Andrew Cuomo’s halo has lost its luster
For a stretch, our governor was riding an incredible wave of praise. Andrew Cuomo was the model of good governance, the hero with the firm hand during the coronavirus crisis. His leadership made him a media darling and put him on the cover of Rolling Stone — ”Andrew Cuomo Takes Charge” — amid suggestions he replace Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. He was the pandemic’s authoritative voice.
But a reassessment is under way. The governor has been taking fire, as regular readers of this newspaper know, for a state directive mandating that nursing homes accept COVID-19 patients. As I wrote for a recent column, that was a tragic mistake, but that’s not the only part of Cuomo’s coronavirus response that’s being questioned.
Last week, the respected news outlet Propublica released an exhaustively reported story asking why New York has suffered 10 times
more COVID-19 deaths than California. The piece portrays Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio as bumbling egoists who let their long-standing personal rivalry prevent early action that would have saved lives.
Another story, in the New Yorker, made similar points as it compared Seattle’s virus response to New York’s. In Seattle, officials listened to scientists, the article says, while de Blasio and Cuomo impeded an effective virus response with their bickering and their refusal to see the looming crisis as a serious threat.
An opinion piece in the liberal Guardian newspaper, out of London, took the argument further — too far, actually. It claimed Cuomo “should be one of the most loathed officials in America right now” because “he’s to blame for New York’s coronavirus catastrophe.”
What happened? How did the governor go from darling to, perhaps, goat?
Well, we should remember that polls suggest New Yorkers overwhelmingly approve of Cuomo’s handling of the crisis. Maybe that will change, or maybe it won’t. Time will tell.
But much of the praise Cuomo received rested on the assumption, as the governor himself told us, that New York was the canary in the coal mine experiencing a pandemic that would arrive with similar force in the rest of the country.
As it turned out, New York was the outlier, with nearly a third of the nation’s total number of COVID-19 deaths just on its own. That no state has been so deeply devastated raises an obvious question: Why here?
Any fair answer has to acknowledge that many factors were beyond Cuomo’s control. New York City’s density, heavy public transportation use and, perhaps, relative lack of sunlight seemingly make it a welcoming place for coronavirus spread. The governor can’t be blamed for that, nor can he be faulted for the federal government’s inept early response to the virus.
Still, there is plenty for which he and de Blasio can be blamed. A damning report by Columbia University released last week found that if New York enacted stay-at-home orders just one week earlier, the move would have spared more than 17,000 lives in the New York metro area.
Then, there’s the state’s directive, now abandoned, which exposed New York’s nursing home residents to harm.
Cuomo had previously earned praise for his expressed willingness to take responsibility for his pandemic decisions. But last week, when pressed by reporters to answer for requiring nursing homes to take COVID-19 patients, he ducked responsibility and said the state was merely following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines.
“Anyone who wants to ask why did the state do that with COVID patients in nursing homes, it’s because the state followed President Trump’s CDC guidance,” Cuomo said during a news briefing in Albany. “So they should ask President Trump.”
Wait. Our governor, the admitted control freak, left the fate of the most vulnerable New Yorkers up to Donald Trump and the federal government? That’s his answer?
It was a terrible moment — especially since some other governors, including Florida’s Ron Desantis, quickly banned nursing homes from taking COVID-19 patients, as New York has since done — and it made clear how unworthy Cuomo is of all the adulation. His halo has lost its shine.
But let’s be reasonable. Politicians are rarely heroic. At best, they are merely human, like the rest of us. When confronted by a crisis as terrible and unpredictable as the pandemic, they are certain to make mistakes. Perfection is too much to ask of Cuomo or any decision maker.
We can ask for accountability, though. We can expect better than ducking responsibility and shifting the blame.