Learn how to apologize
About a week after The New York Times published its July 2014 investigation laying out how Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration had manipulated and then mothballed his Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption, I got a call from a political consultant who asked me for my thoughts about how the governor was doing.
Since he had previously worked for Cuomo, I was fairly certain this wasn’t mere personal inquiry on his part.
I told him that I thought the administration’s response — which argued that since the panel had been created by Cuomo it was his to monkey with, and that anyone who said different was a needle-nosed ethics purist who didn’t know how things were done in Albany — had been arrogant and churlish.
It was baffling to me, I said, that so many politicians were unable to offer even tacit acknowledgment that they might have made mistakes, gone too far, or acted against their previously stated convictions.
Well, he said with a shrug that you could pretty much hear over the phone, that’s just the way these people are — chutzpah and political drive just naturally went together.
And so it was on Friday morning, when Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi called me not long after 7 a.m. to grouse that the Times Union’s editorial for the day, which castigated the administration for its seven months of stonewalling on the complete count of COVID -19 deaths of nursing home residents, was “bulls__” because it hadn’t acknowledged that the Health Department had actually released those numbers the previous afternoon.
I noted, at high volume, that Health Commissioner Howard Zucker actually hadn’t released those numbers in his statement, but had only put out preliminary figures despite months of Freedom of Information Law requests from journalists and demands from lawmakers, and only did so under the pressure applied by the unveiling of the scathing report from Attorney General Tish James’ office that revealed the administration’s July analysis had under-counted the number of deaths of nursing home residents by roughly 50 percent.
Azzopardi’s Johnny Transparency act was like a guy who stops beating someone up the minute the police arrive, and then demands praise for being merciful.
Zucker’s response had indulged in the strained sophistry that, ahem, the Health Department’s previous tally wasn’t really an undercount, you see — just a partial count of those deaths that occurred in nursing homes as opposed to including the residents who had been shipped off to hospitals to die.
The administration, in other words, was in standard no-apologies mode — not for imposing a six-week policy that effectively required nursing homes to accept patients regardless of their COVID status; not for issuing a self-exonerating report that obviously understated the scope of the human loss; not for the months of stonewalling.
This is not a new playbook for Cuomo, whose reliance on it occurs in direct proportion to his horror of independent investigations like the one issued by James’ office on Thursday.
It has been deployed for more than two years now by Cuomo’s Department of Motor Vehicles and Department of Transportation in response to the October 2018 limousine crash in Schoharie County. Even in the face of a similarly brutal report from the National Transportation Safety Board that revealed systemic gaps and specific regulatory failures by state officials in their dealings with the company that operated the decrepit stretch limo involved in the disaster, the Cuomo administration has continued to stonewall the release of documents showing the full interaction between the state and the limo operators.
Indeed, the state is now in court with the families of the dead, arguing that release of the documents would somehow imperil the NTSB investigation — which is now complete — and the prosecution of Nauman Hussein, who ran Prestige Limousine at the time of the crash. As if prosecutors and Hussein’s defense team haven’t been privy to those records for over a year.
The state’s response to the NTSB report in many ways mirrored Zucker’s response on Thursday: Acknowledge no blame, but pour on criticism of the bad private-sector actors (Prestige, nursing homes) called out in the same report.
On Friday, the governor presided over a COVID briefing that functioned as a sort of greatest hits for his uplifting COVID year rhetoric, touching on every topic shy of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand for 45 minutes before taking a handful of questions.
Asked why it took the release of the attorney general’s report to prompt the state to release the actual death tally, Cuomo turned to Zucker, who explained that — remarkable coincidence — he had been wrapping up the audit of those numbers when the report was released, and he thought it wise to release them in “real time.”
Cuomo was asked what he would say to the families of the nursing home residents who had died. He said everybody did the best they could.
“I understand the pain, I understand the search for answers — but it was a tragedy,” Cuomo said.
That’s for sure.