Analyzing Andrew Cuomo’s New Political Ad

There’s never a lack of good examples to teach people how easy it is to create realities out of words. This is the best thing about language in my opinion. And it’s not to say that there’s some correct or right way to speak about anything. Speech creates the expectation of its own conclusion.

Andrew Cuomo’s new ad defending himself from all the accusations of sexual harassment is a great example of what we call equivocation, a traditional fallacy where it is assumed that a complex term or utterance only has one possible interpretation.

There’s a lot going on in these 30 seconds, and it really is a nice example of rebuttal in a multimodal form. However the equivocation here is that failure to legally prosecute means that Cuomo did no wrong.

This ad could be seen as a wonderful example of equivocation and dismissed as a fallacy right away. The trouble with that analysis is that it misses a lot of things that the advertisement is doing in terms of argument. When you call something a fallacy it leads to ignoring the argument in totality. In this case, the way this ad is put together requires a lot more analysis to really understand how it works.

There are of course many other reasons he should have been forced out such as using state employee time to write his book about defeating COVID while COVID raged, and his dismantling of public health, in particular nursing homes, before the pandemic causing large loss of life that should not have happened.

Cuomo should also be well-aware – actually everyone should – about how difficult it is to prosecute cases on harassment. Most DA’s are risk-averse in prosecuting such cases as they have limited resources and always have the weather-eye out for public opinion.

Also it seems that wrongdoing in the law depends a lot on technical perfection. I think this might be a good thing given the disproportionate effects that a verdict can have on someone. I’m a big fan of restricting the state. However this does not mean that Cuomo is vindicated or innocent. The ad works us into a position to feel that the reason the district attorneys did not prosecute is because they did not see any wrongdoing.

Looking at advertisements like this can be a good way to practice critical thinking exercises with yourself or with others – using something like this shows us how easy it is for us to assume one conclusion is only because of one cause, when there could be myriad reasons for someone to choose not to act.

The power of this spot comes from leaving it up to us to make sense of what’s being presented. As news report after report are flung at us, we feel the weight of something that feels like a universal conclusion – but we are never told what that universal proposition is. It’s much more powerful to have us draw the conclusion ourselves.

By doing it ourselves, we are less likely to challenge it. We also believe that it’s obvious – we drew this conclusion; others would too. It isn’t something to question, it’s not a proposition. Our belief in what the commercial means comes from our own conclusions, not someone telling us what to think. Little things like this have huge impact on whether or not we are going to question something offered to us.

Cuomo delivers a powerful argument as he should, but we should respond in equal measure with critical evaluation. Where are these ideas coming from? Turns out if the conclusion is coming from inside yourself it needs much more scrutiny. Someone might be offering information in such a way to ensure that you have all the choice in the world to evaluate that information in one particular way, toward one particular end.

Is his claim fallacious? Certainly. Is that the best way to understand how it works us over? It’s not enough. There’s more going on here that we ad to the situation that should be analyzed instead of just tossed out with the fallacy bathwater.