues are so close to his faults, right?" Seiler noted. "In Cuomo’s case, it is control. When there is a flood, the governor wants to be there wading through the water. When there is a snowstorm, he wants to be helping drag your truck out of the snowy ditch, right? He wants his hands in everything."

"The flip side of that, the flaw, is the pathological horror at any independent investigation that has anything to do with him," he added.

In an article titled "The Andrew Cuomo Show Has Lost the Plot," New Republic reporter Alex Pareene contrasted "TV Cuomo" with "newspaper Cuomo," and the author argued that the nursing home and sexual harassment stories have introduced a nation previously familiar with the television character to the print subject.

No news outlet has covered the latter subject more closely than Cuomo's hometown paper, the Times Union, which endorsed him three times for governor before calling upon him to resign this past weekend. In this episode, Seiler traces the trajectory of Cuomo's career, how the governor wriggled out of past scandals by pulling the levers of power—and what changed with the latest round of controversies.

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