Cuomo clearing in hiding
Gov. Andrew Cuomo is in the bunker, though he is flying that bolthole across the state on the taxpayer’s dime.
On Wednesday, he was at an orchard in the Hudson Valley; on Thursday, at Belmont Racetrack on Long Island; on Friday, in Buffalo, joined by what sounded like two dozen attendees to announce internet aid to poor families. These were like Cuomo barnstorms since time immemorial, with one exception: The media was locked out.
His press office cites COVID -19 protocols for barring reporters, but that’s a joke: Elected officials ranging from U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer to Cuomo’s own lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul, have somehow managed to meet the media while staying safe. The real reason Cuomo is hiding out is because he’s scared of the questions that would confront him in a live news conference.
The governor’s antipathy to the media is nothing new, as revealed in a draft manuscript of his ill-starred COVID -19 memoir “American Crisis.” In a section excised from the final edition that you can read in full on Capitol Confidential, Cuomo claimed that the fans who tuned in for his spring 2020 pandemic briefings were simply appalled by the performance of the Capitol press corps who attended his Red Room briefings.
The viewers “were struck by the hostility of the questions,” Cuomo wrote, or perhaps said into the recording device being held by an Executive Chamber staffer who was “volunteering ” to memorialize the governor’s brain droppings. “I received hundreds of emails and phone calls commenting and complaining about the disrespect and manners of the reporters’ questions. No viewer would ever dream of asking such nasty probing questions. The backand-forth with the press demonstrated to the viewers that my analysis was closely scrutinized and challenged. After the press interchange, they actually had more confidence in what I was saying and doing. One must appreciate the great irony’s (sic) in life!”
You’re welcome — though I’m not sure how the notion that questioning a public official promotes trustworthiness is an example of “irony,” except in the overbroad Alanis Morissette sense (rain on your wedding day, a free ride when you’ve already paid etc.).
It is quite something to be criticized for asking obnoxious questions by a governor who, just a few weeks before cooking up these golden nuggets of wisdom, allegedly quizzed a young female staffer, Charlotte Bennett, about her interest in dating older men, and whether her status as a survivor of sexual assault made intimacy difficult for her. The governor has never denied asking these questions.
As to whether the Executive Chamber received “hundreds of emails and phone calls” from people incensed by the press corps’ questions, I have doubts. I suspect these people exist in the same phantom zone as the guy who, according to Cuomo, grabbed him by the lapel on a Brooklyn street to harangue him about the negative business impact of repairs to the L train, or the people who told him it was impossible to replace the Tappan Zee Bridge.
Elsewhere in the draft copy, Cuomo noted that the Albany press corps, unlike their colleagues in the Washington, D.C., media fishbowl, “doesn’t travel so they don’t cover any events outside of the Capitol.” This is, of course, twaddle. If the members of the Legislative Correspondents Association have enough time to get to an appearance by the governor, they’re there in force. The only impediment: Cuomo’s press office tends to wait until the last minute to inform the media about events that have clearly been in the works for days if not weeks. You’d need a teleportation tube to get there.
An example: On the morning of May 10, 2016, the press office zapped out a notice that Cuomo would be appearing in Essex County to announce the completion of a large Adirondacks land acquisition. It was the first time the governor had held an openpress event since the news broke that his former top aide Joe Percoco was being investigated by federal prosecutors for taking bribes (or, as Cuomo described it last year, “having outside income that was not reported, basically”). If I left the house immediately, I could get there with some time to spare.
I arrived at Elk Lake Lodge to find a familiar news conference setting, and suffered only the minor injury of sunburn on my bald pate. Other members of the LCA began to arrive, and then Cuomo and company. After the land-acquisition ceremony, the governor took a few questions; I asked him if he had any regrets about not asking Percoco to identify the private companies he had done “consulting work” for during the months in 2014 in which Percoco was also running Cuomo’s reelection campaign.
Nope: “The state has tens of thousands of employees; they’re not supposed to be cross-examined to make sure they’re following the rules,” he said, as if Percoco had been an SG-18 worker at the Department of Labor instead of his closest aide.
Was it a probing question? I hope so. Was it a nasty question? I don’t think it was, unless you’re one of those Cuomo loyalists who respond to any criticism of his administration by noting that it’s not as bad as the Trump White House, which also loved to tear down journalists who weren’t sycophants. That’s a pretty classic example of grading on the curve.